On a Resilient Southern Spirit, Prison Could Place No Bars

The South constantly sways with its own Gothic story lines. To roam it can be seductive and fascinating. Go to Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and you find souls, people who want to talk, who have things to say. People who have been down to the river.

James Brown would have made a great and tragic figure in a Southern novel.

It was in 1989 when I was dispatched to South Carolina to write about him. Brown was in prison, four months into a six-year sentence on assault and weapons charges. (He would be released in 1991.) I met his lawyer, a bony man in a too-big gray suit, at a bar in Augusta, Ga., Brown's home town. The lawyer, George Hill, regaled me with stories of Brown, his life. I'd never get to the singer, of course, because he was in prison, so my aim was to find those who knew him, band members, the deejays across South Carolina and Georgia.

But as sometimes happens, a quick and easy rapport was established between the lawyer and me. Before long we were just two cats talking about James Brown. There was much laughter, and we sang -- awful and high-pitched -- the intros to "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" and "Georgia on My Mind."

"Tell you what," Hill said, just after midnight, as we were strolling toward the parking lot, "meet me in front of your hotel tomorrow morning at 7."

Next morning I stood outside of the hotel, leaning on tall white columns. The air smelled fresh, like the country. A white stretch limo pulled up, the window rolled down, and inside was Hill, peering at me from the back seat.

"Hop in," he said.

Soon we were heading down an interstate. The driver jammed in a cassette, turned the volume up loud, and James Brown's voice started bouncing around the limo. "Sex Machine" as I remember.

"Today is Sunday. It's family visitation day," Hill said. "Just follow me when I walk through and don't say a word and don't look any of the guards in the eye."

I felt a rush of adrenaline; I felt giddy. The driver looked at me in the rearview mirror and grinned. The music was thumping. Cornfields whizzed by.

As we got closer, I couldn't help but think of Southern movie dramas: "Cool Hand Luke," "In the Heat of the Night." It is easy enough to be afraid of prisons. Southern prisons -- at least the imagery -- might still one's blood.

We reached State Park, S.C., site of the incongruously named State Park Health Center, a minimum-security facility that would close in 2001. It was plain and drab, low-set. Old prisoners were moving shovels around in dirt in the front of the place. As we entered, the guards all smiled at the lawyer; I heeded his instructions and acted as if I were stamping the dirt from my shoes.