With Billie

by Julia Blackburn

  Pony said that the ‘rich guys who came around the neighbourhood looking for sport’ were white men mostly, simply because ‘Very few coloured men ever had the money … Shit, there weren’t no money in those days. A girl would make a dollar a trick, sometimes a quarter. She’d go to bed all night with a man for two or three dollars.’

  A man would go upstairs with a girl, to the blue bedroom or the white, and he would give her the ‘few pennies he was going to give her’. But what she wanted was his wallet, especially if she had seen that he had a ‘big roll and good bills of money in it’. If he left his trousers folded over the chair by the bed, then it was easy, and Alice Dean or someone else could creep in softly, remove the wallet, empty it and return it to its pocket. But if he kept his trousers on, it was more difficult. Pony was asked in the interview how it was done then, and on the tape you can hear her swivelling her chair round with a noisy squeak as she tells the man called Lenny to stand in front of her so that she can demonstrate the technique.

  ‘OK. So he’s going to trade with me. When we lay down I have to put my hands on him, you understand. But my hand is working on his wallet. On the bed. His pants are down.’

  Again she laughs her big fat laugh and at that moment you can hear a child calling for her and she tells him to help himself to a biscuit from the biscuit tin.

  Pony wasn’t going with men then; that came later, after she had been released from prison. But Billie was much quicker. She learnt the trade from working in the house and soon she was ‘ready to catch tricks in there too’. But as Pony said, ‘She wasn’t doing anything unusual. She did just like all the rest of ’em … Her friends were all doing that … She’d get a pair of stockings, wash ’em out and put ’em on half-dry and go out. She didn’t have too much of clothes or nothing … She wasn’t making money … She was getting a meal, missing a meal getting a trick or two … She wanted to be around where the happenin’s was, round this way, down this corner, out this way.’

  Billie already had a lot of men. ‘She was a tall girl, shaped pretty nice. She was liked by a whole lot of boys, but she used to call them country boys; they were working fellas and she would get the money and she wouldn’t have no time for them … Hustling men liked her. They would come around and take her for nights out. She didn’t have no time for the others.’

  Billie liked men who ‘dressed nice’: leather nob shoes with wing toes in brown or black or a wine colour; grey pinstriped suits; caps from that shop called Matterburg’s. She liked a very ‘pretty-skinned’ boy called Dee Dee who worked in the packing house, but she found him too much of a country boy and anyway he had another girl. She liked Willie Diggs, who made a lot of money and blowed it, and Charlie Diggs who ran a poolroom, and Douglas Crawly who was young and had women take care of him. As Pony said, ‘She wanted who she wanted and they mostly had someone else.’

  At first the other women were resentful of Billie, because she was the youngest of them all and tall and light-complexioned and well-built, and because she could sing. They used to beat her up, until she learnt to ‘get in with them and get rough too’. When Linda Kuehl thought this was the moment to ask if Billie ‘went for women’, Pony replied, ‘There used to be some women around there like that, but she wasn’t with them … Most girls I know in their youth do that. The average woman would go to bed with another woman – that’s just for kicks. Billie always dug them guys.’a

  All the men were keen to hear Billie sing. ‘She used to sing in nightclubs and maybe make two or three dollars a night. She’d be singing “Stormy Weather” and “Stardust” and all those popular tunes. She sang fast and slow numbers. There used to be an after-hours place called Pitts on Caroline Street, where a man would play piano and everybody would pile in there at nights and she would be the big attraction … Everybody would get her on Blue Monday for the singing and they’d be drinking whisky and balling, and she would sing and booze and dance.’ Pony added, ‘She’d sing like it hurt her, like it did her good to sing.’

