Chasing the Scream

by Johann Hari

  Billie brought herself up on the streets of Baltimore, alone, defiant. It was the last city without a sewer system in the United States,115 and she spent her childhood among clouds of stinking smoke116 from all the burning shit. Her cold slum district was known as Pigtown, and many people lived in shacks. Every day, little Billie would wash and clean her great-grandmother117 and listen to stories from her youth, when she had been a slave on a Virginia plantation.

  Billie soon learned there were lots of places she couldn’t go because she was black. One store that sold hot dogs118 would let her in if nobody was looking but gave her hell if she tried to eat inside, in case anybody saw. She knew in her gut this was wrong and had to change, and she made a promise to herself: “I just plain decided one day I wasn’t going to do anything119 or say anything unless I meant it. Not ‘Please, sir.’ Nor ‘Thank you, ma’am.’ Nothing. Unless I meant it. You have to be poor and black to know how many times you can get knocked in the head for trying to do something as simple as that.” This promise would reshape her life—and her attitude toward Harry.

  When she was ten, one of her neighbors—a man in his forties named Wilbert Rich120—turned up and explained that he had been sent by her mother to take Billie to her. He took her to a house and told her to wait. She sat and waited, but her mother didn’t come; as night fell, Billie said she was drowsy. The man offered her a bed. When she lay down on it, he pinned her down and raped her.

  She screamed and clawed at the man121, howling for help, and somebody must have heard, because the police arrived. When they barged in, the officers decided at once what was going on. Billie, they declared, was a whore who had tricked this poor man. She was shut away in a cell for two days. Months later, Wilbert Rich was punished with three months in prison, while Billie was punished with a year in a reform school.122

  The nuns who ran the walled-in, sealed-off punishment center looked at the child and concluded she was bad and needed the firm thwack of discipline. Billie kept spitting their attempts at control right back at them—so they decided they needed to “teach her a lesson.”123 They took her to a room that was empty except for a dead body, slammed the door shut behind her, and left her there overnight. Billie hammered on the doors124 until her hands bled, but nobody came.

  When she escaped—out of the convent, and Baltimore—she was determined to find her mother,125 who was last heard from in Harlem. When she arrived on the bus126 into a freezing winter, she stumbled to the last address she had been given, only to find it was a brothel. Her mother worked there for a pittance and had no way to keep her. Before long, Billie was thrown out, and she was so hungry she could barely breathe without it hurting. There was, Billie came to believe, only one solution. A madam offered her a 50 percent cut127 for having sex with strangers. She was fourteen years old.

  Before long, Billie had her own pimp. He was a violent, cursing thug named Louis McKay, who was going to break her ribs and beat her till she bled. He was also—perhaps more crucially—going to meet Harry Anslinger many years later, and work with him. Within a few years, Billie’s mother was telling her to marry Louis:128 he was, she said, such a nice man.

  Billie was caught prostituting129 by the police, and once again, instead of rescuing her from being pimped and raped, they punished her.130 She was sent to prison on Welfare Island, and once she got out, she started to seek out the hardest and most head-blasting chemicals she could. At first her favorite was White Lightning,131 a toxic brew containing 70-proof alcohol, and as she got older, she tried to stun her grief with harder and harder drugs. One night, a white boy from Dallas132 called Speck showed her how to inject herself with heroin. You just heat up the heroin in a spoon133 and inject it straight into your veins. When Billie wasn’t drunk or high,134 she sank into a black rock of depression and was so shy she could barely speak.135 She would still wake in the night screaming,136 remembering her rape and imprisonment. “I got a habit, and I know it’s no good,”137 she told a friend, “but it’s the one thing that makes me know there’s a person called Billie Holiday. I am Billie Holiday.”

  But then she discovered something else. One day, starving, she walked a dozen blocks in Harlem, asking in every drinking hole if they had any work for her, and she was rejected everywhere. Finally she walked into a place called the Log Cabin and explained she could work as a dancer, but when she tried a few moves, it was obvious she wasn’t good enough. Desperate, she told the owner maybe she could sing. He pointed her toward an old piano man in the corner138 and told her to give him a song. As she sang “Trav’llin’ All Alone,” the customers put down their drinks and listened. By the time she finished her next song,139 “Body and Soul,” there were tears running down their cheeks.

