With Billie (4 page)

In her notes Linda Kuehl said that when she arrived at the club she had to put her face to the peephole and say the word ‘Freddie’ before she was let in. I imagine her leaving the daylight world behind as she steps into a darkened room, full of murmured talk and cigarette smoke. I imagine her walking carefully between the tables, a tape recorder clutched under her arm. In the one photograph I have seen of her she wears pink lipstick, and she has lines of kohl drawn around her eyes. Her pale face is framed by a waterfall of straight dark hair.

She went to sit next to Freddie at the mirrored bar. She said he was wearing a shiny red suit and a white felt hat with a feather stuck in the brim. She said he was sweating profusely and coming down from what he called ‘a wee morning cocaine high’. He called her ‘honey’ and ordered her a drink. She turned on the tape recorder. Listening to the interview, you can hear the electric buzz of voices on all sides.

Freddie was eager to talk. ‘I’m in your corner,’ he said. ‘You’re gonna get it from the horse’s mouth. You’ll get it together, honey, we’ll put that thing together! I can’t tell you more than I know, and it’s easy to repeat something you know is the truth!’

Freddie said that his mother, Miss Viola Green – known as Miss Vi – rented out three rooms in her house on Bond Street. Billie and her mother had a third-floor bedroom at the front. He remembered that they brought their own bedroom suite with them when they arrived and they had what he called ‘some Christian pieces’: the figures of Mary and Jesus and a ‘little tiny statue of the Saviour on the cross’.

Freddie insisted that he and Billie were the same age and ‘we was fourteen’, but this must have been in 1922, when Billie was just seven years old. There is a photograph of her from around that time. She wears white socks and a white ruffled dress with long sleeves. Her right elbow rests on the polished surface of a little table and her left hand reaches across to touch the right hand, as if for reassurance. She stands very serious and poised and erect, and a big white ribbon perches like a butterfly on the side of her head, in a curious visual presentiment of the white gardenias that later became her trademark when she appeared on stage.

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.’

O
n 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.
^*