  Billie was drinking bootleg whisky during that time, usually a corn whisky called White Lightning. ‘She’d be feeling good and high and drunk and she’d go up to a man and say, “Kiss my ass, motherfucker!”, right in his face, in front of all his friends.’ Pony explained that it was ‘a natural thing for a woman to cuss, you’d pick it up right off the street … but they didn’t mostly say it to their men because if they said it to their men they knew they was going to get their behinds beat.b Billie’d say it to anybody, she didn’t have no special ones.’ Some of the men would ignore her and let it slide, but others would get angry and they’d chase her down the street while she ran ahead, still taunting them. ‘ “Come on cocksucker, suck my ass! Suck my ass!” She’d be about half a block from them and then they would beat her up. She’d holler. She wouldn’t say it when they were beating her.’

  Pony remembered how Billie often came back to Miss Lou’s house in the early morning with bruises all over her face, ‘looking like she’d been put through the mill’. But the house was dark and she’d be all made-up and so you wouldn’t notice much, and ‘She wouldn’t tell; no, she wouldn’t tell.’

  But then Miss Lou got sicker and could no longer cope with this girl who was only thirteen years old, but who looked like a grown woman and was getting around so fast. Miss Lou didn’t know what Billie was doing, but people began telling stories about how she was drinking bootleg whisky and fighting and causing trouble. And so she sent for Miss Sadie in New York and told her she must take her daughter away.

  Miss Sadie turned up and stayed for a while at Durham Street and, when she left, she had arranged for Billie to come and join her in Harlem. I wonder if she explained that she was living and working in a whorehouse run by Miss Florence Williams at 151 West 140th Street; a place where a wild and good-looking young girl could earn plenty of money. Or at least more than she was earning in Baltimore.

  Pony saw Billie on the day of her departure. She said she had chosen to wear a white voile dress, something like her Communion dress perhaps, but with a shiny red belt pulled tight around her waist. You see her there, waiting for the train that would carry her to a strange new city, where she could find other beds in which to sleep, and other bars and whorehouses and after-hours joints where she could be invited to sing and drink and smoke and have a party. You see her there, a young girl dressed all in white with a little gold cross hanging round her neck, and perhaps she has the rosary beads and the prayer book which the Sisters of the Poor gave her, tucked neatly into her suitcase, among the silk slips and panties.

  * Pony said, ‘The house is still there, but now there are only white people. It was all coloured then.’ Billie arrived in October 1926 when she was first released from the House of Good Shepherd for Colored Girls.

  † Pony said that ‘Miss Sadie would sometimes go [to the Catholic church of St Michael] with Miss Butler and they would sit in the back, those two.’

  ‡ Linda Kuehl asked if they perhaps saw any films by Billie’s namesake, Billie Dove, but Pony didn’t think so. ‘Westerns were popular … Frankenstein,’ she said.

  § As Farah Jasmine Griffin explains in her book on Billie, If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery (2001), such hats were the prostitutes’ trademark.

  ‖ This was more than Pony might make from scrubbing steps. ‘I’d go up and down Baltimore Street scrubbing steps and people’s houses. Up and down Pratt Street where Jewish people lived. Get ten cents or fifteen cents for doing a group of steps … Sometimes I’d make three, four, five dollars a week, a bad week was two dollars.’

  a Again Donald Clarke in Wishing on the Moon quotes this very differently, and has Pony saying that she thought that ‘Billie went with women …’ (p. 27).

  b Linda Kuehl asked if Billie ‘liked being beaten up’, but Pony was quite evasive. ‘She’d get slapped around a lot. She must have liked it, though she wouldn’t say much about it. She liked the guys.’ Charlie Ray, who was also interviewed in Baltimore in October 1971,
said that when Billie went around with a ‘hustler type’ called Calvin Atkins, ‘She used to like to wear his shoes, just to come down and go to the store. He was always saying, “Don’t wear my shoes!” but she’d wear them anyway. And one day he caught her coming from the store with a pair of his shoes on, so he smacked her on the side of the head and said, “Goddamn it! Didn’t I tell you not to wear my goddamn shoes!” And she haul-assed back inside and took off them shoes.’

