James McBride’s ‘Kill ’Em and Leave’

Bobbit repeats the remark elsewhere (“He didn’t want you to know him”), as does McBride. And when McBride inquires into the reasoning here, the explanation for Brown’s evasiveness, Bobbit says, “Fear.” Fear of “the white man,” of the record business, the cutthroat ways of the entertainment world. Would that be enough to engender so thorough and unremitting a privacy? You could just as well account for the evasiveness in Brown’s early life circumstances, as McBride documents them: absent mother, absent father, sharecropping, extremes of racism, segregation and poverty.

Here are some further examples of Brown’s isolation, as McBride describes them: Late in life James Brown directed his children (the ones he acknowledged) to make appointments when they ­wanted to see him. When he was finished with a gig, he would routinely have his hair done for two or three hours, before seeing anyone backstage, and then he would often leave, rather than undertake the glad-handing typically associated with the entertainment profession. He left Zaire, after performing on the occasion of the Ali-­Foreman “Rumble in the Jungle” prizefight, rather than receive a bag of diamonds offered by the despot in charge of that nation. And so on. This book’s title itself refers to Brown’s avowed philosophy in regard to interacting with fans.

It is McBride’s heavy burden to know this about Brown — his evasiveness, his secrecy — and to fashion a credible story that leads us from Page 1 to Page 232 according to what they call, in writing workshops, a “narrative arc.” The narrative arc is not a thing wanting in McBride’s best-known works. “The Good Lord Bird,” for example, has not only John Brown the abolitionist to drive it along, but a surprising case of gender imposture at its heart as well. And where “The Color of Water” deals with isolation in many of the ways that “Kill ’Em and Leave” does, it is essentially a bildungsroman, a tale of the derivation of its narrator. This is an especially effective idea of “narrative arc.”

The subtitle here reveals the extreme difficulty of the material: “Searching for James Brown and the American Soul.” Not only is the search for Brown the essence of “Kill ’Em and Leave,” but the question of what constitutes “the ‘real’ James Brown” (as the publisher has it) is likewise very much at stake in McBride’s book. It is one thing to suggest that Brown is “nearly as important . . . in American social history as, say, Harriet Tubman,” and another thing to demonstrate the hypothesis through biographical narrative.

McBride attempts to solve his insoluble problem, the structured absence of his main character, in two ways. First, he makes himself central to the work. He situates his assignment at the center of an introductory section (“Countin’ Off”), with a bold admission of where he was himself at the outset of his journalistic task: recently divorced and accordingly, as they used to say in my family, “financially embarrassed.” This is a tried-and-true biographical gambit. See, for example, Ian Hamilton’s similarly titled “In Search of J.D. Salinger.”

The second way McBride attempts to fashion a book-length illustration of the “real” James Brown is through individual encounters with the pertinent and creditable characters of Brown’s life. His cousins, his managers, his accountant, his musicians, his grandchildren, his women friends, his protégés. In many instances, including a chapter on the Rev. Al Sharpton, who was very close to him, and a chapter on Pee Wee Ellis (the extraordinary saxophonist who was Brown’s musical director in the high period of the late ’60s), these passages are exceptionally revealing and very poignant. It should be noted that not everyone reports a good, or even acceptable, working relationship with the Godfather of Soul. When McBride asks Pee Wee Ellis if he can talk to him about Brown, Ellis says, at first, “Can’t we talk about something else?”

The critical mass of these encounters in the second part of the book (“Hit It!”) is more like a collection of Brown’s own highly compact and funky workouts than, let’s say, an extended jam. More soul than funk, more funk than jazz. McBride, that is, has written a collection of diverse meditations and interpretations in search of James Brown, more than he has written the story of the man. Readers embarking on “Kill ’Em and Leave” would be wise to bear this in mind. That said, when McBride digs in, especially when describing the music — that massive, unstoppable, titanic, world-shaking accomplishment — by virtue of his own training as a saxophonist, he does so with great warmth, insight and frequent wit. The results are partisan and enthusiastic, and they helped this listener think about the work in a new way.

As I am a white writer, writing about a black writer, writing about a black musician, there is ample reason to wonder if the requisite nuance is available to me, the guy writing the review. But what I know after reading “Kill ’Em and Leave” is this: James Brown was among the loneliest of the great soul musicians. Indeed, his accomplishments in loneliness are nearly as towering as his accomplishments in song, and it’s the race problem, in part, that apparently made this the heartbreaking case. And yet none of that should stop you from delighting in “Say It Loud — I’m Black and I’m Proud,” or “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.” You should just hear the musicand the melancholy.

James McBride’s welcome elucidation of these points is clear, deeply felt and ­unmistakable.