With Billie (16 page)

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.’
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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.
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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.
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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.’
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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.
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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.’
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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.’
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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.

W
hen 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.’
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An estimated 75 per cent of all jobs in the newly booming defence industry were closed to them.

By the spring of 1943, more than half a million blacks were in the army. But only 79,000 were overseas, and repeating the traumatic experience of their fathers in the First World War. Walter White, the leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, spoke
of ‘the gratuitous insults and beatings and humiliations suffered by men who had fought in the Pacific and had been returned home to train other fighters … the countless stories of lynchings and mistreatments of Negro soldiers’.

The tensions in Harlem were building up during the spring of 1943 and they were exacerbated when the authorities decided to close down the Savoy Ballroom on 21 April 1943. The police charged that the ballroom was a ‘base for vice’ and a major cause of the spread of venereal disease among white soldiers. It was alleged that 164 servicemen had contracted venereal disease in the past nine months as a result of meeting women there. To prove their point the police picked up three prostitutes and a pimp outside the Ballroom.

Ninety employees lost their jobs, and the people of Harlem were indignant. Walter White argued that prostitution was a fact of life at other public places, including the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, but everyone knew that it was really the mixed dancing the police were angry about. As Roy Wilkins observed, ‘Chiefs of police, commissioners, captains, lieutenants and plain rookie cops get purple in the face at the very thought of Negroes and whites enjoying themselves socially together.’
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James Baldwin remembered that before the summer of 1943, he had never been aware of so many policemen on the streets of Harlem, ‘on foot, on horseback, on corners, everywhere, always two by two’. And then on 1 August a riot finally broke out, triggered by a scene at the Braddock Hotel in which a black soldier in uniform tried to intervene in a quarrel between a white policeman and a woman called Margie Polite. There was a scuffle and a shot was fired. The crowd that gathered in front of the hotel was convinced the soldier had been fatally wounded.

The rage and despair burst its banks and soon thousands of men and women were sweeping through Harlem, looting and burning and breaking street-lamps so that whole areas were plunged into darkness. The writer Claude Brown was
six years old at the time and remembered how ‘the crashing sound of falling plate-glass windows kept me awake for hours. While I listened to the noise I imagined bombs falling and people running through the streets screaming.’
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Five thousand police were rushed to Harlem from throughout the city, but they were under a restraint order, which meant that the fatalities were not as high as they might otherwise have been. Nevertheless six people were killed, nearly 700 were seriously wounded and there were 600 arrests.