  EIGHT

  Wee Wee Hill

  ‘I was her stepfather.’

  Linda Kuehl went to interview Wee Wee Hill at his home in Baltimore, a ‘renovated, pretty, brick row-house, on a wide southern boulevard on the Point’. She obviously liked him and described him as being ‘still youthful, handsome and charming’. His wife Viola, ‘a small chunky woman’, was there throughout the interview, but she kept silent apart from occasionally muttering, ‘I don’t know nothing about no Billie Holiday!’

  Wee Wee was twenty-three years old when he first ‘went with’ Billie’s mother Sadie. She was thirty-four at the time, although to him she didn’t seem like an older woman. He described her as a ‘nice-looking, brown-skinned person … with beautiful pitch-black hair’, and said it was obvious she took after her father, Charles Fagan, who was ‘part Indian and real light’.

  According to Wee Wee, Charles Fagan loved both his daughter Sadie and his granddaughter Billie; in fact he was ‘crazy about them’ and would often come down from North-West Baltimore to visit them when they were living in Durham Street.*

  Wee Wee thought he must have started going with Sadie in around 1924, or it could have been later – 1927 perhaps, or even 1928. He said they were together for about four years. He first met her when she was living on Spring Street and then she moved in with him to the house at 217 Durham Street. His mother, Miss Lou Hill, was living next door in number 219.

  Looking back through the tunnel of the years, Wee Wee admitted that in those days he was often a very bad man who couldn’t be satisfied with one woman. He gambled and ran around. Of course he knew that Sadie had a lot of trouble with her daughter; but what he remembered, or at least what he wanted to remember, was a time when everyone was good and kind and loving and they were all part of one big happy family. Billie and her mother were ‘real close’ and Sadie would ‘do anything in the world’ for Billie. He said nothing about Billie being sent to the House of Good Shepherd, or of the occasion when he and Sadie came home in the early hours of Christmas Eve and discovered her being raped by a neighbour.

  Wee Wee talked about the house at 217 Durham Street as if he and Billie and Sadie had lived there together. He said Billie was going to school, and then she’d come home and help to keep the house clean. He said even then she had a nice voice and he used to hear her singing around the house. Maybe she’d be upstairs doing the cleaning, or in the bathroom, and he’d hear her.

  Sadie didn’t have a bad temper, but she’d get angry with him because of the way he was running around. He said that one time she caught him in a good-time house on Bond Street. She couldn’t go into the building because ‘the people there was white’, but she rapped on the door and he looked out of the window and saw her. He was afraid to go down because Sadie was carrying a gun, which surprised him because he ‘didn’t know she cared that much’. When he finally got home that night, Sadie was waiting for him. She hit him with a wooden cigarette stand and cut his wrist and arms. She was cursing him, but still he wouldn’t fight her, because he knew he was in the wrong. He remembered that Billie was there as well, trying to talk to her mother and calm her down.

  Sadie wanted Wee Wee to marry her. She was divorced from Philip Gough by then, so nothing stood in their way. He told her he’d think about it, although the truth was he ‘didn’t have the mind’ to get married.† That was why she packed up and went to New York. She asked Billie to go with her, but Billie said she wanted to stay in Baltimore because she wanted to be with her grandfather. Wee Wee said that even though Billie couldn’t visit her grandfather, she knew he wouldn’t let her down, not if she ever needed anything.

  Wee Wee used to write to Sadie in New York and in the end he did go and join her for a while. At that time she was living in Long Island and working as a maid-cook for a Jewish family named Levy. They managed to get Wee Wee a job as a porter in a cotton store down on Broadway and Times Square, but then he heard that his mother was sick because of the trouble with her leg, so he came back to Baltimore. He never went back to New York because he met Viola and set up house with her and even married her, after his mother had died.

