James Brown was more than the Godfather of Soul to Yamma Brown. He was her dad. And her book, Cold Sweat: My Father James Brown and Me (Chicago Review Press, $24.95), due out in September, sheds light on growing up as the daughter of the man who made it cool to be “black and proud” and how it still impacts her life today.
Far from sugarcoating, Brown, who has a PhD in Pharmacy from Georgia’s Mercer University, delves deep. “[It’s] about the lessons that I learned from him. I grew up with him but I didn’t, and there was a reason for that,” she explains. “My mother was physically abused by him and that’s why they divorced. And I ended up getting into a marriage where I was verbally and physically abused.”
Brown says she grapples with “how somebody even as ‘educated’ as myself could get involved in something that I said, while growing up, I would never allow to happen to me. I saw my mom being abused. That wasn’t something you wanted to see. You still love both of your parents, but it’s difficult growing up like that.”
The effects were so devastating that even as the world watched the drama and fallout of her father’s unexpected death on Christmas Day 2006, especially the difficulties in actually laying his body to rest, Brown was enduring her own personal hell. “I literally had to bury my dad when my cornea [was] slashed two days before [during] a physical altercation with my husband,” the longtime Atlanta resident reveals. “I had bruises up and down my body while I was burying my father.”
After the funeral, her life continued to spiral out of control. “It was a nightmare. I divorced at the end of 2007 and then [my ex-husband] was murdered. Two weeks later, I found out I had Lupus. It was tough.”
Brown, along with her sister and mother, consulted on Get on Up—the long-awaited biopic about her dad, starring Chadwick Boseman (42) out in August. “There is no way that anybody could have planned this,” she says of the timing of both the film and her book, which may be controversial for some. “It’s my memoir about it all [from how] I grew up to where I am now,” she says. “It’s going to be an eye-opener for some people that [being the child of a celebrity] is not always what you think it is.”