Freddie said that his mother had two daughters as well as him. There was Goldie, who became a singer and performed at the Diamond Subway in Baltimore for a while, but ‘she didn’t get nowhere’. And there was Pearl, who was the youngest. Miss Vi did day-work as a maid, but the money was ‘so measly’ that she needed to take in roomers as well.
Miss Vi had a wind-up Victrola or ‘graffaphone’, as well as an ‘old-time roll piano’ in the downstairs room, and Freddie remembered how Billie would ‘sing along and could pick up a tune just like that’, and on the tape you can hear him snapping his fingers.
You can see that serious child standing transfixed by the miracle of the player-piano, watching as the black-and-white keys come alive and pour out their wild music with no hands touching them. You can see her captivated by the defiant energy in the voice of a great female blues singer like Bessie Smith, who tells the world that she is as blue as blue can be, because her man has a heart like a rock thrown in the sea. Even then, Freddie said, it was the sad songs that Billie liked best.
All the roomers had the use of the one kitchen and on Sunday mornings everybody would gather there and ‘It would be tripe fried in batter and eggs and hot biscuits and bacon and a dish of molasses on the side.’ But it seems that Miss Sadie was never around for those Sundays. ‘She used to make trips to New York over the weekend and she’d be back for Monday mornings, so she must have had a friend there.’
Freddie thought that Billie and her mother kept the room in Bond Street for a year and a half, but ‘Sadie wanted her own home’ and he remembered her telling his mother that she had found ‘this little home on the Point and that she was moving.
‘My mother said, “Freddie can help you”, and she gave me this money for a harness team. I think I paid two and a half dollars for a horse and a wagon.’ The moving was very easy because there was nothing more than the bedroom suite and some chairs and they all fitted in a single load.
The new house was on Dallas and Caroline, right in the heart of the red-light district and very near to Ethel Moore’s whorehouse. Freddie described it as a ‘two-storey row-house’ with three rooms downstairs and two rooms up. ‘There was a bathtub in the kitchen and everything was in place … Miss Sadie was a very clean lady.’
Freddie would visit Sadie and her daughter once or twice a week. They lived right at the end of town in a district they called Bottom of the Point, or just the Bottom, where ‘you could get everything’ and ‘you had to fight your way to get down there’. If he came on a Sunday he’d stay for dinner.
He described Sadie as a ‘short little lady and a very pretty lady … with a beautiful set of chestnut hair’. Billie was always dressed ‘very plain’, in gingham cloth skirts and blouses that her mother had made up for her. She wore her hair pulled straight back from her head and cut in a bob.
And then Freddie saw no more of Billie and her mother. When Linda Kuehl asked him if Billie was working at Alice Dean’s whorehouse, he said he ‘got lost with that part of her life’. The next thing he knew was that she had set out for Harlem to join her mother there. He thought Harlem must have been even tougher than the Point in Baltimore, because it was more of ‘a dog eats dog place where you had to struggle, you had to squeeze more, and people had their thing and didn’t help one another’.
So Freddie’s friend disappeared into the big city and for years he heard nothing more of her. He had been buying records by a singer called Billie Holiday† and ‘having a ball with’ em’, but the name ‘threw him off’ and he didn’t realise this was ‘the same girl he came up with’, whom he had always known as Eleanor Gough or Eleanor Fagan.
And then one day, sometime in the late 1930s, Miss Sadie came to tell Freddie’s mother that Billie was in town over at the Royal and that they all must go and listen to her. ‘It shocked me,’ said Freddie. ‘My mother asked, “You know who Billie is? – Eleanor!” ’
So there she was with a three-piece band at the Royal. She looked very stylish and wore her hair pulled back in a tight bun with an orchid pinned on the side, just like that early photograph. But Freddie was not so impressed by her when she sang, because ‘She was more of a stand-still type. She wasn’t that exciting type. She just stood still … I couldn’t see her as a star coming up.’
