He takes a sip of water, his mind reeling back to a time and place long forgotten: the Muhammad Ali–George Foreman fight in Zaire in 1974, which featured Brown and several entertainers, the famous “Rumble in the Jungle.”
“They had chartered a plane for the performers. B.B. King was on it and Etta James and Sister Sledge and Bill Withers. Brown wanted to bring his equipment. I told him, ‘You don’t need to bring equipment. They’re on a different current over there in Africa. They’re 220. We’re 110.’ But he insisted. They had to take a lot of his stuff off the plane because it was too heavy. He held the plane up. It was so loaded it barely got into the air. Oh my God, Bill Withers was so mad. They were late getting to Zaire because of Brother Brown.
“Mobutu [the president of Zaire] was famous for giving diamonds as a gift. He sent word for all the entertainers to stay behind for a while when the music was finished. Mr. Brown said, ‘I ain’t staying here.’
“He come offstage, went into a room, changed his clothes, and went straight to the airport and sat there for four hours. And he could have got a bag of diamonds as a gift. But he was a man that did what he wanted to do. That was him.
“That’s why I say most of these people don’t know James Brown. They don’t know that part of him. He let known what he wanted to be known.”
He sits pondering.
“Did you feel trapped with him?” I ask.
“No,” he says softly. “I loved the man.”
Forty-one years after the two met, in the wee hours of Christmas Day in 2006 at Emery Crawford Long Hospital in Atlanta, James Brown’s prediction about himself and Charles Bobbit—I and you gonna be together till one of us dies—came true. David Cannon had left a few hours earlier. Andre White, another close friend of Brown’s, had come and gently massaged Brown’s feet but had also departed. Brown lay on a hospital bed in the ICU, his body shutting down. His knees, his prostate, his heart, his teeth, his lungs were all giving out. The room was empty save Charles Bobbit and James Brown.
Brown suddenly sat up and said, “Mr. Bobbit. I’m on fire! I’m on fire! My chest is burning up!” Then he lay back and died.
“He closed his eyes and I felt his pulse and he didn’t have a pulse,” Bobbit says. “I don’t know why, but I looked at the clock. It was 1:21 Christmas morning, and I felt his pulse and there was none. I felt his stomach and there was none. I picked up the phone and called the nurse’s station and they all came running. They worked on him till 1:45, when they officially declared him dead. The doctor told me to leave the room, so I went and stood in the door and they were working on him, working on him. The doctor said, ‘You might as well stop. This man is gone.’
“I said, ‘Gone? Gone where?’
“He said, ‘This man is dead.’
“Dead? James Brown is dead?”
“He said, ‘Yeah, yeah. He’s dead. Everybody dies.’
“Then they pulled the blanket up around to his neck. They didn’t even cover him over. They just pulled the blanket up and walked out of the room.”
Sue Summer wheels her battered 2010 Toyota Prius down the streets of Newberry, South Carolina, like she owns the place, spinning left, and right, then left again. She’s in a hurry this hot August afternoon. Her two-year-old granddaughter Eleanor needs to be picked up soon. Eleanor is a real beauty. A southern belle in training? Not quite, because this heavyset, attractive, sixty-two-year-old grandmother is doing a lot of the raising of Eleanor. And Sue is nobody’s belle. She’s big-league and plays with the big boys.
She passes the old post office, built in the early 1900s. The whining gas motor hollers for mercy before the car jumps into silent mode as she glides down a hill, just four blocks away from Bubba’s, the town bar where her brother Danny Davis, an ex-marine who did two tours of duty in Vietnam, used to drag his soldier friends home to meet his pretty little sister “Annie Laurie.” In the old days, when he was training at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, the next state over, Danny would call Sue and say, “I’m coming home for the weekend, Annie Laurie. Getting a lift from a buddy, Annie Laurie.” Annie Laurie. It was a code word that meant he was standing next to some army sap, usually a Yank, who was giving Danny a free ride home, hoping to get lucky with one of Danny’s pretty southern-belle sisters. The guy got lucky all right. He was lucky if Sue didn’t drink him under the table and make him walk home. Annie Laurie. Yankees are so stupid.
