Papa

Everything else he owned, including his sixty-acre estate in Beech Island, South Carolina, and his catalog of 800 or so songs, was to remain in a trust, which in turn was divided into two funds: one to educate his grandchildren (seven among those six named children, plus the daughter of his son Teddy, who died in 1973) and a much larger one to pay tuition for "financially needy" students who attend school in South Carolina or Georgia. How much is that trust worth? Hard to say, because Mr. Brown's best assets are of a sort that can be marketed and managed in perpetuity as opposed to simply liquidated for cash. But the lowball estimate is $20 million, which, with proper promotion, could be multiplied many times over for many years to come. Elvis has been dead for three decades, after all, and he's still pulling eight figures annually.

In other words, Mr. Brown left a fortune to poor strangers.

Fifteen months later, none of those poor strangers have seen a nickel. Nor will they for months, and more likely years, to come, by which point there may be little left, after the creditors and the lawyers are paid. The first attorney was hired barely thirty-six hours after Mr. Brown died, and the first legal challenge was initiated less than two weeks after that. The lawsuits and lawyers rapidly multiplied—there are now more than thirty lawyers suing in three different courts—which has had the predictable result of resolving…precisely nothing.

For such a simple little will—all of five pages, and mostly boilerplate at that—there are a stupefying number of issues to resolve.

Mr. Brown's ostensible widow and the mother of James Brown II wants at least a third and perhaps half of his riches—though, as a matter of law, she is almost certainly not his widow nor, as a matter of human physiology, the mother of his biological child. Five of the six children named in the will want the trust dissolved and the will invalidated, which would entitle them to equal shares of the entire estate; that puts them at odds with the sixth sibling, Terry, and his boys, Forlando and Romunzo, who want the will and educational trusts to stand. At least two other daughters whom Mr. Brown never acknowledged also want a share of the pot, as well as eighteen years of back child support. Four more potential children—Jane and John Does I, II, III, and IV in the court records—might have similar claims. The three men Mr. Brown named as trustees have resigned, though two of them, Albert H. "Buddy" Dallas and Alford Bradley, want to be reinstated, because they say a judge bullied them into quitting. That same judge, Doyet Early, wants to put the third former trustee, David Cannon, in jail for not repaying $373,000 in misappropriated funds. Cannon says he can't afford it, which looks bad considering he spent almost $900,000 in cash to build a house in Honduras last year. State investigators are working a criminal case on Cannon, too. The two special administrators Judge Early appointed to replace those three men, meanwhile, are being sued in federal court by Forlando Brown, who argues that they were illegally put in charge and are improperly attempting to shift assets from the trust to the estate, from which their $300-an-hour fees could be paid. The administrators, Adele J. Pope and Robert Buchanan, have in turn sued Bradley, Cannon, Dallas, entertainment lawyer Joel Katz, his firm (Greenberg Traurig), and Enterprise Bank in state court, alleging a years-long conspiracy to swindle millions from Mr. Brown. All of those people have lawyers, and many of them have more than one. Tomi Rae Hynie, the widow who's probably not technically a widow, has five. Her son has his representative, a guardian ad litem, and the guardian ad litem has his own lawyer. Pope and Buchanan have lawyers. Even the anonymous beneficiaries of the trust, all those needy and deserving would-be students, have a lawyer—the attorney general of South Carolina—and they used to have two until Judge Early tossed out the Georgia attorney general.

And those are the relatively dignified legal proceedings.

Outside the courtroom, the family has bickered over absolutely everything, including the disposition of Mr. Brown's body, which for a time was kept in a gold-plated coffin inside a climate-controlled room in his house. When it was finally decided that the corpse would be put in a crypt in daughter Deanna's yard in early March, daughter Yamma nearly missed the private ceremony because police in Atlanta had arrested her the night before for stabbing her husband in the arm with a butcher knife. Since then, Forlando Brown has accused those two aunts, Deanna and Yamma, of swiping mementos, checks, and tens of thousands in cash from his grandfather's house, and in court he called their lawyer—who used to be his lawyer—a liar and a forger, or at least an accomplice to forgery. Yamma, Deanna, and half-brother Daryl accused the former trustees of hunting for "certain assets" when the trustees photographed the woods around Mr. Brown's house, an obvious reference to cash Mr. Brown is believed to have buried in the yard. Tomi Rae Hynie, who prefers to be called Mrs. Brown, was locked out of the house, and she insists someone—the adult children or the former trustees, or a combination thereof—shredded more recent wills, which she believes left half of Mr. Brown's assets to her and her son, and took all of her jewelry and most of Mr. Brown's clothes. "They looted everything," she says. "You're dealing with nothing but liars and thieves and cheats who would throw a widow and a 6-year-old child out on the streets." She also believes, along with several other people, that Mr. Brown was killed, though by whom and how neither she nor anyone else will say. "I can't comment on that right now," she says, "for the safety of myself and my son." Even the lawyer who drew up the will and trust that are now being contested is a tawdry little sideshow: He's in prison for the 2006 murder of a strip-club manager who'd bounced him for nakedly masturbating while waiting for a $300 lap dance.

----

Part 2 of 14.

Wait, there's more.

There are claims against the estate from creditors and would-be creditors. The funeral home wants $17,995 for the programs it produced for the services. One of Mr. Brown's managers wants a $200,000 cut of royalties he was promised. Buddy Dallas would like $624,876 in fees he says he was shorted over seven years. The Pullman Group, to which Mr. Brown mortgaged his royalties in 1999, wants $31 million (the refinancing of that deal is the subject of yet another lawsuit). A doctor wants $8,500 to reimburse her for, among other things, all the times she packed Mr. Brown into a limo to rehab in Atlanta; she'd like an additional $14,000 for two African carvings he never returned to her, or failing that, the carvings. Roosevelt Johnson, too, would like to get paid. "We were always told by Mr. Brown we would be taken care of should anything happen to him," he wrote in his claim. "We, meaning myself, and his group should have at least got two weeks severance pay. Myself for over 30 years of faithful service should get 2.5 million for a lifetime of service as he promised."

Maybe Mr. Brown did make that promise. But he never put it in writing, and it probably wouldn't have mattered if he had. Somebody surely would've sued.