She sang from about twelve till close-up and then she went on to the Savoy Grill, where they had ‘turned it all out for her and they had tablecloths and everything’. There was a chorus girl called Evelyn Randolph, who was a friend of Billie’s in New York, and she told Freddie to come and join the party.
As soon as Billie saw him she called out, ‘Freddie, hey, Freddie!’
He said, ‘Oh, girl, you’re fabulous.’
And she said, ‘Sit down and shut up!’ and he was given a seat right next to her and her mother.
The last time Freddie saw Billie was in 1948. She had come to Baltimore with Count Basie and his band. In the early days she had been smoking grass pretty hard, but now she had got into ‘this other bag and … she was going for the hard thing’, which surprised him because he never thought she would. Freddie was particularly shocked because she was so negligent. ‘She’d have grass on her dresser and some powder over there and people could come in and see it.’
He remembered how he called her one evening and she was in bed, but she told him to come on up anyway. When he got to her room he saw this powder and she said, ‘D’you want some horse?’ and he said, ‘Oh, no! I never could do anything but smoke grass.’
But in other ways Billie never changed, ‘no matter how much of a star she was. She’d go down in the slums, in the bars, and she’d have her mink, you know, and she’d just throw it on the chair and sit down with a little booze and buy for everyone else. And say “bitch” and “motherfucker” and “what you doin’ now?” And she would tell jokes in different voices … And there’d be little kids, dirty and all, and she’d grab ’em in her arms and not care, and hold ’em and they’d have molasses on ’em, and she wouldn’t care.’
* Not Freddie Green the guitarist, ‘the quiet guy’ who played with Billie in the Count Basie band and with whom Baltimore Freddie said she had ‘something going for a while’, although he couldn’t ‘put them together’.
† Billie’s first recording, with ‘Riffin’ the Scotch’ on one side and ‘Your Mother’s Son-in-Law’ on the other, was issued in 1933. In 1935 she made the first of a number of recordings for Columbia, with Teddy Wilson and his orchestra.
FIVE
Christine Scott
‘She never bothered with nobody.’
On 5 January 1925, the nine-year-old Billie Holiday was brought before the magistrate at the Juvenile Court in Baltimore. Her mother Sadie was there in court as a witness, along with the probation officer who had reported Billie to the authorities for playing truant. She was described as being ‘a minor without proper care and guardianship’ and was sentenced to spend a year at the local reform school, the House of Good Shepherd for Colored Girls.
The school was a big, ugly, six-storey warehouse on Franklin Street and Calverton Road in West Baltimore. It was run by a dozen or so nuns who belonged to an order called the Little Sisters of the Poor. They were provided with an annual income of $3,000 by the State of Maryland, but that was not nearly enough for them to feed and clothe themselves, let alone a shifting population of about a hundred girls who were mostly between the ages of fourteen and eighteen.
People who remembered the House of Good Shepherd from that time said it was an awful place, very bleak and grim. When Linda Kuehl asked some of the sisters to tell her what it had been like to live there, they did not want to speak about it; they were simply glad the school had been moved to a new location and that conditions had improved. This was except for one very old and senile sister, who kept saying over and over again that it had been ‘Heavenly! Heavenly!’
The sisters supplemented the school’s income by taking in washing. The girls helped to run the laundry and also did sewing, crocheting
and knitting as well as their household duties. There were lessons in reading and writing for the younger ones and in organ playing for anyone who was interested. The days were regimented by prayers in the chapel.
All the girls had their hair cut short. In the summer they wore blue capes and blue dresses with pleated or gathered sleeves and white cuffs and collars. In the winter they wore the same capes, with black skirts and white blouses. The sisters wore a similar uniform.
Linda Kuehl spoke to two women who had been sent to the House of Good Shepherd. One of them was Billie’s childhood friend Mary ‘Pony’ Kane, who spent a few weeks there in around 1929, just after Billie had left for New York. Pony was then moved on to the training school, ‘where they put the real bad girls’. That was followed by a term in the local jail, which was where she learnt to steal and ‘do other things’.