She whirs past the C&L Railroad on O’Neal Street to the old mill side of town, where her mother grew up, turns, and beats it past Newberry Middle School, which lies above the hallowed field where baseball legend Shoeless Joe Jackson once played with a local ball team from the mill in nearby Greenville. Shoeless Joe is the guy from the Chicago Black Sox scandal of the 1919 World Series—he took a payoff to throw the series, but still played to win. Until he died, he denied that he had cheated. Down here they believe him.
She turns down a tree-lined street, swerves past a boy walking a dog, then hits a state highway still rolling hard. The neat homes give way to farm country, clapboard houses, trailer homes, hulks of cars lifted on cement blocks surrounded by high weeds, and tiny churches bearing placard poster signs out front like the ones I saw earlier that said HOW WOULD YOU FEEL IF GOD ONLY LISTENED TO YOU ONE HOUR PER WEEK? and I DON’T I-PAD. I-PRAY. God is serious business down here in South Carolina. You speak foul of the Redeemer Who Spilt His Blood in these parts and you’re liable to find yourself knocked upside the head hard enough to spend the rest of your life leaning like a flower a week after the rain.
She stops across the street from a humble schoolhouse near Silverstreet, a quiet country road. Then she points out the window of her old car. “That’s it,” she says. “That’s the place.”
I’m looking at the Reuben Elementary School. This is where Sue’s daughter teaches. The school has a “backpack ministry,” just like the one run by Sue’s church at nearby Gallman Elementary. The “backpack ministry” gives out free breakfast and lunch to dozens of kids every day, but volunteers realized the need was so great that they had to give the kids backpacks on Fridays, because the kids didn’t have enough food at home to last the weekend. “To give them food in paper bags would be to single out the poor ones,” she said, so they gave them backpacks with cereal, soup, peanut butter, crackers, enough to last through Monday again. Many of the kids are white, whose proud working-class parents often keep cows in the garden for milk and work two or sometimes three jobs a week to make ends meet.
These are the kids that James Brown left his money to. As the lawsuits drag on and his estate plummets in value, the children of Reuben Elementary School can’t afford the cost of lunch. And because so many children in Newberry County come to school without pencil and paper, a school-supplies drive was launched by volunteers—Sue’s been doing that for fifteen years, too—gathering pencils, papers, and notebooks for the kids. Imagine that, in America, in the new millennium. These are the children we expect to compete with kids from France, China, Japan, Russia. And when they don’t succeed, we say it’s their fault. Or it’s the video games. Or their parents. Or hip-hop music. Anything but the lawyers and politicians up the road, feasting on the money meant for them, fighting over an airtight will that James Brown spent $20,000 putting together.
Sue sits at the steering wheel of her car, peering through the windshield at the empty schoolyard. Without a word, she puts the car in reverse, backs up, and swivels the car around toward town.
She was lighthearted on the drive out. But now, driving back to town, her face is etched in a firm frown. She drives in grim silence. The old homes and high weeds and dilapidated houses seem to whiz past as the beaten Toyota picks up speed. I mumble something about the whole case being a shame.
She says nothing for a while, staring straight ahead. Finally she speaks. “Everybody is lying,” she says. “That’s what I’ve decided.”
—
Sue Summer is the kind of reporter they used to teach us about back at the Columbia Univers
ity Graduate School of Journalism when I was a student there in 1980. I remember those days, staggering into the big lecture hall at 116th and Broadway at eight A.M. on a cold fall morning, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes, scrounging low in my seat in the back of the lecture hall as First Amendment attorney Benno Schmidt and the mighty Fred Friendly, president of CBS News, lectured us on the importance of a free press in a democratic society. Friendly was a tall, regal figure, as kind as his name implied. He’d stalk the lecture room floor, regaling us in his booming baritone about the swinging pendulum of the Freedom of Information Act, how he used it like a baseball bat—kicking in doors, massaging sources to truth. He recalled the fights, the arm-twisting, the tension, the furious arguments that broke out in smoke-filled production rooms at CBS News just seconds before airtime as he and legendary radio and TV newsman Edward R. Murrow grappled with the network, forcing it to take aim at some loathsome public sleaze, or at some smooth crook who was paying his bills with foreign dough. I’d walk out of those classes wired, ready to jump out the window and begin preserving the Freedom of Information Act right then and there, pack it in ice, can the whole thing the way my aunt Parthenia used to can peaches back in Virginia, then lob it like a hand grenade through the window of the first enemy of the press I ran across. That’s how inspired I was.
