With Billie

by Julia Blackburn

  Sadie hated Jimmy Monroe. There was a simple reason for that. ‘Billie was always devoted to her mother, very devoted, and all of a sudden she started directing her affection towards Jimmy. Sadie thought Billie was giving him too much attention and neglecting her attention to her mother.’

  Sadie became obsessed with the idea that Jimmy had ‘pulled Billie with drugs’. She did everything she could to stop the two of them from seeing each other. Finally, Sadie confronted Jimmy and said, ‘I don’t want you coming around here. If Billie’s going to hang out with you, then she’ll have to go someplace else to stay!’

  Ruby Helena was in the apartment on the morning Billie came back, having been out all night without phoning her mother to tell her where she was or what she was doing. When Sadie began to scream at her, Billie produced a sheet of paper that she flung down on the table. It was a marriage certificate. ‘We’re married,’ she said. ‘So can he come in now?’b

  Shortly after this confrontation, Billie moved out with her new husband, leaving her mother abandoned and weeping. The newly-weds began their life together by taking a room on 110th Street, until Billie discovered that Jimmy’s ex-wife Nina was living much too close by. They ‘jumped up’ and moved on. For a while they were somewhere in Maryland, then they rented a room upstairs from the prestigious Symphony Chord Club, which was run by a childhood friend of Jimmy’s. The club was in a basement and next to it was a soundproof music room shaped like a baby grand piano, where all the entertainers used to go to rehearse. Anyway, that didn’t last long.

  Ruby Helena said something changed in Billie’s character around 1942. She was no longer friendly or nice to be with and she’d swear a lot and act strangely with the people she knew. She never saw Billie taking anything, but she was sure she must have started to use hard drugs. ‘Even when she wasn’t on drugs, she still wasn’t herself. She’d be nervous, edgy.’c

  By now Sadie was convinced her daughter was ‘doing something wrong’ and suspected that Jimmy Monroe was turning her on to drugs in order to have financial control over her. After all, Billie was making a lot of money, singing at the Famous Door and at other places on 52nd Street, and yet she was always broke. Sadie wrote a letter to Ruby Helena in which she said, ‘I’m writing this with tears in my eyes. Billie is gone. She is always drugged. I know this is going to take me to my grave.’

  Less than a year after the marriage, Jimmy Monroe went to California and (according to Ruby Helena) took most of Billie’s money with him. He set himself up with a stable of women there.d She said that Billie was heartbroken once he had gone, not because she missed him, but because she suddenly realised how she had abandoned her mother and had failed to look after her properly.

  * Ruby Helena explained, ‘They knew you; they knew what kind of money you had, where you were working … and if you were a person who was making big money, you’d pay five dollars for it.’

  † When Linda Kuehl asked Ruby Helena to describe the apartment, she replied, ‘It was small … It was a slum area. It was a ghetto during that time. It was moderately pleasant.’

  ‡ Ruby Helena said, ‘Of course my name was Ruby Helena, but Billie always called me Helen.’

  § Regardless of her looks, Ruby Helena conceded that Billie already had ‘something in her voice that struck the public like lightning’.

  ‖ Ruby Helena seemed to think that Billie had had no contact with Clarence Holiday. ‘The reason she felt that way about her father was that she knew how much her mother loved him. She didn’t know anything about her father [but it] made her closer to her mother.’

  a It was at this time that Billie earnt the name of Mister Holiday and took to introducing herself as William or Bill, especially when she was meeting a new woman. Later she told her pianist Carl Drinkard that she went with women, ‘But I was always the man!’

  b Linda Kuehl asked, ‘Do you think she was rebelling against her mother?’ Ruby Helena replied, ‘Of course. You will, when you are on drugs … You feel everyone else is your enemy.’

  c Ruby Helena and Billie got into big fights, but this seems to have been because Billie resented the way Ruby Helena was keeping a watch on her. One night when they were leaving the Famous Door in a taxi Billie told the driver, ‘You take me home and take this bitch uptown.’ ‘I couldn’t believe it,’ said Ruby Helena. ‘That’s when I left the family.’

  d In May 1942 Jimmy Monroe was arrested for drug smuggling. He was given a twelve-month prison sentence for marijuana possession. Billie raised the money for his defence, but broke up with him after he was released from prison.