Pony Kane said that Sister Margaret, the Mother Superior, was a mean woman who would hit you and make you stand on one foot in the corner if you didn’t do what you were told. And every time you used swearwords she’d hit you across the fingers with a ruler. But it was the hierarchy of bullying among the inmates that she hated most, especially since all the sisters seemed to know what was happening, but turned a blind eye.
Pony said, ‘Some of the girls were there five to ten years and some of them were tough. Girls used to get together and they used to fuck you, if they seen you and liked you. The older girls would fuck the younger girls, if they liked ’em. They would sneak ’em candy and talk to ’em … And if a girl didn’t come across with ’em, they would catch ’em in bed and nobody would holler and nobody would tell on nobody … Some of the girls would cry … a lot of ’em would tell their parents about it and a lot of ’em wouldn’t tell nobody.’
Pony Kane mentioned one inmate who had ‘been there so long’. She must have been thinking of Christine Scott, whom Linda Kuehl interviewed on 4 November 1971. Christine had been born in the 1890s and sent to the House when she was still very young. I have no idea why; maybe she simply lost all her family and there was nowhere else for her to go. Whatever the reason, she was still an inmate when Billie arrived in 1925 and she stayed on throughout the years that followed until she was eventually moved to an old people’s home outside Baltimore, which was also run by the Little Sisters of the Poor.
Linda Kuehl was impressed by Christine. She said she was ‘remarkably sharp and her memory was astounding’; she was shown to be correct in all the information that could later be proved. Christine was, however, convinced that Billie was about fourteen years old when she first arrived at the House, and she failed to mention that Billie was there a second time, from 24 December 1926 until 2 February 1927.*
Christine Scott explained that she had never been an affectionate person. She didn’t like hugging or kissing; in fact she didn’t like to be touched at all. ‘Everybody knew it,’ she said, ‘because I could never let the children take hold of my hand. I was awfully touchy. That’s the truth. I am strange. Always was … I had nothing to do with nobody. I didn’t want to be bothered with people. You get into trouble when you have lots of friends flocking around.’
When she was asked about her first meeting with Billie, she said she remembered how she was sitting on her own in the chapel one Monday morning, when the chaplain beckoned her over. He had a very shy young girl with him, whom he said was called Madge.† Christine had hardly noticed the girl before and had never said more than two words to her, but now she looked at her for the first time. ‘She was a very nice-looking brown-skinned girl. She wasn’t quite as light as I am, but she was light. And she had a nice suit of hair. And her features were even and light. She was as tall as any fourteen-year-old would be and she was right plump.’
The chaplain explained that he wanted to have Madge baptised because he’d had an ‘awful time trying to find out where she came from and where her people came from’. He asked Christine if she would be the girl’s godmother.‡
Something changed in Billie when she learnt she was going to be baptised; while she was being prepared for the ceremony she was no longer so silent and fearful and she told everyone in the House how excited she was. And when the day came, she was dressed like a bride in a white frock with a white veil and she rushed to show all the sisters how pretty she looked. Christine said, ‘She was so happy, poor child, she was grinning from ear to ear – you could almost see her back teeth, and she was just as light as a feather.’
As soon as the baptism and the First Communion that followed were over, the sisters gave Billie a string of rosary beads and her new godmother was told to present her with a prayer book. And Christine said that as long as she stayed in the House, Billie ‘had that prayer book in her hand all the time, so she must have appreciated it’.
But once the brief immersion in the limelight had ended, the little girl withdrew back into her shell. She was clearly frightened of the other girls, but she felt safe with Christine and used to follow her everywhere like a lost puppy, padding after her from room to room and then sitting on the floor at her feet, silent and watchful.
