Solitude and the Making of James Brown

James Brown, the late Godfather of Soul, famously spent many of his formative years living in his aunt's brothel in Augusta, Georgia. His first memories, however, were made in Barnwell County, South Carolina, where he was born in 1933. Though his mother deserted his father (and James) for another man in 1935, the single father and his son would continue to live in the Barnwell/Elko area until 1940. In his 1986 autobiography, Godfather of Soul, Brown describes this experience and the effect it had in shaping him:

"It gave me my own mind." The young James Brown.

We lived in a series of shacks all around the Barnwell and Elko areas…The shacks were unpainted, didn't have windows except for shutters that you could pull together; and there was no electricity or indoor plumbing…

Being alone in the woods like that, spending nights in a cabin with nobody else there, not having anybody to talk to, worked a change in me that stayed with me from then on: It gave me my own mind. No matter what came my way after that—prison, personal problems, government harassment—I had the ability to fall back on myself.

The Chapel that Smokes Built

Originally a Christian school, Duke University was still called Trinity College (after the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) when the Duke family dumped $6 million of cigarette money into its lap. Quicker than you could rip open a pack of Camels, Trinity came off and the Dukes' name went on.

     But James Duke didn't feel fully at ease with the idea of knocking God's name off the marquee, and--perhaps to smooth things over with the Almighty--decided to build the campus a chapel.

     In general, the university closely followed James Duke's specifications regarding the structure. It was, for instance, built upon the highest spot on campus. (Early plans to have stained-glass depictions of the disciples puffing away on their favorite American Tobacco Company products, however, were eventually shelved.)

   The term "chapel," however, was a bit of an understatement. The neo-Gothic Duke University Chapel is patterned after Canterbury Cathedral, is hung with 50 bells, and contains more than 800 carved and painted figures (all non-smoking). James intended the structure to be the central building on campus, and sure enough, the chapel's 210-foot tower has become the best-known emblem of Duke University. 

(From Moon Travel Handbooks: North Carolina, 2nd Edition, 2003.)

Crumpets of Freedom: The Edenton Tea Party

Here’s the story: On October 25, 1774, Mrs. Penelope Barker led a tea party at Mrs. Elizabeth King's house in Edenton, North Carolina. There, the two women and their forty-nine female guests signed a decree vowing to support the resolutions of the colonies' First Provisional Congress, which had banned, among other things, the importation of British tea.

Penelope Barker

            This tale has traditionally been accepted as fact in Edenton. A bronze teapot even marks the site of Mrs. King's house, now part of the beautiful town's Old Courthouse Green.

            The downside of the tea party legend is that it probably never happened. While it's near-certain that fifty-one North Carolinian women signed their names to a protest document sent to England, many historians doubt whether they all ever sat down together at Mrs. King's house, or anywhere else. The best anyone can figure, it's unlikely that the women, most of them housebound with domestic responsibilities, and who hailed from at least five different counties and a variety of social classes, would or could have ever arranged a mass meeting. Nonetheless, in what is considered one of the earliest examples of political involvement by American women, the women did manage to sign the same piece of parchment, which likely was circulated petition style. In part, it declared:

Shoeless Joe Jackson: Baseball's Not-So-Tragic Figure

Greenville baseball prodigy Shoeless Joe Jackson has become something of an icon over the years, the subject or a character in at least two motion pictures and a one-man play, all in the past 25 years.

            In 1888, Joseph Jefferson Jackson was born in Pickens County, the oldest of George and Martha Jackson's eight children. When little Joe was five years old, his father took a job with the Brandon Textile Mill in West Greenville and moved the family down from the hills into one of the Brandon Mill textile villages. A year later, at the age of six, Joe Jackson began working in the textile mills himself.

            By age 13, in 1901, Joe made the Brandon Mill baseball team. After five years in the mill leagues, Joe was signed to the semi-pro Greenville New Leaguers. Two years after that, he was hired by the Carolina Association team, the Greenville Spinners. He hit .346 and led the league in batting.