  SEVENTEEN

  ‘Strange Fruit’

  Southern trees bear a strange fruit,

  Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,

  Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,

  Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

  Pastoral scene of the gallant South,

  The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,

  Scent of magnolias sweet and fresh,

  Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.

  Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck,

  For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,

  For the sun to rot, for the tree to drop,

  Here is a strange and bitter crop.

  I have been looking at a photograph that was taken in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1919. The upper part of the picture shows a group of about forty individuals gathered together on a dark night to watch the final stage of a lynching.* I can see three women and a young boy who can’t be more than twelve years old, but the rest are grown men. They are all wearing hats of one sort or another, some are smoking cigarettes, and one is holding a walking stick in his leather-gloved hand. A number of them look straight into the camera with a triumphant and smiling gaze, while others seem more distracted.

  It was between 1900 and 1920 that lynching was at its most virulent. As the contemporary Baltimore journalist and sardonic humorist H. L. Mencken explained it, life in the South could be lacking in entertainment and ‘lynching often takes the place of the merry-go-round, the theatre, the symphony orchestra and other diversions common to larger communities’. Thousands of people would turn up for the well-publicised spectacle† and Baptist and Methodist ministers often worked hand-in-hand with the Ku Klux Klan by delivering sermons that incited further racial hatred and violence. Although the myth of protecting white women from black men was maintained, a lynching was often provoked by any signs of what was known as ‘uppitiness’, such as a black man seeking employment above his station, offensive language or boastful remarks. Even evidence of material success, such as the acquisition of a new car or a soldier returning home with a medal for valour, could be interpreted as uppitiness.

  Racial discrimination eased a bit during the 1930s and cases of public lynching had almost entirely ceased by 1940, although as one more cynical commentator pointed out, ‘public opinion is beginning to turn away from this sort of mob activity … but the work of the mob goes on … Countless Negroes are lynched yearly, but their disappearance is shrouded in mystery for they are dispatched quietly and without general knowledge.’‡

  Billie Holiday had never personally witnessed a lynching, but of course she could imagine what it would be like and she must have spoken to many people with first-hand experience. Her friend Lester Young managed to help his cousin ‘Sports’ Young escape from a lynch mob when they were both still in their early teens, and the singer Lena Horne must have told Billie how she witnessed a lynching in a small town in Florida when she was a child with her mother’s touring theatre troupe.§

  In 1938 Billie joined Artie Shaw’s all-white band and went on tour with them. It meant she was often refused entry to the hotels where the other musicians were staying, couldn’t eat with them in restaurants or drink with them in bars; and in the South she was turned into a fugitive, not even able to use public toilets and always ready to hide from danger. It was during this tour that she had one of many violent and potent
ially dangerous confrontations when a man in the audience asked the ‘nigger wench’ to sing another song. Artie Shaw later described the whole southern experience as a nightmare from beginning to end.

  When the band came back to New York City they played at the Lincoln Hotel and even there, in an establishment named after the President who had proclaimed the equality of all Americans, Billie was treated like a second-class citizen. She said later, ‘I was never allowed to visit the bar, or the dining room. I was made to enter and leave by the kitchen and I had to remain alone in my little room all evening until I was called to do my numbers.’‖ The band was also making a series of radio programmes, but the tobacco company promoting them insisted that Billie’s voice could not be allowed on the air waves and so she was replaced by the white singer Helen Forrest.

  Billie gave up in disgust and went to work at a newly opened club called Café Society. It was run by Barney Josephson, a Jewish ex-shoe-salesman who wanted a place where a black and white audience could mix together with dignity and mutual respect.a Billie liked the atmosphere and stayed there for nine months. Barney Josephson described her as someone who was sensitive and proud and who did what she liked. ‘She could tell a good joke. She knew all the words to use if you rubbed her the wrong way. When she told you off, you damn well were told – white, black, rich, poor!’