‘She liked me and she didn’t want to be with the girls. She never told me her reason. I didn’t ask her a thing about herself or about her parents and she never told me anything … She very seldom had anything to do with anybody else and she was always down in the dumps … In the classroom she’d go to sit on a chair by herself, and when she went out in the yard she’d go to sit by herself. She never bothered with nobody. She very seldom spoke to anybody … She was almost like a stick … She sewed a lot: overalls, shirts …’
Billie, in the form of a child called Madge, was released back onto the streets of Baltimore on 3 October 1925, three months before she had completed her sentence. This was presumably because her silence and lack of contact with the other inmates were interpreted as good behaviour.§ Christine Scott said she did not know who came to fetch Billie when it was time for her to leave, but she was quite sure it was not her mother Sadie.
Apart from the period between 24 December 1926 and 2 February 1927 that Christine failed to mention, Billie made one final visit to the House, in around 1950. She came because she was planning to go to Europe and needed a copy of her Certificate of Baptism in order to be able to obtain a passport.
She arrived with John Levy, her current boyfriend and manager, and in a flurry of excitement showed him around this place that had been one of her many childhood homes. She led him to the chapel where she had been baptised, to the dormitory where she had slept in a narrow bed, to the room where she had kept herself busy sewing shirts and overalls, to the kitchen where she had eaten her solitary meals and to the yard where she had sat in silence, ‘almost like a stick’. One of the sisters looked at John Levy’s pale skin and smooth black hair and asked him if he was Jewish. ‘Half-Negro and half-Jew,’ he replied.‖
Then Billie agreed to sing a song for the girls. Perhaps one of the sisters was willing to accompany her on the piano, or she had a pianist with her, or she sang without any music at all. The song she chose for the occasion was ‘My Man’. The girls squealed with delight, while the sisters were appalled.
He’s not much on looks
He’s no hero out of books
But I love him.
Yes, I love him.
Two or three girls
Has he
That he likes as well as me,
But I love him.
I don’t know why I should,
He isn’t true
He beats me too.
What can I do?
Christine Scott missed this performance, but she was told about it later. She thought she must have been out in the yard feeding the chickens at the time, and nobody bothered to come and tell her that her famous god-daughter had returned. So she never had a chance to see for herself how the frightened child she knew as Madge had been transformed into such a bold woman, full of laughter and talk, her lips painted as red as blood, her mink coat slippery on her shoulders.
Lind
a Kuehl asked Christine what she thought had happened to Billie and why it had all gone so wrong. Her reply was, ‘She got off track. You see things and you know how it is; how a young girl feels.’
* In the small hours of the morning of 24 December 1926, Sadie discovered her daughter being raped by a neighbour called Wilbert Rich. Billie was bundled off to the House of Good Shepherd as a State Witness and might have languished there for years had not her uncle Charles Fagan paid for a lawyer to fight for her. She was released on the grounds of habeas corpus. At his trial, Rich was found guilty on the count of ‘Carnal Knowledge of 14–16-year-old’ (there were six counts against him in total), in spite of the fact that Billie was only eleven at the time and both the court and the House of Good Shepherd held her correct date of birth (Nicholson, pp. 26–7).
† All the girls were given new names when they arrived. In theory this was to protect their identities, although it seems more like a way of making them forget who they were. Billie (whose name at the time was still Eleanor) was called Madge.
‡ This first baptism was on 19 March 1925 and Billie’s place of birth was given as Philadelphia. For some mysterious reason she was given a further ‘conditional baptism’ on 14 August 1925, when her birthplace had become Baltimore. When she returned to the House of Good Shepherd on 24 December 1926, she was baptised a third time and again her birthplace had become Philadelphia. The ceremony was performed by a different pastor on each occasion, so perhaps people forgot it had been done before and Billie, as always in such situations, kept silent.
§ In 1994 Stuart Nicholson interviewed one of the sisters from the House of Good Shepherd. He was told that Billie often visited the institution when she came to Baltimore and that Sister Margaret, the Mother Superior mentioned by Pony Kane, ‘retained a great affection for “Madge” ’. Nicholson concluded that ‘in the disciplined environment of the House of Good Shepherd, Eleanor [Billie] found the guidance and security that were missing in her life.’
With Billie Page 3