Then I had to get a job after J-School. And that was that.
But had I known that I would meet a Sue Summer, I suspect I would have paid more attention. For more than twenty years Sue has been a reporter and columnist for the financially strapped 130-year-old Newberry Observer. For more than three of those, since August 2011, she has been the sole journalist guarding the public’s right to know, as it pertains to the James Brown court case, which has dragged on for more than nine years under the cloak of near secrecy, with forty-seven lawsuits and over ninety attorneys.
Here’s the setup: Imagine a boxing ring and two fighters. In one corner, you have a sole journalist who writes for a small-town newspaper, a grandmother who spent most of her career writing baking recipes, local jokes, and gossip but who stumbles onto a big story. In the other corner, imagine some of the richest and most powerful music executives, and political foes you wouldn’t want to meet, from LA, Atlanta, and of course South Carolina. They too have stumbled onto a story. It’s a story with a pot of gold—an estate and will of a dead guy that hasn’t been sent to probate court yet. If it had been sent to probate court, that would have frozen the thing and left it just as the dead guy wanted it. Instead, it’s been shoved into circuit court, which means it’s red meat on the table. And this is not just any will. And it’s not just any guy. It’s the will of a black guy named James Brown, a damned troublemaker who caused South Carolina a pisspot of trouble. And the only thing standing between them and James Brown’s pot of gold is this little old lady and her little old newspaper, which one of them dubbed “a rag that nobody reads.”
Well, it turns out that old Grandma knows how to throw a punch or two herself. Turns out old Grandma has Muhammad Ali speed and Joe Frazier guts. Here are some of the powerful characters spelled out in Sue’s Rag That Nobody Reads, the guys in the other corner: Louis Levenson (representing some of Brown’s children); attorneys Robert Rosen and S. Alan Medlin, the latter a University of South Carolina law professor, both representing Tomi Rae Hynie, Brown’s female companion later ruled to be his wife; Aiken County judge Doyet Early III, who helped dismantle James Brown’s original trust and whose 2015 ruling elevated Brown’s female companion to the status of “widow”; Peter Afterman, an LA-based producer who represents the Rolling Stones’ music catalog; Russell Bauknight, trustee of the James Brown estate, who forked over management of the catalog to Afterman in the first place; the powerful South Carolina law firm of Nexsen Pruet, which represents Bauknight, among others; and the tag team of Henry McMaster and Alan Wilson, former and current attorney general and heads of the most powerful law-enforcement body in the state of South Carolina.
These are heavy hitters. They represent money. Power. Influence. And little ol’ Sue Summer just gives ’em all headaches. Why is that? Because she’s tough? She’s smart? She’s a journalist? Which?
“I’m just a broad,” she says simply.
Some broad.
—
The fight began within hours of Brown’s December 25, 2006, death, with disputes about how to conduct his funeral and initial legal fire coming shortly after from two parties: Brown’s “widow,” Tomi Rae Hynie, and five of Brown’s six claimed children. Both parties claimed Brown was “unduly influenced” at the end of his life by his selected trustees: Buddy Dallas, David Cannon, and Albert “Judge” Bradley. The three were jettisoned by Aiken County judge Early in 2007. Judge Early named two local attorneys, Robert Buchanan and Adele Pope, as trustees. A plethora of lawsuits and wild legal scrambling followed, including a hastily arranged auction of Brown’s personal effects at Christie’s in New York to raise legal fees, which netted a relatively paltry sum for some seemingly valuable items.
The fight never really came up to street level. There were hearings to determine hearings. Hearings to determine the status of other hearings. Hearings for this. Hearings for that. Two assessments of Brown’s worldly items. Calculations and more calculations and hundreds of questions, posed by lawyers who, of course, billed James Brown’s estate. Sue wandered into it in 2011, when she got word that there was an FOI request. The request involved Tomi Rae Hynie Brown, who had married Brown in December 2001. Brown filed to annul the marriage in 2004, after learning Tomi Rae was already married to another man. It meant, at the time of course, that Hynie, angling for a percentage of Brown’s estate, was not his wife at the time of his death. Tomi Rae kept a diary that allegedly revealed pertinent information about that marriage or lack thereof. The diary was suppressed by Judge Early, who collected all of the copies of the diary, placed a 2008 gag order on it, and, seven years later, ruled that Hynie was, in fact, Brown’s wife. This ruling came after untold hundreds of thousands of Brown’s money was spent on attorney fees.