            It was while playing for the Spinners at nearby Anderson that Joe got his famous nickname. He found that his new shoes had given him painful blisters on his feet, but because the team only carried 12 players to begin with, and a number were already hurt, his manager insisted that he play. Joe slipped out of his shoes and played the rest of the game--the only game in which he ever did this--in his stocking feet. When he rapped out a triple, an Anderson fan stood up and shouted, "You shoeless son of a gun, you!" The name stuck, though Jackson never did like it.

            In 1908, Jackson married Katie Wynn. And later that summer, the Philadelphia Athletics signed him and brought him up to the major leagues.

            Joe played the next two years in the minors, but in 1910 he was called up to the Cleveland Indians and hit .387 over the last 20 games of the season. In 1911, his first full season, he batted .408, the highest average ever by a rookie. Amazingly, he didn't even win the batting crown that year, since Ty Cobb picked that same year to hit .420.

            Jackson dominated the league for the next seven years. In 1919, while playing for the White Sox, he roomed with a member of the team who conspired to throw the World Series. Though Jackson himself batted .375 and set a record for number of hits, and fielded a perfect 1.000 fielding average, he was named as a co-conspirator in the 1920 Black Sox trial and, though found innocent, was banished for life from organized baseball.

            Though Joe did continue to play organized baseball under various aliases for a number of teams through the ‘20s and ‘30s, he never considered himself the tragic figure that the press—and, later, novelist Thomas Kinsella and filmmaker John Sayles--made him out to be.

I have read now and then that I am one of the most tragic figures in baseball. Well, maybe that's the way some people look at it, but I don't quite see it that way myself. I guess one of the reasons I never fought my suspension any harder than I did was that I thought I had spent a pretty full life in the big leagues. I was 32 years old at the time, and I had been in the majors 13 years; I had a lifetime batting average of .356; I held the all-time throwing record for distance; and I had made pretty good salaries for those days. There wasn't much left for me in the big leagues.

Joe Jackson with Greenville youngsters, 1944.

First of all, the conception of Shoeless Joe Jackson as a barefoot mill-town hayseed is way off. True, Jackson's education was limited; his signature is widely prized—partially because he only shakily signed his name a few times in his life—but many often ignore Joe's business success. Even before the scandal, Joe owned a successful valet business in Georgia. After the scandal, Joe and his wife moved to Augusta, and she ran the business while Joe played for the local ball club. After his mother died in 1935, the Jacksons returned to Greenville for the funeral—and stayed for the next 16 years, living at 119 E. Wilborn St. on the south side of Greenville, while Joe became successful owning a liquor store—though he didn't drink—and a dry-cleaning business.

            Why did he allow folks to think he was dumb in his baseball days? Joe himself explained:

All the big sportswriters seemed to enjoy writing about me as an ignorant cotton-mill boy with nothing but lint where my brains ought to be. That was all right with me. I was able to fool a lot of pitchers and managers and club owners I wouldn't have been able to fool if they'd thought I was smarter.

When Jackson died of a massive heart attack in December 1951, he was buried in Woodlawn Memorial Park on Wade Hampton Blvd. in Greenville. You'll find his grave in Section V, plot 333. If you want to visit the site, stop by the office at Woodlawn and they'll be glad to give you directions.

            In March 1996, the Shoeless Joe Jackson Memorial was dedicated at the old Brandon Mill baseball field. Later that year, the South Carolina legislature passed legislation to change the name of the road that runs near the Brandon Mill Baseball field to "The Shoeless Joe Jackson Memorial Highway."

            On May 5, 1998, state legislator J. Verne Smith proposed--and the South Carolina state legislature passed—legislation asking the commissioner of baseball to reinstate Joe Jackson as a member in "good standing" of professional baseball. This is one of the necessary steps that must be accomplished before Jackson can be considered for the Hall of Fame.

            To celebrate the 110th anniversary of his birth, Greenville Mayor Knox White declared July 1998 "Shoeless Joe Jackson Month." Plans were made for a public display all month at City Hall of Jackson memorabilia.