  In April 1939, a young Jewish schoolteacher called Abel Meeropol was invited to Café Society. He had written a song called ‘Strange Fruit’, which was his response to a photograph he had seen of a lynching.b Josephson wanted Billie to sing it and so Meeropol sat down at the piano with her and they went through the song together.

  According to Josephson, who always liked this kind of joke, Billie didn’t at first know ‘what the hell the song meant’, and only later did its meaning percolate through. But Meeropol gave a different account of her response. He said that at first he thought ‘She didn’t feel very comfortable with it because it was so different from the songs she was accustomed to. This is quite understandable.’ She asked him what the word ‘pastoral’ meant and he did his schoolmasterly best to explain that it referred to shepherds and shepherdesses and green fields, and here it was used ironically, as a way of shocking the listener.

  Meeropol said that the next time he saw Billie was a few days later, and ‘She gave a startling, most dramatic and effective interpretation of the song which could jolt the audience out of its complacency anywhere. This was exactly what I wanted the song to do and why I wrote it. Billie Holiday’s styling fulfilled the bitterness and the shocking quality I had hoped the song would have. The audience gave a tremendous ovation.’c

  People started to come to Café Society, just to hear that one song. And for the rest of her life Billie sang it all round America and in Europe. She even had a clause put into some of her contracts allowing her to sing it in those clubs where they would have preferred her to stick to happy and unhappy love songs. She always claimed that ‘Strange Fruit’ was one of the reasons why she was hounded so fiercely by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and the FBI. She said it was no coincidence that she defied an order not to sing it at the Earle Theater in Philadelphia and the next day was arrested on charges that eventually led to her imprisonment.d

  Lena Horne said that, in singing ‘Strange Fruit’, Billie ‘was putting into words what so many people had seen and lived through. She seemed to be performing in melody and words the same things I was feeling in my heart.’e Leonard Feather called it ‘the first significant protest in words and music, the first unmuted cry against racism’, and for the record producer Ahmet Ertegun it was ‘a declaration of war … the beginning of the civil rights movement’. The drummer Max Roach believed it was ‘more than revolutionary. She made a statement that we all felt as black folks. No one was speaking out. She became one of the fighters, this beautiful lady who could sing and make you feel things.’

  In the same year that the record was released, copies of it were sent to all the members of the US Senate, as a form of protest against lynching. The civil rights campaigner Walter White sent a letter to Billie congratulating her for what she had done. There was even talk of awarding her the Spingarn Medal, given annually to a black person of special achievement, but that came to nothing because church leaders disapproved of entertainers.

  Billie often said the song reminded her of how her father had been ‘killed by the Jim Crow laws of the South’, and it was thinking about him that brought tears to her eyes as she sang. Her pianist Mal Waldron said she often chose to sing it to give herself courage when she felt under threat. ‘Whenever things were not going right she would sing that tune. If her dressing room wasn’t too beautiful, or maybe the police were waiting outside or had stopped her or something like that.’f

  There is a film sequence of Billie singing ‘Strange Fruit’ at the Chelsea Palace Studios in London in February 1959. By then she has become painfully thin and the dress she wears is stretched over the angular scaffolding of her bones. Her hair is pulled back from her face and tied in a long pony tail. She looks austere and beautiful and her face has taken on the abstract iconography of a mask. Even though she is performing in front of an audience, you have the impression that she is lost in her own thoughts and oblivious of her surroundings. She sings very slowly, giving full weight to the power of each word, allowing the images to grow in their terrible intensity.