*****

buddy dallas met james brown in 1984 at a political reception in Augusta, Georgia. It was a brief and unremarkable encounter—Dallas mostly remembers that his 2-year-old daughter liked the little man with the funny hair—but the next day, the phone rang in Dallas's office. It was Mr. Brown.

"Mr. Dallas," he said, "I need you to represent me."

"But Mr. Brown," Dallas replied—it was somehow automatic that James Brown was Mr. Brown—"I don't know anything about the entertainment business."

"That's all right," he said. "I'll teach you about the entertainment business. But I need you to represent me now."

Mr. Brown's immediate problems didn't involve entertainment. Mainly, he was broke. He hadn't broken the Billboard 100 in seven years, and he was playing shows for $7,500 that cost him $9,500 to produce. The IRS wanted $20 million in back taxes and penalties, the phone company had cut his line, and the founder of the Sacramento chapter of his fan club was after him for child support. "Mr. Dallas," he said a week after they'd met, "I hate to ask you this, but I really, really need some money."

So the first thing Dallas did as Mr. Brown's lawyer was give him $12,000, two grand in cash, the rest in checks paid to his creditors. Less than a year later, Dallas put up his own Lincoln as collateral for another $18,000.

The second thing he did was straighten out the child-support mess in Sacramento. "Mr. Brown," Dallas told him when the paperwork was settled, "you're going to have to be more careful."

"Well, Mr. Dallas," he said, "we're not going to have to worry about that no more."

What he meant was there wouldn't be any future paternity suits: Mr. Brown told at least six people he'd had a vasectomy earlier that year. But that was too little and much too late: One reason his estate is such a disaster is that he left so many heirs who could lay claim to his wealth.

His first wife, Velma, bore three sons in the 1950s, of whom two survive, and a backup singer had a fourth boy. Another singer gave birth to a daughter in 1965, and his second wife, Deidre, had two girls, one in 1968 and the other in 1972. The fan-club woman in Sacramento had her son in 1968.

That's seven children from five women.

And those five women are like grains of sand on a very wide beach. Mr. Brown had an insatiable appetite for women that was at least as pathological as it was sexual. "You'd have to grow up in a whorehouse to understand how James Brown felt about women," one of his confidants says, which is apt because Mr. Brown did, in fact, grow up in a whorehouse. His mother walked out on his father when he was 4, and two years later, he was sent to live in his aunt Honey's brothel in Augusta. He shined shoes for the soldiers from Fort Gordon, danced for nickels and pennies they'd flip at his feet, watched them shamble into Aunt Honey's to fuck the women, watched them shuffle back out.

When Mr. Brown grew up, when he was a famous performer touring the world forty, fifty weeks a year, he fucked a lot of women. That is a deliberate term, fucked, because Mr. Brown was not a man who made love or even had sex. Mr. Brown fucked. "He did not know about the soft," a longtime friend says. A lot of times, he'd let one of his cronies deal with the preliminaries, make small talk with a girl, get her a drink, keep her company. "She ready?" he'd ask. "I ain't got no time now. Make sure she ready." He'd hop on, roll off. Straight missionary, straight to the point. He never saw a reason for much else. "Why's a white man eat a woman?" he once asked a white friend. "What's he get outta that?" Hell, the man was in his sixties before he discovered doggy style on the Playboy Channel. He called up Roosevelt Johnson at three in the morning to tell him about it. "You sittin' down, Mr. Johnson?" he asked, which is what he always said when he had an astonishing new fact to report. "Black man don't know nothing. Black man don't know a damned thing. A white man, he get up in his woman from behind." Johnson pretended to be surprised by that. ("You had to go there with him," he says, "because you didn't know anything Mr. Brown didn't know.")

So how many women? How high can you count? Mr. Brown always kept a few girlfriends on the side, some for decades, and he always found a woman or two in whatever city he happened to be playing. "There'd be times, literally, when one would be coming in the front door while another one was going out the back," says Buddy Dallas.

Naturally, some of them got pregnant.

In 1961, there was a groupie named Ruby Mae Shannon, from Houston, who gave birth that December to a daughter, LaRhonda.

In 1968, there was a pretty white 17-year-old hippie named Lea Mernickle. She was standing in line to buy a photograph after a show in Vancouver when Mr. Brown sent one of his men to go fetch her. "Do you want to meet Mr. Brown?" he asked. Which was a silly question, because really, who didn't want to meet Mr. Brown? She followed the man backstage, and Mr. Brown greeted her warmly. "He seemed to be smitten with me," she says. He invited her to fly to Los Angeles with him that night. She said no—her mother would've killed her, disappearing like that—but when he asked her a few days later to fly to Denver, she went. "I was always thinking the best of people," she says. "And my head was in the stars. I was going to hang out with James Brown. How groovy is that?" And it was, except for, as she puts it, "the part I wasn't particularly thrilled about." She flew home pregnant and in October had a baby girl with skin the color of cinnamon, which is what she named her, Cinnamon Nicole Mernickle.

In 1970, there was a woman named Christine Mitchell, whom he culled from the audience at a show in Miami. She gave birth to yet another daughter, Jeanette.

That's ten children so far. Four more—at least four more—are awaiting DNA results. The laws of probability suggest there are others ("Let's hope this thing doesn't spread to Europe," Dallas says), but how many, nobody knows. "My dad would send his hounds to pay women to get rid of the babies or pay them not to talk about it," says La-Rhonda, Ruby Shannon's daughter. "My mom wouldn't settle for it. I used to ask her why, and she would say, 'Because he's a friend.' "

*****

one of mr. brown's hounds intercepted Lea Mernickle backstage in the summer of 1968, when he was in Vancouver for another show and she was obviously pregnant and trying to find him to tell him. The man—maybe a lawyer, maybe a bodyguard—asked a lot of questions, "accusatory questions," about her baby. Was she sure Mr. Brown was the father?

"The only thing I want to know," she told the man, "is does he want to know his daughter, does he want to see her, does he want a relationship with her?"

No.

She got paid a couple of thousand dollars, and because Lea was a minor when she got pregnant, her mother signed an affidavit saying Lea had never had sex with Mr. Brown or anyone in his entourage. And that was it.