            For an excellent Web site on Joe Jackson, see www.blackbetsy.com, home of the Virtual Hall of Fame. To see Joe portrayed by D.B. Sweeney as an "ignorant cotton-mill boy," watch John Sayles's fine film Eight Men Out. To see him played with a New Jersey accent by Ray Liotta, watch Field of Dreams. [Originally published in Moon Travel Handbooks: South Carolina.]

The People of the Smokies

Although people ostensibly come to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park to see and experience the wilderness, unless visitors leap out of their cars and run straight into the woods, they will have contact with three groups of Southerners: locals, fellow vacationers, and, in places like Cades Cove, the people who formerly inhabited the Smokies.
     The people who live here and work in restaurants, hotels, and all the other jobs-now called the "service industry"-are almost invariably much more polite than they need to be. They can't help it; that's how they were brought up to behave, even to people who don't deserve it. They don't have to be trained to say "sir and "ma'am"; they do it naturally.
As for fellow vacationers, many of them come from the South, and they are friendly as well. The people standing in line with you will talk to you. They will generally ask where their conversationalist is from, make some favorable comment about that place, and, if possible, ask if the speaker "knows so-and-so's brother there--no, he doesn't live there anymore, he got to thinking he was Elvis and they had to put him in a home." And on from there.
     The final group of people that visitors may encounter are ghosts-the people who settled the Smokies, who lived their lives in the shadows of the mountains, and who were forced off land that their families, in some cases, had owned for generations so that the rest of us can enjoy pleasant vacations.
Looking at the engineering it took to construct the Mingus turbine mill on the North Carolina side of the park, or at the innovative design of the cantilever barns in Cades Cove, the thoughtful visitor comes to the realization that the people who lived in these mountains were not the stupid hillbillies so often trotted out in popular culture and by the hucksters in towns surrounding the park. The families who settled the Smokies were intelligent, resourceful people who created art in quilts and music, who read and believed the King James version of the Bible, and who lived lives that were in many ways superior to the frantic ones that the rest of us come here to escape.


by Mike Sigalas, from (Moon Handbooks: Smoky Mountains, cowritten with Jeff Bradley).

Nuclear Leakage Near the State Capital

share

South Carolina's Heroes of the Alamo

At one time a popular bumper sticker in the Saluda, South Carolina, area read, Texas Starts Here. Saluda County was, after all, birthplace and childhood home of two of the Alamo's greatest heroes, William Barret Travis and James Butler Bonham.


Travis was co-commander (along with famed frontiersman James Bowie) of the makeshift fortress when the Mexican army led by General Santa Anna arrived in San Antonio. A lawyer by trade, Travis was a fiery, handsome redhead with a restless spirit. Before coming to Texas in 1831, he had already tried Alabama, where both he and his cousin, James Bonham, practiced law.

Travis was a complicated sort. When he moved to Texas, he had professed to convert to Catholicism (a requirement of Mexican citizenship) and declared himself single, though he had left behind a son and pregnant wife in Alabama. Legend has it that Travis, convinced of his wife's infidelity, killed the man he suspected to be the father of her unborn child. His wife claimed desertion and was granted a divorce in early 1835. Meanwhile, Travis kept written documentation of his extramarital conquests and made plans to marry someone else.


And yet William Travis was considered a fair man, and well disciplined. Along with Bowie, he argued that the Alamo was the only thing keeping Santa Anna from invading the vulnerable settlements of East Texas. On February 24, 1836, Travis addressed the following letter, To the People of Texas and All Americans in the World:

Fellow citizens & compatriots –




I am besieged, by a thousand or more of the Mexicans under Santa Anna – I have sustained a continual Bombardment & cannonade for 24 hours & have not lost a man. The enemy has demanded a surrender at discretion, otherwise, the garrison are to be put to the sword, if the fort is taken – I have answered the demand with a cannon shot, & our flag still waves proudly from the walls – I shall never surrender or retreat. Then, I call on you in the name of Liberty, of patriotism, & every thing dear to the American character, to come to our aid, with all dispatch – The enemy is receiving reinforcements daily & will no doubt increase to three or four thousand in four or five days. If this call is neglected, I am determined to sustain myself as long as possible & die like a soldier who never forgets what is due to his own honor & that of his country – Victory or Death




William Barret Travis
Lt. Col. Comdt.