  She sang a moment behind the beat and lived a moment ahead of it. One New Year’s Eve, a sailor saw her being served in a bar and asked: “When did you start serving nigger bitches?” She stabbed a bottle into his face.140 Another time in another bar,141 a group of soldiers and sailors started stubbing out their cigarettes on her mink coat. She handed the mink coat to a friend to hold, picked up a diamond-shaped ashtray, and laid the sailors out flat.

  Yet when it came to the men in her life,142 this impulse to defend herself bled away. Louis McKay graduated from being her pimp to being her “manager” and husband: he stole almost all her money. After her greatest performance at Carnegie Hall,143 he greeted her by punching her so hard in the face she was sent flying. Her story was about to crash into Harry Anslinger’s. He had been, it turned out, watching her very carefully.

  Harry had heard whispers144 that this rising black star was using heroin, so he assigned an agent named Jimmy Fletcher to track her every move. Harry hated to hire black agents, but if he sent white guys into Harlem145 and Baltimore, they stood out straight away. Jimmy Fletcher was the answer. His job was to bust his own people, but Anslinger was insistent that no black man in his Bureau could ever become a white man’s boss. Jimmy was allowed through the door at the Bureau, but never up the stairs. He was and would remain an “archive man”146—a street agent whose job was to figure out who was selling, who was supplying, and who should be busted. He would carry large amounts of drugs with him, and he was allowed to deal drugs himself so he could gain the confidence of the people he was secretly plotting to arrest.

  Many agents in this position would shoot heroin with their clients,147 to “prove” they weren’t cops. We don’t know whether Jimmy joined in, but we do know he had no pity for addicts: “I never knew a victim,”148 he said. “You victimize yourself by becoming a junkie.”

  He first saw Billie in her brother-in-law’s apartment,149 where she was drinking enough booze to stun a horse and hoovering up vast quantities of cocaine. The next time he saw her, it was in a brothel in Harlem, doing exactly the same. Billie’s greatest talent, after singing, was swearing150—if she called you a “motherfucker,”151 it was a great compliment. We don’t know the first time Billie called Jimmy a motherfucker, but she soon spotted this man who was hanging around, watching her, and she grew to like him.

  When Jimmy was sent to raid her, he knocked at the door pretending he had a telegram to deliver. Her biographer Julia Blackburn studied the only remaining interview with Jimmy Fletcher—now lost by the archives handling it—and she wrote about what he remembered in detail.

  “Stick it under the door!” she yelled.

  “It’s too big to go under the door!” he snapped back.

  She let him in. She was alone. Jimmy felt uncomfortable.

  “Billie, why don’t you make a short case of this and, if you’ve got anything, why don’t you turn it over to us?” he asked. “Then we won’t be searching around, pulling out your clothes and everything. So why don’t you do that?”152 But Jimmy’s partner arrived and sent for a policewoman to conduct a body search.

  “You don’t have to do that. I’ll strip,” Billie said. “All I want to say is—will you search me and let me go? All that policewoman is going to do is look up my puss
y.”

  She stripped and stood there, and then she pissed in front of them, defying them to watch.

  When Billie sang “Loverman, where can you be?”153 she wasn’t crying for a man—she was crying for heroin. But when she found out her friends in the jazz world were using the same drug, she begged them to stop.154 Never imitate me, she cried. Never do this.

  She kept trying to quit. She would get her friends to shut her away in their houses for days on end while she went through withdrawal. As she ran back to her dealers, she cursed herself as “No Guts Holiday.”155 Why couldn’t she stop? “It’s tough enough coming off156 when you’ve got somebody who loves you and trusts you and believes in you,” she wrote. “I didn’t have anybody.” Actually, she said, that’s not quite right. She had Anslinger’s agents, “betting their time, their shoe leather, and their money that they would get me. Nobody can live like that.”