Not long after Cinnamon was born, Lea married a man of Danish descent and moved to the Okanagan Valley, east of Vancouver, where she had three sons, all blue-eyed and blond. And when she was young, Cinnamon—who was called Nikki as a child and now Nicole as an adult—believed she was Danish, too. "If you'd asked me," she says, "my ancestors were Vikings."

But the white kids in the valley—which would have been all the kids in the valley—were merciless.

They made fun of her hair, the kinks she combed out with Vaseline. They said her brothers couldn't be her real brothers, and when she asked her mother if that was true, Lea admitted it was. "Your real father was a famous singer," she said. Maybe she said James Brown, but Nicole had never heard of him. Later, though, when an uncle gave her a copy of Papa's Got a Brand New Bag, she would stare at his face on the cover. She knew that man was her daddy.

Not that it made her feel any better. "I was different, and being different sucked," Nicole says. The white kids said she was black, and when one black family finally moved to town, those kids said she wasn't black enough. In the fifth grade, one of those black girls yanked Nicole off her bike and slapped her. "Stop lying," she said. "James Brown ain't your daddy."

The problem, she decided, was that James Brown simply couldn't find her. That had to be it. Why else would a man abandon his little girl? "I was believing he didn't know I was alive," she says.

"He just needed a message, and then he would come and rescue me." He never did, though, even after Lea's marriage broke up and she moved her children to Vancouver and had to collect welfare to get by.

So what's that worth, now that he's dead, all those years of being different and feeling abandoned? Is there a debt owed? One that is even possible to repay?

Nicole never asked for anything while Mr. Brown was alive. But in the mid-'90s, after she'd been divorced and had two children of her own, she did try to meet him. She started making phone calls, which eventually led her to Buddy Dallas. She told him she didn't want money, only to meet her father. It took a while, but Dallas arranged a conference call between himself, Mr. Brown, and Nicole.

Mr. Brown was polite when he answered. Always with the manners. Nicole got to the point: "Do you have any doubt that I'm your flesh and blood?"

"Yeah, I have doubts," Mr. Brown said. "You ain't my child. Somebody lyin' to you, 'cause I ain't your daddy. If you is my daughter, I'd want to hug you and tell you I love you and meet your kids. But you ain't my child."

The conversation lasted all of three minutes. She never spoke to him again, and she saw him only once, from the eighth row of a Vancouver auditorium in 2004. The way she tells it now, there was a moment, in the middle of "It's a Man's Man's Man's World," where he seemed like he saw her in the audience, like he was staring at her from the stage. "He just had this mean look," she says.

"Like, I hate you."

Probably just her imagination. James Brown wouldn't have recognized his daughter. And maybe that's why Nicole saw a man who looked so mean. He never gave her a reason to see anything else.

*****

And what about LaRhonda? Does she have anything coming?

She was 4 years old, playing mud cakes in the yard, when her mother called her inside and put her in front of the TV. "I want you to see something," she said. There was a black man singing on the screen. "That's your daddy."

"That ain't my daddy," LaRhonda said. Then she went back to her mud cakes.

For years after that, whenever Mr. Brown played Houston, Ruby Shannon would dress up her daughter and take her to the arena, LaRhonda grousing the whole time about having to see some old man's show. She never believed that man was her daddy. For a long time, she wasn't even sure Ruby was her mother, what with the woman working two jobs to pay the bills, leaving LaRhonda to be raised by her great-aunt.

Then, when LaRhonda was 11, her mother dragged her to yet another show, and she stood outside afterward, by the stage door, waiting for an autograph. It was late, two in the morning, maybe three, before he finally came out, because Mr. Brown had to wipe off the sweat and put on fresh clothes and roll his hair all over again before he'd walk outside. The man liked to stay in character, and the character always looked good.

He recognized LaRhonda in the crowd from seeing her at all those other shows with Ruby. He went straight to her, asked where her mother was. LaRhonda pointed off to one side. She watched Mr. Brown go to Ruby, watched him pick her up and twirl her around. And for the first time she thought, Maybe he is my daddy.

Ruby died in 1975 at 40, a heart attack after surgery. LaRhonda tried for months to tell Mr. Brown. She finally tracked him to a hotel in Birmingham and got through the switchboard by saying her name was Ruby Mae Shannon.

Mr. Brown got on the line. He was sweet. "Hey, baby," he said. "What's goin' on?"

LaRhonda started sobbing. She told him who she was, told him Ruby was dead.

"What you calling me for? I ain't your daddy."

He said that, Mr. Brown did, to his 13-year-old daughter.

"That daddy I always thought was gonna come home," LaRhonda says now, "that was gonna come running and pick me up and hug me and kiss me, that daddy I thought was gonna be like, 'Okay, her mom's passed, I'll take her in'—that daddy never came."

But LaRhonda kept coming back. "Like a canker sore," she says. She'd go to his shows in Houston, find someone to let her backstage. The first time, she was 16, and Mr. Brown just stared at her. He warmed to her as the years went by, or at least thawed some. "Me and your mama was friends," he told her once. "Your mama was built like a Coke bottle," he told her more than once. When she was 19, she took her own daughter, Ciara, backstage, and Mr. Brown held the baby on his lap and called her his granddaughter.

"If she's your granddaughter," one of his backup singers said, "then who's her mama?"

Mr. Brown scowled. "Ain't nobody asked you nothin'." He turned to the Reverend Al Sharpton, who was close to Mr. Brown in those days. "Reverend, you're a man of the cloth. Tell the truth: She look like me?"

"I am a man of the cloth," Sharpton said. "And she looks like you spit her out of your mouth."

Sharpton doesn't recall the conversation, but he says it sounds plausible (especially since LaRhonda does bear a gobsmackingly obvious resemblance to her father). More important, he remembers her clearly. "You mean Peaches?" he says when asked about the daughter in Houston. That's what everyone calls her, Peaches. Her father gave her that name. "She's a Georgia peach," he told Ruby years ago.

And maybe that's the worst thing: La-Rhonda was never a stranger to the people around Mr. Brown. She knew most of her half siblings, held some of their children in her arms, and she found out Mr. Brown had died when his son Daryl called. "Pop's dead," he told her. Even Tomi Rae Hynie, the (maybe) widow, knows Peaches. "And Peaches," she says, "is his daughter."