  But now I have one more photograph in mind. It shows the scene of Billie’s funeral, which took place in New York at St Paul the Apostle Roman Catholic Church on 21 July 1959, just five months after that film was made. A crowd of some 3,000 men and women has gathered to watch as her open coffin is carried towards the steps of the church. Some have obviously come to pay their last respects with dignity and sadness, but others, who don’t seem to belong to the jazz world at all, have a strange look of eagerness about them. It is as if they have come to enjoy a spectacle.

  * Much of the information for this chapter is taken from Long Memory by Mary Frances Berry and John W. Blassingame, 1982. Between 1882 and 1951 there were 4,720 recorded cases of lynching in the US, but the figures are very vague and the number of unrecorded cases is almost impossible to assess.

  † There would be extensive coverage of such events, with photographs and ‘light-hearted’ articles. Postcards with photographs of the victims were sold in large numbers, including one that showed five men hanging from a tree, along with a little poem about the lesson to be learnt from the Dogwood Tree. People who wanted a tangible keepsake from such an event could take home a fragment of human bone, a scrap of cloth or some charred rope. There was a terrifying obsession with the male sexual organ, and many lynch victims were castrated or otherwise defiled. See Trouble in Mind by Leon Litwack, 1988.

  ‡ Myrdal, pp. 566, 1350. There was also the sinister suggestion that the police and the judiciary took over some of the tasks that had previously been managed by the mob.

  § Speaking about this experience, Lena Horne said, ‘I knew about the fear it aroused in people and in my mother. It’s something I wanted to forget, but it stayed with me.’

  ‖ Interview in Ebony, July 1949, pp. 26–32.

  a The club was ‘a milestone along the long road to racial integration in America’ (Nicholson, p. 110). Barney Josephson said he wanted to establish such a club because ‘I always had strong feelings of social consciousness. I guess I just had a democratic upbringing.’ He was later accused of being a Communist during the McCarthy era and was hounded out of business for a while.

  b Abel Meeropol later changed his name to Lewis Allan. In a letter to Linda Kuehl, dated 8 July 1971, he said, ‘Way back in the Thirties I saw a photograph of a lynching … It was a shocking photograph and it haunted me for days. As a result I wrote “Strange Fruit” as a poem … I set it to music and my wife Anne sang it around at small gatherings.’ In a letter to the New York Times Book Review, on 15 July 1956, in which he objected to the way his part in the genesis of the song was described in Billie’s gho
sted autobiography Lady Sings the Blues, he said, ‘I wrote “Strange Fruit” because I hate lynching and I hate injustice and I hate the people who perpetuate it.’

  c Lewis Allan (Meeropol) in a letter to Linda Kuehl, dated 28 July 1971. Although Columbia Records had a contract with Billie at that time, they would not agree to do a recording of ‘Strange Fruit’, although they did give her permission to record it on the Commodore label with ‘Fine and Mellow’, on the other side. The record was produced by Milt Gabler in April 1939. It quickly rose to number sixteen in the charts and eventually sold more than a million copies.

  d In a 1947 interview for Downbeat magazine she said, ‘I’ve made a lot of enemies. Singing that song hasn’t helped any. I was doing it at the Earle Theater ’til they made me stop.’ According to William Dufty, the ghostwriter for Lady Sings the Blues, ‘Billie has been kicked around and harassed for years by the authorities. One of the reasons is that this song “Strange Fruit” made her well-known and politically controversial.’

  e David Margolick, Strange Fruit: The Biography of a Song, 2001, p. 41.

  f Mal Waldron worked with her from 1956 to 1959.

  EIGHTEEN

  Harlem at War

  When Poland was invaded in 1939, the United States was faced with the possibility that it might be drawn into the conflict. The key issue for the black community was whether they were prepared to support America’s involvement overseas, while still being denied their democratic rights at home. At first many blacks looked upon world events with a certain optimism because they felt that there might be a chance of work for everyone, as well as the opportunity to serve their country and prove their patriotism. But by the winter of 1940, in spite of ‘the war plants begging for men and women workers, those with black skins were daily told contemptuously that they were not wanted.’* An estimated 75 per cent of all jobs in the newly booming defence industry were closed to them.