When he started, she took it to the bedroom and closed the doors - I presume to spare Deanna and me from seeing her battered. When my father was in that crazy-ass way, everything was my mother’s fault. Usually I just shook like a damn leaf trying to hold on during a brisk fall breeze. Sometimes I threw up in my hands when they fought. My father never beat us, but sometimes I think a beating would have been less hurtful than hearing the sounds of him using my mother as his punching bag. The sound of the silence was the worst because that’s when Deanna and I would wonder if our mother were alive or dead and if we would be next. After that, the house would go completely quiet. The monster would appear, wreaking havoc on our lives, and then the rumbling would stop and we’d hear our mother’s muffled cries. As my grandma used to say, “Ain’t that just the saddest thing?” Sometimes the fights lasted only minutes. Whenever he’d start, my sister Deanna and I would run for cover, usually in a closet or under our beds, and cry quietly into our cupped hands. I swear that during those fights, I could feel the whole house shake with my father’s crazy rage.
She must have learned long ago that screaming incites him. I wait for her to scream, but she doesn’t. “Dee Dee! Goddamn it, Dee Dee!” Then I hear what sounds like thunder rolling through the house. First comes the boom of my father’s voice. My parents are in their bedroom, behind closed doors. The beatings always begin the same way, with the same terrible sounds. In the excerpt below, Yamma flashes back to a moment when Brown beat her mother in front of her and her sister, then writes about how that violent legacy stayed with her into adulthood.
Earlier this month, his daughter Yamma Brown published a memoir titled Cold Sweat: My Father James Brown and Me (co-written with Robin Gaby Fisher) that details her life growing up with her often volatile dad. But it wasn’t until now that we’ve been able to get a look at just how frightening the singer could be.
This summer’s biopic Get On Up left out many of the weird, uncomfortable, and simply violent incidents that Brown instituted or participated in. It’s no secret that James Brown had a dark side.
0 kommentar(er)