So again, what's that worth, now that he's dead and LaRhonda has a letter from a DNA lab that says there is a 99.99 percent probability that James Brown is her father? Is there a debt owed?

Perhaps. If the trust stands, both LaRhonda's and Nicole's children would appear to be legitimate beneficiaries of the grandchildren's educational fund. If the will and trust are invalidated, they might be in line for a fraction of what's left after the creditors and lawyers are paid. Their own lawyers have filed for back child support—though ironically, if the will is valid, that likely would be futile, since almost all of Mr. Brown's assets would be in the trust, not the estate. Blood from a stone and all that.

Mostly, though, there is the name: James Brown. Because that name represents both validation for his children and a rebuke toward their father. To have that name says that lawyers and lab techs did in his death what James Brown would not do in his life: acknowledge his children. "And I want people to know," Nicole says, "that he did not acknowledge me."

All things considered, that is not an unreasonable request.

*****

roosevelt johnson's request, on the other hand, is not at all reasonable. He would like $2.5 million, which is a number he appears to have pulled out of his hat.

It's an unfortunate number, too, because it makes Johnson look greedy when he is merely desperate. The man's broke. A few months ago, he would've been content with a lousy $1,200, enough to get his landlord off his back and keep his small apartment in a shabby tower on the Lake Erie shore. He's sold his cars and his jewelry, and he's been trying to find work, any work. "But people look at your résumé and what you've been doing for the past forty years, and they think, This guy doesn't really want a job," he says. "Yeah, I do. My job died."

He never saw it coming, either. When Johnson stood in the big cemetery on Laney Walker Boulevard in the winter of 2004, part of him really believed he'd be the one leaving Mr. Brown behind. Yes, he was twenty years younger than his boss, and he knew Mr. Brown aged like any other man, but Mr. Brown, the flesh-and-blood mortal, was not the same as James Brown, the Hardest-Working Man in Show Business, the character and icon. James Brown was—is—immortal. Any man could confuse the two, the person and the persona, and not even know his mind was playing tricks on him.

Mr. Brown came from nothing, a poor black son of the Depression South. His father made a pauper's living slicing trees for sap he could haul on his back to the turpentine plant in Bamberg, and little James's clothes were so raggedy, the teachers sometimes sent him home from school. He started stealing so he could buy something decent to wear, and when he got caught breaking into cars at 15, a judge gave him eight to sixteen years in prison. But he had a gift. The other inmates called him Music Box on account of his voice, his ear for harmonies and chords, the way he could arrange a gospel quartet into a sound so sweet men would weep. He told the parole board he'd sing for the Lord if they'd let him loose, which they did in 1952, three years and a day into his sentence.

That's how it started, a 19-year-old ex-con singing gospel in a little town called Toccoa in the hills northeast of Atlanta. He charted his first hit, "Please Please Please," in March 1956, another hundred by April 1974, and twenty-eight more before his last, "Living in America," reached number four on the pop charts in 1986. He sold tens of millions of records and earned hundreds of millions of dollars, and yet his commercial success was less remarkable than his cultural influence. James Brown changed modern music. He put the beat on the One, birthed funk from gospel and soul, laid the foundation (and countless sample tracks) for hip-hop and rap. Long after the hits stopped coming, even after he got busted for smoking angel dust and punching women, people still paid to see him because he was still James Brown. In 2005, when his statue was set on the promenade in the middle of Broad Street in Augusta, near the intersection of James Brown Boulevard and not far from what would become James Brown Arena, Sharpton whispered to him, "You know, Mr. Brown, you've built a brand so high even you couldn't tear it down." He was still Mr. Dynamite, still Soul Brother Number One, still, and always, the Godfather of Soul. Only four B's in music, he liked to say. Beethoven, Bach, Brahms…and Brown.

Roosevelt Johnson was a part of that phenomenon for forty years. And what's he got now? A job with James Brown didn't come with a pension plan. There was no junior executive waiting to step up, keep the company running. Mr. Brown was the company. Everyone else was merely support staff, temp workers until the boss died.

So here's what he's got now: One of Mr. Brown's combs. A partial bottle of Mr. Brown's Viagra. A few hundred snapshots of himself with famous people. Some digital recordings of concerts Mr. Brown gave him that might be worth something. And he has a few stories to tell. He peddled one to a tabloid last year about Tomi Rae Hynie supposedly being a lesbian (which she denies). Forty years with a legend and that's what he's reduced to: selling scraps of another man's fame.

*****

and why shouldn't he? A dead man's celebrity is a commodity, a resource for anyone willing to stake a claim to it. And a lot of people are. Take, for instance, Tascha Houston, a charming lady of a certain age whom Mr. Brown hired in 1966 as one of the original J. B. Dancers. She uses that exact phrase many, many times. As in, "Mr. Brown told me, 'I want you to keep your part of the legacy alive as one of the original J. B. Dancers.' " As in, "As long as I live, even if I'm in a wheelchair, I will always try to carry on the legacy of the original J. B. Dancers."

She is not at all insincere. She clearly adored Mr. Brown. He was her best friend and her mentor, she says, and then she has to stop talking because she has begun to cry. She's brought her manager with her, Mr. Marlowe ("Just put Mr. Marlowe," she says. "That's respect"), as well as a few photos from the day she laid a wreath on the James Brown Bridge in Macon, and a folder of official documents from mayors in five cities—Atlanta, Augusta, Philadelphia, Chattanooga, and Lithonia, Georgia—proclaiming various dates to be Tascha Houston Day, primarily in honor of her being an original J. B. Dancer. "I have a person who works on that, to make sure I get the recognition," she explains. "The minute you say James Brown, everyone jumps on it."

The reason she wants that recognition, of course, is that she still performs. She dances for a James Brown impersonator, and she's choreographed what she calls a one-woman tribute to the Godfather of Soul. "I would like to get it on Broadway," she says.

