“This is where I was born and this is home and I love it.
I just want to live.”īut he’s also inspired - the more Bradley sees a racially and politically divided country, the more he wants to get up and sing “God Bless America” and “Good to Be Back Home,” the first two tracks on Changes. Everybody’s tired of all of the hatred and animosity. Why you hating him? Because what his ancestors did?’ If you’re a real person, I don’t care if you blue – I’m going to be your friend. I say, ‘Man, you don’t even know that guy. “A friend of mine said, ‘You see all the white people moving into the neighborhood?’ I said, ‘It’s beautiful.’ They call me an ass-kisser. “Maybe that’s why down in the ‘hood I don’t have too many friends, because I want change,” he says. Knowing he’s a bit of celebrity, friends and neighbors also frequently hit Bradley up for money (he’s often too generous to refuse), or call him out for working with white musicians, having white fans, and welcoming wealthier Caucasian neighbors to his rapidly gentrifying neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. “All I want to do is get me a piece of land someplace where I can say, ‘This is home’ and I got nobody bothering me.” Let them go live their life and leave me alone.” He dreams of buying a small place, maybe out in the country, where he can live quietly. “I told my lawyer, I don’t want to be bothered with none of them. Some of his family wants a financial cut, so he’s thinking of selling. Inez left Bradley her house, where he currently lives with a younger sister, but the property hasn’t given him much joy. She said, ‘Son, I can tell the world now. “She was very sick, and I knew she was leaving. And when her health began to fail in 2013 - just as he was enjoying the success of his second album, Victim of Love - he was despondent. Here’s five cents.'” He became her protector in ways she had never been for him.
Whatever money he earned, from odd jobs around Brooklyn or his 2011 debut album, No Time for Dreaming, he shared with her: “If I had ten cents, I’d say, ‘Here, ma. (Unlike Bradley’s 1977 assault case, she was released a day later.) One of Inez’s stories, which Bradley said he’ll only retell now that she’s passed on, was particularly difficult for him to hear, but gave him a better understanding of her character: Once, the father of one of Bradley’s siblings physically abused her after a dispute over rent money, and she ended up shooting at him in self-defense. “She said, ‘Son, I know you got a whole lot of force against me, but you don’t know what I had to go through,'” he says. Eventually, Inez took a Greyhound to California and asked Bradley to come home so they could get to know each other. He left New York at 16, joining the Job Corps to work as a cook around the country. That same year, fed up with the family’s strife and poverty, he ran away, usually living on the subway. At 14, he saw James Brown at the Apollo in Harlem, and would go home and practice the Godfather’s moves using a broomstick as a microphone. At 8, he moved to Brooklyn to live with his mother and his other half-siblings. When Bradley was less than a year old, Inez left him with her mother in Florida. He’s relaxing on a black leather couch in his manager’s New York City office before his first performance on the Late Show With Stephen Colbert, fresh off a few weeks in Europe playing to sold-out crowds and doing multiple interviews.Īs Bradley’s dark eyes well up, it’s easy to think that the once-rocky relationship between mother and son is replaying in his mind. “I want to sit in my own sorrow, cry it out, talk to God, and say, ‘Give me strength, wisdom,'” he says of his grieving process. The 67-year-old singer, also known as the “Screaming Eagle of Soul,” would rather carry all of that pain alone and try to heal some of yours. And especially not for the 2014 death of his mother, Inez, who became his closest friend after decades of estrangement. Not for the late-in-life success that’s caused select family members and friends to peg him as some sort of racial traitor, a panderer to white people. Not for the loss of his brother, Joseph, who was shot and killed by one of Charles’ nephews. Not for the 30 days he spent in a California jail, held for assault with a deadly weapon after he used a knife in self-defense against a white attacker. Not for the years he spent homeless in New York City, or hitchhiking across the country looking for a cooking job and the occasional singing gig.
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