  The morning he first raided her, Jimmy took Billie to one side and promised to talk to Anslinger personally for her. “I don’t want you to lose your job,”157 he said.

  Not long after, he ran into her in a bar158 and they talked for hours, with her pet Chihuahua, Moochy, by her side. Then, one night, at Club Ebony, they ended up dancing together—Billie Holiday and Anslinger’s agent, swaying together to the music.

  “And I had so many close conversations with her, about so many things,” he would remember years later. “She was the type who would make anyone sympathetic because she was the loving type.”159 The man Anslinger sent to track160 and bust Billie Holiday had, it seems, fallen in love with her. Confronted with a real addict, up close, the hatred fell away.

  But Anslinger was going to be given a break on Billie, one he got nowhere else in the jazz world. Billie had got used to turning up at gigs so badly beaten by Louis McKay they had to tape up her ribs161 before pushing her onstage. She was too afraid to go to the police—but finally she was brave enough to cut him off.

  “How come I got to take this from this bitch here? This low class bitch?” McKay raged. “If I got a whore, I got some money from her or I don’t have nothing to do with the bitch. I don’t want no cunt.”162 He had heard that Harry Anslinger wanted information on her, and he was intrigued. “She’s been getting away with too much shit,” MacKay said, adding he wanted “Holiday’s ass in the gutter in the East River.” That, it seems, was the clincher. “I got enough to finish her off,” he had pledged. “I’m going to do her up so goddam bad she going to remember as long as she live.” He traveled to D.C. to see Harry,163 and he agreed to set her up.

  When Billie was busted again, she was put on trial.164 She stood before the court looking pale and stunned. “It was called ‘The United States of America versus Billie Holiday,’ ”165 she said, “and that’s just the way it felt.” She refused to weep on the stand.166 She told the judge she didn’t want any sympathy. She just wanted to be sent to a hospital so she could kick the drugs and get well. Please, she said to the judge, “I want the cure.”167

  She was sentenced instead to a year in a West Virginia prison,168 where she was forced to go cold turkey and work during the days in a pigsty,169 among other places. In all her time behind bars, she did not sing a note.170 Years later, when her autobiography was published, Billie tracked Jimmy Fletcher down171 and sent him a signed copy. She had written inside it: “Most federal agents are nice people.172 They’ve got a dirty job to do and they have to do it. Some of the nicer ones have feelings enough to hate themselves sometime for what they have to do . . . Maybe they would have been kinder to me if they’d been nasty; then I wouldn’t have trusted them enough to believe what they told me.” She was right: Jimmy never stopped feeling guilty for what he’d done to Lady Day. “Billie ‘paid her debt’ to society,”173 one of her friends wrote, “but society never paid its debt to her.”

  Now, as a former convict, she was stripped of her cabaret performer’s license, on the grounds that listening to her might harm the morals of the public. This meant she wasn’t allowed to sing anywhere174 that alcohol was served—which included all the jazz clubs in the United States.

  “How do you best act cruelly?” her friend Yolande Bavan asked me in 2013. “It’s to take something that’s the dearest thing to that person away from them.” Billie had been able to survive everything—but this? “You despair because you have no control. You can’t do the thing that is a passion and that you made your livelihood at, and that has brought joy to people all over the world,” Bavan says. Billie was finally silenced. She had no money to look after herself or to eat properly. She couldn’t even rent an apartment in her own name.

  One night, Billie fell over drunk, and her friend Greer Johnson found her sobbing on the floor.

  “Baby, fuck it! Honest to Christ, I’m never going to sing again no more.”

  “What the hell do you think you can do if you don’t sing?” Greer asked, according to Julia Blackburn.

  “I don’t give a fuck!”

  “Fine! And then what will you do, Billie?”

  She muttered: “I’ll sing again.”

  “You’re damn right you will!”175

  Another of her friends kept telling her she could save enough money to retire to a house with a garden where she could have babies. “Do you think I can? Do you think I can do it?”176 she asked incredulously. She dreamed of getting a big farm177 somewhere and turning it into a home for orphaned children, where she’d run the kitchen herself. Sometimes, she would go to visit her baby godson, Bevan Dufty, at his family’s apartment on Ninety-Fourth Street, and she would suckle him. Although she had no milk, it seemed to reassure her. “Bitch, this is my baby,” she would tell his mother, laughing.