LaRhonda, meanwhile, would like to be on TV. "You just don't know," she says. "I am so destined to do a reality show." She has put a great deal of thought into this. All the Brown children, the acknowledged and the alleged, would be sequestered in a big house on an island, where they would wait, one by one and week by week, for a lab technician to compare their DNA to Mr. Brown's. At the end of each episode, one potential heir would be called to a sterile room, where the results would be revealed. "And when they find out they're not his child," she says, "it'd be like, 'Papa's got a brand new bag!Now get your things and get on outta here.' " She jerks her thumb over her shoulder when she says that last part; every decent reality show needs a gesture to go with the catchphrase.

One sibling she knows would not be kicked off the island is her half sister Nicole. LaRhonda calls her often, and they have exchanged photographs, but she has not traveled to Vancouver, and Nicole has not come to Houston, which genuinely frustrates her. "I can't wait to meet my sister," she says. "On the reality show. Or like, on Oprah. Oh, that'd be one of those moments." And then she's quiet while she dabs the tears out of her eyes.

A few weeks after LaRhonda sketched her reality show, a woman she calls Auntie Fannie arrived at the Park West Theater in Chicago, where the Chicago Music Awards were being dispensed, wearing a full-length white fur coat with tawny streaks and trailed by two men from Shine On TV, in Augusta, and a filmmaker named Harrison Starks. Fannie had been invited to receive an Award of Honor because, as the program noted, she used to perform "alongside her famous brother, 'The Godfather of Soul' James Brown" and because she is now "sending a positive message through the music she wrote with James Brown before his death."

The lady at the podium finished announcing the award, and then Fannie Brown bounded onto the stage and began lip-synching to a single she recorded with a few musicians who used to back Mr. Brown. It is called "He's the God Father of Soul, How We Love Him So," and it is obviously not one she wrote with Mr. Brown because it's about him being dead. During the chorus, Fannie did the Robot, and she ended the number by repeating, over and over, "my brother" and "I love you so."

Then, in quick succession, she plugged her Web site, two other sites where her CDs can be purchased, and I Got Soul, the film Harrison Starks is making.

Perhaps Fannie does love Mr. Brown. She is clearly distressed by the mess that is his estate. "If he'd left it to me, Michael Jackson, and Prince, we'd never let him down," she says. She lets that hang there while she fans herself, sweaty from the performance. Then: "The love that Michael and I have, oh, from when we was babies…"

Fannie Brown Buford (she appropriated the name) is not, however, Mr. Brown's sister. He did not have a sister. Still, she's been calling herself that since at least 1993, when she was mentioned in a photo caption in Jet. Yet she is referenced in neither of his autobiographies, and none of Mr. Brown's longtime associates remember her as anything more than an occasional background performer, if that. "You mean the souvenir girl?" one of them says. Yes, the souvenir girl. Fannie says so in her song: I'm loud-talking Fannie / Selling James Brown souvenirs / From Japan to Miami. Also, she sold them at his funeral in Augusta: "Cold Sweat" washcloths, "Hot Pan(t)s" pot holders, that sort of thing.

As Fannie tells it, she met Mr. Brown when she was 11, in 1967, when he played the Regal Theater in Chicago. "He was sliding onstage, and I was sliding in the aisle," she says. "He did the splits, and I did the splits and a backbend." She caught his eye, and he let her come to wherever he was playing on the weekends during the school year, as much as she wanted when classes were out. She says Mr. Brown essentially raised her (which would make her the only child he raised). And the sister thing? Not her doing. "He said I was his sister." Or like a sister. Or something.

She believes Mr. Brown's story needs to be told and told properly, which is why she is writing a book and working with Harrison Starks on the film, about which he will reveal very little. "What I'm really worried about is all these phony people like Spike," he says. Starks means Spike Lee, who has for years planned an authorized and well-publicized bio-pic and who, in matters of black cultural icons, is generally not referred to as phony."A lot of people don't know the real history," Starks says. "I do. And the real question is, Who killed James Brown?"

Fannie Brown is nodding her head. Apparently that is indeed the question.

"Ain't no one can tell his legacy but me," she says. "He never did anything without talking to me about it." Why bother asking anyone else? "You won't get anything, because everyone you dealing with is liars and druggies. How will you get to the truth when all those people heroined-up and cracked-up and coked-up?

"History will find the truth," she says. "And when I can find someone to pay for my story, I'm gonna tell the truth."

*****

the truth? No one knows the truth about James Brown, not the whole truth, because Mr. Brown never let anyone close enough to reveal the full measure of himself. He could make you believe you were close, make you believe that you, and only you, had been blessed with a glimpse of his soul. But that's merely charisma. Or manipulation.

"People were his confidant in that area of his life where he was dealing with them," Sharpton says. "All of us—all of us—were consequential to his self-image."

And that's from a man who was closer than most to Mr. Brown. He toured with him in the 1970s, lived with him for a while in the early 1980s, wrote the introduction to his autobiography. He's called Mr. Brown his surrogate father, and Mr. Brown likened him to a son. Yet he has no illusions, either. He knows he was also a useful prop, a gifted black preacher Mr. Brown could mold and brand as a protégé, help smooth the friction with the civil rights establishment (Mr. Brown, after all, endorsed Richard Nixon). "He saw me as his answer to Dr. King," Sharpton says, and then he drops into a pretty good impersonation: "I'm gonna make my own Dr. King."

(Decades later, Mr. Brown still saw his reflection in Sharpton. "One of the proudest moments of my life," he told the reverend in 2004, "was when you walked out at the Democratic National Convention with that James Brown hairdo and brought James Brown into mainstream national politics.")

For all that, Sharpton doesn't claim to have known the total man. "Only tell people what they need to know, Rev," Mr. Brown told him long ago. "And anybody want to know anything outside their lane, don't trust 'em." Mr. Brown trusted Al Sharpton because he stayed in his lane.

Everyone saw in Mr. Brown only what he let them see. A mistress saw a frustrated old man trying to get hard while whacked out on PCP. His pastor in Augusta saw a spiritual man who quoted Scripture, especially Matthew: "Verily, I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these, my brethren, ye have done it unto me." Forlando Brown saw a grandfather who read through his college applications and checked his grades every semester. Buddy Dallas saw a captivating performer, an astute businessman, and more than that, a man who survived poverty and prison and drugs and the IRS. We rather die on our feet / Than keep living on our knees / Say it loud / I'm black and I'm proud. That's what Buddy Dallas saw.

