Growing Pains

Hard Time

Brunswick, population 15,600, is a place of seedy beauty, that contradictory grace possessed by the Old South, with its decadent residue and peeling antebellum wretchedness alongside old wealth, all of it bathed in sublime breezes. Brown's childhood home is a clapboard A-frame with torn screens and a collapsing sofa on a sagging porch, as if it all had given way from the weight of holding the eight Brown children and their single mother, Joyce.

Where Brown is from, ordinary career options range from wielding a sponge at a carwash to a spatula at a fast-food restaurant. These are some of the jobs held by his brothers. And then there are the murkier and more tawdry employments that have landed four of them in jail. One of the earliest elements of Brown's education was simply: Don't do what they did.

"They made every bad decision that you could possibly make, and I saw the ending result," he says. "So it was almost like a test that I already had the answer for. All I had to do was fill in the blanks. I just did the total opposite."

Brown's oldest brother, Willie James Brown Jr., 29, is serving a 121/2-year sentence in federal prison in Jesup, Ga., for conspiracy to sell narcotics, more specifically, for distributing crack. Tolbert Lee Brown, 25, was convicted of shooting a man and is serving a 15-year sentence in the Wilcox (Ga.) State Prison for aggravated assault. Two other brothers, Alton and Tarik, have had lesser difficulties with the law.

Where Brown is from, religion can be a fairly desperate matter, a begging for some explanation and improbable rescue from the unpayable bills and empty refrigerators and the illnesses that come from living in stagnation and deprivation -- in the case of Joyce Brown, the gnarling arthritis, or the kidney disease that left her with just one, or the degenerative disk in her back from cleaning under all those beds at the local Holiday Inn. It was at the urging of Reverend Ike, the television preacher, that Joyce Brown finally left her physically abusive husband, Willie James Brown, once and for all after 17 years.

Joyce Brown met and married Willie, a truck driver from Charleston, S.C., when she was barely 20. She was born and reared in Brunswick; her father was a fisherman and her mother worked in a cannery. Willie offered her a ticket out of town, and to be a father to her first child, Carla Yvette, who is now 32 and lives in Smithfield, Va. Seven more children came in close succession, Willie James Jr., Tolbert, Alton, Tabari, Tarik, Kwame and Akeem.

No one in the family could anticipate when Willie would turn ugly and administer a beating. Joyce Brown is 6-2 and not easily bullied. She tried to leave, she says, "almost every year. I'd get away, and he'd get me right back." She would flee to Brunswick, and he would come after her, and tell her, "These are my children. They belong to me. You might leave, but you aren't taking them." That was his way, she says, of telling her, "You're not going nowhere."

She suspected he was using speed when she found a handful of multicolored pills in his pocket, which would have explained his violent mood swings. "There were some good days and some bad days," she says. "There were some ups and downs. I had to keep my head. The stuff I went through, it was pretty bad. Somebody needs psychological help to get through it. And then, you rely on God. I was raised in the church, so I had to grab my faith, and I started digging deep for the spirit. Because I was in a deep need, and I could have just given up."

At one point, when Kwame was 5, certain that her husband was coming after her once again, she was desperate enough to write to the Reverend Ike, explaining her situation and asking for help. "What should I do?" she asked.

Some time later, she received a reply. As she remembers it, the TV preacher wrote, "He's going to kill somebody. But it's not going to be you. When your mother gave birth to you, she gave birth to an Amazon."

This time, when Willie appeared in Brunswick, she jabbed her finger at him and quoted the Reverend Ike. "You're going to kill somebody. But it's not going to be me."