  The only other way she could soothe herself was by returning to childhood habits of her own. She would lie in bed all day reading Superman comics and chuckling. One day, she went out with a teenage friend to Central Park.178 They fed LSD to the horses and then took a ride. The cabbie was puzzled: Why wouldn’t the horses follow their normal route? Billie cackled with laughter from her carriage.

  But when she was forced to interact with people, she was becoming more and more paranoid. If Jimmy Fletcher had been one of Them, who else was? She believed—correctly, it turns out—that some of the people around her were informing on her to Anslinger’s army. “You didn’t know who to trust,” her friend Yolande Bavan told me. “So-called friends—were they friends? What were they?” Everywhere she went, there were agents asking about her,179 demanding details.

  She began to push away even her few remaining friends,180 because she was terrified the police would plant drugs on them, too—and that was the last thing she wanted for the people she loved.

  One day, Harry Anslinger was told that there were also white women, just as famous as Billie, who had drug problems—but he responded to them rather differently. He called Judy Garland, another heroin addict, in to see him. They had a friendly chat,181 in which he advised her to take longer vacations between pictures, and he wrote to her studio,182 assuring them she didn’t have a drug problem at all. When he discovered that a Washington society hostess he knew183—“a beautiful, gracious lady,” he noted—had an illegal drug addiction, he explained he couldn’t possibly arrest her because “it would destroy . . . the unblemished reputation of one of the nation’s most honored families.” He helped her to wean herself off her addiction slowly, without the law becoming involved.

  As I sat in his archives, reading over the piles of fading papers that survive from the launch of the drug war, there was one thing I found hardest to grasp at first.

  The arguments we hear today for the drug war are that we must protect teenagers from drugs, and prevent addiction in general. We assume, looking back, that these were the reasons this war was launched in the first place. But they were not. They crop up only occasionally, as asides. The main reason given for banning drugs184—the reason obsessing the men who launched this war—was that the blacks, Mexicans, and Chinese were using these chemicals, forget
ting their place, and menacing white people.

  It took me a while to see that the contrast between the racism directed at Billie and the compassion offered to addicted white stars like Judy Garland was not some weird misfiring of the drug war—it was part of the point.185

  Harry told the public that “the increase [in drug addiction] is practically 100 percent among Negro people,”186 which he stressed was terrifying because already “the Negro population . . . accounts for 10 percent of the total population, but 60 percent of the addicts.”187 He could wage the drug war—he could do what he did—only because he was responding to a fear in the American people. You can be a great surfer, but you still need a great wave. Harry’s wave came in the form of a race panic.

  In the run-up to the passing of the Harrison Act, the New York Times ran a story typical of the time. The headline was: NEGRO COCAINE “FIENDS” NEW SOUTHERN MENACE188. It described a North Carolina police chief who “was informed that a hitherto inoffensive negro, with whom he was well-acquainted, was ‘running amuck’ in a cocaine frenzy [and] had attempted to stab a storekeeper . . . Knowing he must kill this man or be killed himself, the Chief drew his revolver, placed the muzzle over the negro’s heart, and fired—‘intending to kill him right quick,’ as the officer tells it, but the shot did not even stagger the man.” Cocaine was, it was widely claimed in the press at this time, turning blacks into superhuman hulks who could take bullets to the heart without flinching. It was the official reason why the police across the South increased the caliber of their guns.189

  One medical expert put it bluntly: “The cocaine nigger,”190 he warned, “sure is hard to kill.”

  Many white Americans did not want to accept that black Americans might be rebelling because they had lives like Billie Holiday’s—locked into Pigtowns and banned from developing their talents. It was more comforting to believe that a white powder was the cause of black anger, and that getting rid of the white powder would render black Americans docile and on their knees once again. (The history of this would be traced years later in Michelle Alexander’s remarkable book The New Jim Crow.)