But none of them saw it all. Indeed, you can tell how close someone was to Mr. Brown by how readily they admit that fact.

"Mr. Brown was an exceptionally slick, conniving, brilliant man," says Charles Bobbit, his friend for forty years and his manager from 1966 to 1977 and again from 2000 until Mr. Brown died. "And he made sure—made sure—he was misunderstood."

Yet there was one matter on which he clearly wanted to be understood: his legacy.

Mr. Brown told people for twenty years how he wanted to be remembered. A few small details would change now and again, but his general wishes were consistent.

For instance, he didn't want his children getting his money. Why depends on who he was talking to and what his mood was at the time. Partly, he was a detached father. Blame the constant touring, blame the multiple divorces, blame whatever demons crawled around his head. "He was never much of a family man," Bobbit says. "But I guess you got that." Sometimes he'd say that being James Brown's child was enough of an inheritance, that the name alone was worth more than anything he had growing up. He worked for his wealth, and they could, too. If he was in a foul mood, he'd be blunter: "They ain't gettin' rich off my back," he told at least four people over the years. "They ain't gettin' a damned dime."

Well, almost there. Papers to establish the trust were never filed. Yet around the time the tape was made, she sat in an office with Dallas and listened as Mr. Brown outlined his plan for it. "I want everything to go into that trust," he said. "My house, my royalties, everything."

"Mr. Brown," Dallas said. "You've got kids.…"

"Dammit, I ain't giving them a stepping-stone to make history," he snapped. "They all got education. I been supporting them. I ain't givin' them a dime."

Dallas remembers that conversation almost verbatim, which is notable because Hollander didn't speak to him for twenty years after it took place. And Hollander certainly has no motive to soften Mr. Brown's image now. In fact, she says he raped her later that same year, drove her deep into earlier woods, high on PCP, and told her to take her clothes off. When she refused, he said, "I'm not going to ask you again. And if you don't, I'm gonna." Then he put a shotgun in her face. "He told me, 'If you try to run away, I'll kill you,' " she says. "He told me he owned me. He told me he was giving me a blessing." (She never brought criminal charges, but she later passed two polygraphs, including one administered by a twenty-seven-year veteran of the FBI.)

Also, she's glad he's dead. "His death was the most unbelievable Christmas present God could have given me," she says. "Is that a horrible thing to say?" Not really, considering. But she does like to believe that Mr. Brown called his fund the I Feel Good Trust because he remembered the first one, that he chose that name to cleanse his sins.

*****

in the summer of 2003, Mr. Brown positioned a lawn chair on his front porch, sat down, and told his grandson Forlando to get the broom from the pool house, the blue one with the tattered yellow bristles.

Then he told him to sweep the lawn. Which Forlando did. Mr. Brown had a way of making people do stupid, humiliating things, like not speak when he was in the room or be cowed into letting him pick their meals in restaurants. Once, when Forlando answered a question with "yeah" instead of "yes, sir," Mr. Brown glowered and pointed toward another room in the house. "Get up," he said. "Go there." Forlando was 17 years old, but he sat in that room, alone and quiet, for three hours. "He demanded respect, and if he didn't get it, you weren't a part of his life," Forlando says.

So he swept the lawn. Hours passed before Mr. Brown told him to stop. "Now, boy," he said, "that's why you gotta get an education. Because if you don't, people gonna make you do senseless stuff like that. You ain't nothin' without an education."

Mr. Brown felt that he'd been blessed, that God had given him a voice and rhythm and the charisma to use them. But he never got past the sixth grade. So what if he hadn't been blessed? He probably would have done his full sixteen years for breaking into cars and not much else after that.

Which is why the I Feel Good Trust was set up as an educational fund. The cause wasn't new to him—"Don't Be a Dropout" broke the top fifty way back in November 1966—but he began to formalize it as his legacy on February 24, 1999. He met that night at his office to sign a will and trust drawn up by H. Dewain Herring, who, before he shot up a strip club and was sent to prison, was a respected South Carolina estate lawyer. Mr. Brown brought a tape deck with him, which he used to record four and a half minutes of musings about his eventual demise. He rambled a bit, but he made three important points:

Hopefully the legacy will serve as a mentor for young people to make it in all walks of life. This is…let me say this: My intention is not just to go to black kids; this is to go to poor children. And they're not going to limit no color. We've had that, enough of that in America already, and now we're going to begin to move over.

And then:

All the things that I have… I'm James Brown twenty-four hours a day, and that's been proven, even in litigations that I suffered, even in my home, 'cause I was James Brown. So let's not not be James Brown now, now that I'm being paid. I want everything to go down this way.

And finally:

When you get my age, you don't think about nothing but what you can do for people. It's like, it's not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country. And I think this is true, which is to the country and mankind throughout the world. That I made it, from God's blessings, in spite of all obstacles, all the ups and downs we had as people, yeah, He's taken me to a point that I can give back, like I prayed before I come here. Nothing is mine anyway; it's all given to me by God. So whatever I do with it, I hope I'm doing His will. Thank you.

For whatever reason, he didn't sign those documents until June 15, 1999. A little more than a year later, in August 2000, he signed a revised version. The only significant change was that he made the trust irrevocable.

*****

the people who are fighting over Mr. Brown's riches all agree, oddly enough, that he would want much of his wealth to benefit the poor.

What they disagree on is who is best suited to control Mr. Brown's assets and, more to the point, how much should be given away and who should get the rest. It's all become very nasty and would appear quite complicated, considering the forests of pulp trees slaughtered for legal briefs in the first year alone. But it is really, boiled down, a family feud fought on three fronts.

One front is Forlando Brown, who wants his grandfather's will and trust left exactly as written. He would then like a group of investors he has assembled to buy out the assets in the trust for a fair-market, court-approved price, which he suspects would be anywhere from $60 million to $100 million. It is not a wholly altruistic offer—the investors, though not Forlando, intend to make a profit—but it would be efficient. Professional marketers could wring more out of Mr. Brown's image and songs than some court-appointed administrator, and they would return a percentage of their annual gross to the trust. The I Feel Good Trust, then, would be flush with cash and would require only the services of a competent money manger.