In the meantime, some of Brown’s kids filed their own legal grievances. They’re led by Deanna Brown Thomas, lead plaintiff in the children’s lawsuit. Brown Thomas entombed her father in her yard—the same father she and her sister Yamma sued in 2002 for royalties on songs for which Brown gave them writing credit when they were six and three years old. The wrangling between these suing parties was so heated that the great state of Georgia, which had a 50 percent interest in Brown’s education trust, walked away, leaving the South Carolinians to duke it out.
In the fracas, the net worth of James Brown’s estate, which was worth easily $100 million according to his accountant Cannon, plummeted to as low as an estimated and disputed figure of $4.7 million, declared by the court-appointed trustee Russell Bauknight in 2009. Bauknight, fifty-six, of Irmo, South Carolina, has been mentioned in many of Sue’s stories. He’s a tiny fellow, an accountant, and the one who described the Newberry Observer as “a rag that nobody reads.” He’s also a reserve deputy captain for the Lexington County Sheriff Department, appointed by a sheriff who was indicted in 2014 by the feds for taking bribes. Bauknight’s accounting firm has scarfed up some pretty sweet fees working on the Godfather of Soul’s estate—$345,000 in 2013 and $315,000 in 2014—and is represented by the goliath South Carolina law firm of Nexsen Pruet, with its cadre of 190 attorneys. That firm raked in $1.6 million in legal fees from the James Brown estate for the years 2013 and 2014 combined. Bauknight, Nexsen Pruet, the South Carolina attorney general’s office, and attorneys Medlin and Rosen, who represent Brown’s “widow,” Tomi Rae Hynie, have been key figures in Summer’s more than sixty stories about the James Brown case. One result: She’s been served with subpoenas three times, once in May 2012, then again six months later and again in January 2015. The subpoenas demanded notes, tapes, sources, and contacts. Sue refused. One of those subpoenas was served while Sue was at home putting her granddaughter Eleanor, who was then one year old, d
own for a nap. She told the server, “Come back after I put her to sleep.” The guy did. She showed up at court for the second subpoena with a toothbrush, a tube of toothpaste, and an extra pair of underwear crammed in her purse for a possible jail stay. At one of the hearings, Sue brought her eighty-two-year-old mother, Ethel, along as “backup,” in case her attorney from the South Carolina Press Association couldn’t keep her out of jail.
Bauknight and one of his legal teams claimed that the public documents Summer posted on her Facebook page and in the Observer were somehow hurting the resolution of the James Brown case as it made its way to the South Carolina Supreme Court. Meanwhile a second law firm that represents Bauknight trotted out their own arguments about the case just before the South Carolina Supreme Court heard arguments about it—in an interview with Nexsen Pruet attorney David Black, which appeared in over four hundred newspapers.
There was a time, say thirty years ago, when a story that smelled this bad—lawyers and politicians wrangling money meant for the poor and kicking a sole journalist around as they did it—wouldn’t last long in America. The odor of the thing would waft clear out of South Carolina and up to, say, The Philadelphia Inquirer. That newsroom during the 1980s was loaded with some of the greatest reporters this nation has ever known, headed by legendary editors Gene Foreman, Gene Roberts, a white southerner who covered the civil rights movement for The New York Times, and the late Jim Naughton, one of the greatest newspaper editors ever. The old Philadelphia Inquirer would pivot on a story like this with the agility of a cougar and devour it like catnip. The rats would scurry, the castle would totter, the big networks would move in to finish the job, and down it would go—and the money to educate poor kids would be freed up. But today, print newspapers are the poor kids on the block in America, as ads revenues vanish; the once mighty network news departments are like punch-drunk boxers, crippled by cuts, forced to fight off cable, which in turn is fighting off the still-developing serious digital news sites (which are, thankfully, beginning to muscle up), which are, in turn, fighting off the information chatterboxes that serve a steady diet of potato chips and cake icing as news.