  Anyway, there was the twelve-year-old Billie on her own in Baltimore, fending for herself. Wee Wee said she never needed to work scrubbing steps because he provided her with enough funds to pay for a furnished room on Pratt Street. He ‘used to give her money now and then, when she used to ask me for a couple of dollars’. Her grandfather would also give her money ‘when she went up there to get her dollars from him, or when he came down to see her on weekends’. And on top of that, her father Clarence was ‘good to her’ as well.

  Linda Kuehl was obviously not convinced. She asked Wee Wee, ‘Well, how did she make money?’

  ‘Well, like I said, her grandfather was pretty good to her,’ he replied.

  ‘And she was hustling?’ said Linda Kuehl.

  ‘Yeah, probably so,’ came the answer. ‘Yeah, definitely so. When she hung around with Alice Dean and them girls, that’s what they did. So she had to be doing the same thing …‡ She was on her own for maybe two years. People knew. That’s what gave her a bad name. My mother loved her, and Billie would come and spend a night at Durham Street and eat, and my mother tried to talk to her, about being a good girl. She’d come up to the house, get a meal, listen, but she never give a damn.’

  Wee Wee said that Billie stayed with him and his mother at the house on Durham Street on the night before she set off to join Sadie in New York. Wee Wee took her to the station the following morning. He didn’t mention that she was wearing a white voile dress with a shiny red belt around her waist.

  He heard nothing more about her until the summer of 1932 or 1933, when Sadie contacted him to let him know that Billie was coming to Sparrow’s Beach and was singing with Count Basie’s band, and could Wee Wee ‘spread it around and build her up’.

  ‘A lot of her friends were excited and a lot didn’t believe it,’ he said. ‘They didn’t think it could be her. All of East Baltimore went to Sparrow’s Beach that Sunday to see if she could sing. They said she did good. She was all right. She could sing. She made good … Practically all the guys I knew went that Sunday.’

  After this meeting Billie always tried to see Wee Wee whenever she came back to Baltimore. As he said, ‘I was her stepfather. She knew I wasn’t her father, but she didn’t have no father.’

  The last time they met was when Billie was appearing at the Royal. She had heard that Wee Wee’s wife Viola was sick in bed and so she went to visit her at the house. When she learnt that Wee Wee was in the barber’s shop downstairs she followed him there and sat with him while he got a shave and a haircut. The people in the shop wanted her to sing and Billie said she couldn’t because of her contract with the Royal. She bought drinks for everybody instead.

  * Billie’s first cousin John Fagan gave a very different account of these family relationships, saying that Sadie was treated ‘kind of cool, because of Billie’. It wasn’t the fact of her illegitimacy (he calls it bastardy), but it was because Clarence Holiday, ‘he ain’t from the Point, from the East Side, I don’t know exactly where he’s from. So they gave Sadie a hard time … Billie was disgusted by this … One night we went to the Astoria – me and my father and my sister, and after she finished a set … she came over and she made a remark that, “So far as I’m concerned, all the Fagans are dead!” What she meant was that she carried that feeling over till after she was successful, because her mother had gotten this hard time from her family when she was small.’

  �
�� This is contradicted by Pony Kane, who said that Wee Wee was married to a woman called Mary who moved out of Durham Street when he started with Sadie.

  ‡ When John Fagan was asked the same question, he said, ‘Of course Billie turned tricks. What else are you going to do in those times. You had to make ends meet. You had to survive.’ He also insisted that she was ‘not like a slut. No, no, no, no! She was not staggering from one bar to another. She just lived fast. The difference is this. Some people are good-time people, but they have their principles about themselves. They are out after hours and … they go in and wash their faces and clean up and sleep half the day and go out all night and sleep again. Billie had that pride and respect for herself.’

  NINE

  The Pursuit of Happiness

  In 1776 the Declaration of Independence stated that all men were created equal and every American was promised ‘certain unalienable Rights’. These included the right to ‘the pursuit of happiness’, as if happiness were a wild animal lurking in the woods and bushes of life, and you and everyone else must go out and follow its trail, dogs on the scent, guns at the ready.