Kill 'Em and Leave

 Kill 'Em and Leave

By James McBride

Book three in my little foray into McBride. This one is a kind of hybrid of The Good Lord Bird and The

Color of Water: part memoir, part biography. This time the subject is James Brown. Or rather, the subject is how elusive the "real" James Brown is. Or rather, the subject is James McBride's encounter with James Brown's elusiveness. Over and over again, McBride hears from Brown's associates that he didn't want to be known.

So: How to tell the story of someone who doesn't want their story told -- and, given that he had been dead for a decade when the book came out, couldn't tell it if they wanted to? First: Make it about yourself. McBride is as central a figure in this book as James Brown. He sets the stage for this from the very beginning, relating his own brush with Brown when the singer lived in the Bronx. Or, rather, it was his sister's brush, as she was the one brash enough to knock on the Godfather's door and received an admonishment to "Stay in school Dott-ay!" But my favorite is this: "I came down here on a bum steer. No need to lie or toss that in later. No need to slip that in with the old excuse, 'I'm a musician too and I love the music," or The public needs a guy like me who can really tell it,' or whatever music critics say so the corporate-music taste makers can pump up the latest fifteen-year-old cuss artist while ignoring some real talent who's not good-looking or young enough. I needed the dough, plain and simple. The ex-wife dropped the hammer." It's honest and funny. It has personality. It's indicative of the writing throughout the book. This personal brush with the legal system, and the lawyers who navigate it, perhaps explains McBride's fixation on Brown's will, which, as of the writing of the book, had yet to be fulfilled according to the wishes of its author. Brown apparently wanted to leave the bulk of his millions to poor children in need of education. His own children, it seems, had other ideas.

Next: Portray Brown from as many angles as possible. For me, the book was most enlightening when McBride tears down the Hollywood depiction of Brown as a crazed troublemaker, exaggerating his low points so as to make him look like an addled buffoon. When, of course, the truth is much, much more complicated. But also of great interest are the many interviews that McBride conducts and relates with all sorts of Brown's associates, including ex-wives, former managers, and members of the band that made him famous. 

My own issue with the book was what I saw as distracting repetition. The same details and anecdotes popped up in two, three, or four chapters. For example, we hear the origins and meaning of the book's title, Brown's theory for how to keep his audience wanting more, over and over again. It feels at times, then, that this is a rambling tale told at a bar rather than a book. But, hey, I'd love to share a drink with a storyteller like McBride any day. 

The Color of Water

 The Color of Water

By James McBride

Inspired by Deacon King Kong, I'm thinking about going down a James McBride rabbit hole. This one was much different than the two previous books I'd read (Kong and The Good Lord Bird). It's a memoir -- autobiography? -- in which he seeks his mother's story and, in so doing, helps frame his own.

See, it always appeared that McBride's mother, or Mommy as he calls her, was "different" than the twelve children she managed to raise in New York in the 1950s and 60s. They were black. She was white. The contrast elicited stares and comments and, more importantly for this book, sowed discord within McBride about his identity. What does it mean to be white? To be black? To be "mixed"? It didn't help that McBride's mother was tight-lipped about her past, about why, at a time when it was both (or either) formally and informally illegal for people with different skin tones to marry, Ruth McBride not once but twice married a black man, choosing a path that, from the outside, meant additional hardship in an already harsh world.

When she finally opens up about who she is, though, it is clear that the difference between Ruth and her children really were only skin deep. Ruth, it turns out, was a Polish immigrant, born into a troubled family who fled Europe amidst pogroms that broke out just before World War II. They eventually settled in Suffolk, Va., where they were outsiders that locals placed just above people of color in the social pecking order. It was a lonely place to grow up as an Orthodox Jew. It was made even lonelier by a father, Tateh, who was not only unloving but sexually abusive and vehemently prejudice against the black population he exploited at the store he ran, and a mother, Mameh, whose inability to speak English and debilitating bout of polio left her almost completely dependent upon Ruth. And so, when she could, Ruth fled. And when she arrived in her new home and fell in love with a black man, she was declared dead by the family, who sat shiva for her. Eventually, it became mutual. Ruth buried her past just as her past buried her.

All of this information, of course, helps McBride see his mother in a new light. Hers is a story of extraordinary determination and adaptation. It helps explain how she could shepherd twelve -- 12! -- kids through a child of economic poverty, but emotional wealth, and into college and the professional class. As McBride writes, "I felt like a Tinkertoy kid building my own self out of one of those toy building sets; as she laid her life before me, I reassembled the tableau of her words like a picture puzzle and, as I did so, my own life was rebuilt."

McBride's family history is fascinating. But equally interesting are the question the book seems to raise about stories and the responsibility we have to share them. McBride's mother is clearly pained by her past; she doesn't want to sit for his interviews to revisit this part of her life. It is so emotional that McBride never shares with her a recorded greeting from an old neighbor in Suffolk because it might put her over the edge. I found this an interesting choice. McBride clearly benefited from knowing who his mother really was. In the end, he seems to argue that telling stories, especially painful ones, set us and those around us free. And yet he withholds this part of the story from his mother. It's a small moment, but I think the one that will stick out to me. He is in a sense taking on the parental role. His mother had decided her children didn't need to know her past and so censored it; here, he is the censor. 

The book is also, of course, a contemplation of the role that race plays in our nation. It points out the progress that has been made and the many miles of road that need to be traveled. By touching on these timeless themes, of identity and stories and obligations and race, it seems like this book will be relevant for some time.