His letter has been called "the most famous document in Texas history"  and "one of the masterpieces of American patriotism." After news of the Alamo's fall became known, Travis' stirring words were reprinted by newspapers and pamphleteers around the world. You can see a copy of the letter in the Saluda County Museum.

Though not a leader at the Alamo, James Bonham is reckoned a heroic figure for having at least once (and perhaps twice) escaped through Mexican lines to seek help – returning to again pierce the lines and rejoin his doomed comrades within the garrison. Bonham pleaded for aid from Colonel James Fannin in nearby Goliad – but was rebuffed. Three days later, all but two of Alamo's defenders were dead.


Bonham was related to the important Butler Family of what is today Saluda County, and his brother, Milledge Luke Bonham, grew up to be governor. According to recent research, James Bonham was Travis' second cousin, and the two spent their early boyhoods attending Red Bank Baptist Church together. Though he was expelled after leading a student protest his senior year at South Carolina College, (now the University of South Carolina), Bonham went on to practice law in Pendleton. There, in one notable incident, he caned an opposing attorney for insulting his female client, and was then arrested after "threatening to tweak the nose"  of the judge who attempted to intervene. By 1835, Bonham had set up shop in the Old Southwest, opening a law practice in Montgomery, Alabama, where two of his brothers lived. Before the year was out, however, both of Bonham's brothers had died, and he decided to join Travis in Texas.

Five other South Carolinians perished at the Alamo, but the roles of Travis and Bonham are legendary. On March 5, the day before the Mexicans' final siege, Travis is said to have drawn a line in the sand with his sword, telling the men inside the fortress that whoever was ready to fight to the death should step across and join him on the other side. All but one man did. (Over 150 years later, another emigrant to Texas – President George H.W. Bush – would allude to this bold gesture when he spoke of "drawing a line in the sand" during the Gulf War.)


Today, numerous place-names throughout Texas honor William B. Travis, including Travis County, home of the state capital of Austin, and nearby Lake Travis. But the colonel's legacy reaches further still. Though he lived in Texas for just over four years, the name of this native South Carolinian has become synonymous with the American West in general and Texas in particular. Countless Texan boys are given the rugged first name of "Travis" each year, and Western films regularly use the name "Travis" for their protagonists. (In Executive Decision, Steven Seagal took no chances: his character was named Colonel Austin Travis.) Actors from Lawrence Harvey to Alec Baldwin have portrayed Travis on both big and small screens; in 1991, the bioflick Travis traced his entire life, from South Carolina onward.

Though James Butler Bonham hasn't exactly become a household name, head north of Fort Worth, Texas not far south of the Red River and the Oklahoma border, and you find yourself in the mid-sized city of Bonham, named in honor of the Saluda County native. Home to legendary US Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn, Bonham ironically serves as the seat of Fannin County, named for the man who declined to save the Alamo. In the John Wayne film, The Alamo the Duke reserved the choice role of Bonham for his own son, Patrick.


In South Carolina today, you'll find a monument to Travis and Bonham on the lawn in front of the Saluda County Courthouse. The Red Bank Baptist Church, attended by the Travis and Bonham families, still stands today. Bonham's birthplace, now called Bonham House, also stands. To get there, take US 178 east 3.5 miles to SC Secondary Road 328. Take 328 north 0.7 miles to SC 329, and follow this road east for 0.2 mile until you see the old house on the left side of the road. Continue a bit further along SC Secondary Road 329 and you'll reach the Smith-Bonham Cemetery on Richland Creek. James Bonham is not there, of course – his body was burned by Santa Anna's men after the battle, along with those of Travis and all but one of the other Alamo defenders.


You can also find a fine Alamo display at the Saluda County History Museum, including a painstakingly accurate 1/64th scale model of the garrison. Out on SC 121, you'll see a Travis monument erected jointly by Saluda County and the ever-grateful people of Texas.