Another front is Tomi Rae Hynie. She is suing as the "omitted spouse," which is a legal term meaning Mr. Brown never got around to changing his will to include the woman he married after it was written. Of course, she claims he did revise his will to leave her half of everything, but she can't prove it because she also claims those documents were shredded before she could get into the house to retrieve them. Yet on at least one occasion, in 2006, Mr. Brown had a codicil drawn up by an attorney named Jay B. Ross that would have left her 17 percent. That document also bequeathed 5 percent each to her son, to Roosevelt Johnson, to Mr. Brown's son Daryl, and to his housekeeper and property manager, David Washington. A percentage of what—all of his assets? his royalties?—wasn't clear, except in the case of Charles Bobbit, who was to receive 10 percent of the damages expected from a pending lawsuit against the photo agency Corbis.

Johnson and Bobbit watched Mr. Brown initial every page and then sign the last. He gave the papers to Bobbit, who put them in his briefcase. A few hours later, Mr. Brown asked for them back. No one ever saw those papers again. Bobbit figures he probably got mad at Tomi Rae and tore them up, which sounds reasonable. Mr. Brown got mad at Tomi Rae a lot. He used to call David Washington from the road, all worked up, saying, "Mr. Washington, pack her clothes. Get her outta there." Then Washington would wait a few hours for him to call again. "Nah," Mr. Brown would say. "I think she gonna be all right. Put her clothes back."

The real problem Tomi Rae Hynie has, though, is proving she was ever legally Mrs. Brown. She met him in 1997 in Las Vegas, where she was working as a Janis Joplin impersonator, and on June 11, 2001—seventeen years after his vasectomy—she had a son, whom she named James Brown II. Six months later, Mr. Brown married her. Bobbit asked him if he was sure, if he knew what he was doing.

"When you go home, Mr. Bobbit, there's someone waiting for you," he said. "When I go home, I'm all alone. So yes, I know what I'm doing. I love her, and I'm gonna marry her."

Unfortunately, Tomi Rae had married a Pakistani man in 1997. She says she was a dupe in a green-card scam, that the marriage was never consummated, and that she tried to get it annulled almost immediately when she discovered her groom had three other wives in Pakistan. But she didn't. Which meant her 2001 marriage to Mr. Brown was invalid, and he never remarried her after she finally did get the annulment in 2004.

The third front is the five children to whom Mr. Brown left only trinkets. They want the will invalidated and the trust dissolved, arguing in court papers that Mr. Brown was tricked into signing them by Cannon, Dallas, and Bradley. Coupled with the suit filed against those men by the special administrators, Adele Pope and Robert Buchanan—which notes prominently that Mr. Brown "had a limited formal education and relied heavily upon his trusted legal and financial advisors"—it seems to dredge up all those old, ugly images of shady white guys (though Bradley is black) stealing from a dumb black song-and-dance man.

To be fair, Mr. Brown did, on occasion, lapse into utter lunacy. He was terribly paranoid, convinced the government had bugged the armoire in the den, placed tiny cameras in the curtains, pointed satellites through his window, even wired up the yard. "See them trees," he'd say when the wind blew and the branches swayed. "That's them. They watching me." And he would occasionally flat out lose his mind. "Motherfucker was crazy," says Gloria Daniel, a girlfriend he kept on the side for forty years. "It was the drugs."

Mr. Brown smoked his drugs—PCP, until that got hard to find, then cocaine—mixed with tobacco from his Kools. "You sitting there rolling tobacco out of a cigarette—that's a woman's job—and you sitting there naked so he can look at you 'cause he getting ready to fuck you," she says. "Yeah, right." She rolls her eyes. The drugs, to say nothing of the diabetes and the prostate cancer, made him impotent. "He tried like hell, though," she says. "He'd wear you out. That man died trying to come."

One night in the summer of 2001, after he'd slathered her in Vaseline ("He liked you all greased up," she says. "Like a porkchop") and wore her out trying to come, he gave up and left the room, and Gloria dozed off. When she woke up, Mr. Brown was standing at the foot of the bed in a full-length mink coat over his bare chest, a black cowboy hat, and silk pajama pants with one leg tucked into a cowboy boot and the other hanging out. He had a shotgun over his shoulder and a white stripe of Noxzema under each eye. "I'm an Indian tonight, baby," he announced. "C'mon, let's let 'em have it." Then he dumped a pickle jar of change on the floor, told her to get a machete, and went out to the garage. He took the Rolls, drove ten miles to Augusta, weaving all over the road, clipping mailboxes, smoking more dope, and screaming about being an Indian. Gloria kept thinking she should flag down a cop, say she'd been kidnapped.

Like she says, motherfucker was crazy on drugs.

When he wasn't high, though, Mr. Brown was firmly in control of his affairs. That's another point upon which all the warring parties—his kids, Tomi Rae Hynie, Forlando—concur. He was suspicious of everyone and kept an eye on all of his business dealings and the people handling them on his behalf. Bobbit used to wonder if he had ESP, the way Mr. Brown could read people. "I can't see how Mr. Brown would know everything going on around him and not know who was ripping him off," he says.

And if Buddy Dallas and the rest tricked Mr. Brown into signing a bad will and trust, why? "Pretty slick," Forlando says drily, "conning my grandfather into giving his money to poor kids." The alleged motive is that the trust, as well as Mr. Brown's earlier dealings, was structured in such a way as to guarantee enormous commissions to the trustees. But if they were going to steal his money with a bogus will, why not just name themselves beneficiaries and avoid all that paperwork? As for Dallas, whose financial records have been examined, "If there was such a grand conspiracy, why am I worrying about my credit card bills every month?"

But there's one more thing, and it's important. Buddy Dallas loved James Brown, Mr. Brown loved Buddy Dallas, and there is a long line of people who will testify to that. "Mr. Dallas is a good man," Mr. Brown told Bobbit. "Mr. Dallas didn't even know me, and he gave me $30,000."

"He always said he'd never forget what Mr. Dallas did for him," David Washington says.

The courts will maybe, probably, eventually sort all this out. And Dallas will be sitting there, like he was in February and Forlando Brown was on the witness stand. "None of us in this room," Forlando said, "not one of us sang and danced for James Brown. He did that. And I don't think it's right for any of us…" His voice broke. "For any of us to tell my grandfather what to do with his money."

Dallas was in a chair against one wall, just inside the bar rail, and he had his head down, weeping for his dead friend and the mess his legacy has become.

*****

the tour after Christmas was going to be the last one. Mr. Brown would play his final show in Anaheim, then pack it in after fifty-seven years. "When we finish this little thing, we going on a vacation," he'd told Bobbit. He was going to take Tomi Rae and go to San Francisco, a few other towns, spend some money. "Then we going to Vegas, and I'm gonna marry her again. She's my wife, I love her, and I ain't gonna punish her no more."

But first they had to do the shows, and for that Mr. Brown needed new teeth. Getting implants screwed into the jaw is a brutal procedure, and Mr. Brown didn't think he could stand the pain. He wanted to be put under. But the man was sick. His knees were shot and his feet were swollen, his stomach hurt all the time, he was constipated and couldn't pee too well, either. Now he had a bad cough, and he was losing weight.

Bobbit was waiting for him when Washington drove Mr. Brown to the dentist in Atlanta. Bobbit had a physician with him who gave Mr. Brown the once-over and then told him he might not ever wake up from anesthesia. He checked him into the hospital that Saturday, December 23. He rested all night and the next day, the doctors checking him, trying to clear out the pneumonia. Bobbit and Washington stayed with him. And then, late Sunday, just before midnight, Mr. Brown told Washington to leave the room.

"I'm gonna leave here tonight," he said.

"If you're talking about what I think you're talking about," Bobbit said, "that's a trip I can't make with you." He was trying to lighten the mood, not ready for Mr. Brown to die, not believing he could die.

Mr. Brown stayed serious. "I want you to look out for my wife, if you can," he said. "And I want you to look out for Little Man, if you can. And look out for Reverend Sharpton."

He always called Tomi Rae's son Little Man. He knew he wasn't his son, but whenever someone told him to get a DNA test, he said no, not while he was alive. Because he loved Little Man, loved him as his own, almost as if he was finally going to be a proper father, make up for all those years and all those other children. Bobbit thought that's why he called him Little Man. "It was his ego," he says. "Like, 'Look at him, look at that little man—he's just like me.' "

Bobbit settled into a chair at the foot of the bed. Mr. Brown lay back and dozed. Then he bolted upright, grabbed at his chest. "I'm on fire, I'm on fire," he said. "I'm burning up. Burning up." He flopped across the bed, and his gown rose up, exposing him. Bobbit got a blanket to cover him up. He was leaning down, his face close to Mr. Brown, still holding the blanket. He heard Mr. Brown take three short, weak breaths, saw his eyes open wide for an instant, then close. "As God is my witness, I don't know why," he says, "but I looked at my watch and it was one twenty-four."

The doctors worked on his body for another twenty-one minutes, but James Brown was already dead.

*****

some nights, when David Washington is asleep, Mr. Brown comes to him. He doesn't like to talk about this, because people tend to think you're crazy when you talk about a dead man visiting you in your sleep. But it's true. It's just the two of them, like it was all those years, Mr. Brown in his bed, Mr. Washington in the chair, watching an old Western on the television.

"Mr. Washington," he says, "go fix me some corn and bacon." And Mr. Washington gets up and goes to the kitchen and makes the food, puts salt and pepper and butter on the corn, the way Mr. Brown likes it.

He started working for Mr. Brown in 1994, part-time on the grounds crew after pulling twelve-hour shifts at the textile mill. Mr. Brown found him in the yard one afternoon, asked if he was smoking dope, asked if he was drinking on the job. "No, sir, Mr. Brown."

"Then why your eyes all red?"

"I just came from my other job, sir."

Mr. Brown told him to quit the mill, come work for him full-time. A man shouldn't have to work two jobs, wear himself out like that.

For the next ten years, Mr. Washington did almost everything for Mr. Brown. He cooked his meals and laundered his clothes and drew his bath. It wasn't always easy, because Mr. Washington never knew what kind of mood he'd be in. "You got used to it," he says. "Don't talk. Just, 'Yes, sir,' 'No, sir.' " He was supposed to be there from nine to five, but he'd stay late, listen to Mr. Brown talk, buy him a carton of cigarettes in the middle of the night, watch Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune with him. Mr. Brown didn't have many friends who'd watch TV with him. Mostly, he had people from whom he demanded respect, which isn't the same as a friend at all.

"He told me a long time ago, all the friends he got he could count on one hand," Mr. Washington says. That's hard on a man, makes him lonely. Sometimes Mr. Washington almost pitied him, though he'd never use that word, because Mr. Brown wouldn't take pity. "He was, like, missing something," Mr. Washington says. "He had everything in the world, but it was like…just something missing. Some kind of happiness."

Mr. Washington was his friend. And Mr. Brown took care of him, bought him a bedroom set and a burgundy Lincoln, paid for the burial when Mr. Washington's brother died. He told Mr. Washington he was going to buy him a house and maybe a couple of acres on Johnson Lake. Mr. Washington isn't sure where Johnson Lake is, exactly, and it doesn't matter now, anyway.

He still works at the house. Keeps the place cleaned up, looks after the grounds. Mr. Brown always said he wanted 430 Douglas Drive to be another Graceland, a shrine to the Godfather of Soul. But he's been dead sixteen months now, and Mr. Washington is one of very few people allowed past the gate without a judge's permission.

Mr. Brown came to him there once, too. About a week after he died, Mr. Washington saw him as he came up the driveway. He was sitting on the front porch, his hands folded in his lap, and Mr. Washington thought, Mr. Brown, get yourself back in the house. You got the pneumonia.

The driveway sloped down toward the pond, and Mr. Washington lost sight of the house at the bottom of the hill. He climbed the rise on the other side, and Mr. Brown was still there. Then he started to fade, and when Mr. Washington got to the house, it was empty and he was all alone.

The house is still empty now, and Mr. Brown is in a crypt in his daughter's front yard, lying there like somebody's pet.

sean flynn is a gq correspondent.