With Billie (9 page)

Duke Ellington, in a talk he gave in Los Angeles just before the outbreak of the Second World War, gave an unexpected interpretation of one of the effects of this broken promise, saying, ‘I contend that the Negro is the creative voice of America,
is
creative America, and it was a happy day in America when the first unhappy slave was landed on its shores. We stirred in our shackles, and our unrest awakened justice in the hearts of a courageous few, and we recreated in America the desire for true democracy, freedom for all, the brotherhood of man, principles on which the country had been founded … [We’ve kept] America and its forgotten principles alive in the fat and corrupt years intervening between our divine conception and our near tragic present.’
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Although the majority of black Americans lived and worked in the South, they also had a long connection with New York. Already by 1771 they made up about one-sixth of the city’s total population. But this number began to decrease once New York became the destination of hundreds of thousands of immigrants escaping from hunger and persecution in Europe. Each newly arrived group fought for its share of territory and power in the city, and throughout the nineteenth century the black population was driven out of areas where they had established themselves. They were pressed further and further to the north. They had to escape from the violence and intimidation that was brought to bear on them in Soho and in Greenwich Village, in the Five Points district (which became Chinatown) and in Little Africa (which was transformed into Little Italy).
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All this was in spite of the fact that, as Jacob Riis explained in 1890,
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‘There
is no more clean and orderly community in New York than the new settlement of coloured people that is growing up on the East Side … In this respect the Negro is immensely superior to the lowest of the whites, the Italians and the Polish Jews, below whom he has been classed in the tenant scale.’

By 1905 the first of the more well-to-do black families had moved into Harlem, occupying the elegant red stone houses that had been left empty after a slump. They were prepared to pay higher rents in exchange for the space and dignity that could be found here, and at first the neighbourhood was ‘stable and unified’, with blacks and whites living in close proximity to each other. However, most of the properties in Harlem were owned by white landlords, who could charge rents as much as 58 per cent more than the average in the rest of the city. Of the 12,000 retail stores operating in Harlem in 1930, only 391 were owned by blacks and 172 of them were groceries.

With the internal migrations from the countryside to the city and from the South to the North, Harlem’s population increased by 600 per cent between 1910 and 1935. The grand houses in their wide boulevards were transformed into ‘filthy, vermin-ridden buildings’ as more and more people were crowded into the one area of the city where they were able to live. By the late 1920s there were around 200,000 people crammed into three and a half square miles.
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The overcrowded houses had become tenement blocks; schools, sanitation and all the basic amenities of life were neglected by the civic authorities, and the death rate was twice as high as in the rest of the city. There was just one hospital, the Harlem General, which was known locally as the Butcher Shop or the Morgue. In 1931 it was providing 273 beds for the entire community.
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As well as employment, housing and health problems, there were also the persistent humiliations and social discriminations. In Blumstein’s or Koch’s, the big Harlem department stores on 125th Street, a black woman was not permitted to try a dress on in the store. The people of Harlem were forbidden to use the toilet facilities in shops or restaurants. Black movie-goers could only sit in the balcony at Loew’s Victoria on 125th Street. A black person could not be served at a bar with a white friend.

The tensions in Harlem reached a crisis during the First World War, when many black Americans wondered ‘why we fight for democracy abroad when we don’t have democracy at home’. A similar crisis came with the onset of the Second World War. James Baldwin, in his essay
The Harlem Ghetto
, spoke of the ‘furious bewildered rage’ that was taking root throughout these years, as ‘all over Harlem, Negro boys and girls are growing into a stunted maturity, trying desperately to find a place to stand; and the wonder is not that so many are ruined, but that so many survive’.

But people made the best of what they had, and Harlem in the first decades of the 1900s was full of clubs, ballrooms, speakeasies, hole-in-the-wall joints, whorehouses and reefer pads; all sorts of enclosed paradise worlds where you could forget your troubles for a while, with the help of music and dancing, and sex and liquor, and whatever drugs were available at the time.

For wealthy white New Yorkers, the word Harlem was a ‘national synonym for naughtiness’, and the ‘pleasure-loving’ would go ‘slumming’ in search of excitement and entertainment. Some places, like the Cotton Club, maintained strict rules of segregation,
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while others – and in particular the famous Savoy Ballroom that opened in 1926 – had a mixed clientele.

The Savoy occupied an entire block on Lenox Avenue.
You came in via a marble pillared staircase lit by cut-glass chandeliers and stepped out into an orange-and-blue dance hall, which had a revolving stage for a band at either end so that the music never had to stop. Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald and Cab Calloway were regular performers. Wednesday-night shows were reserved for fraternal organisations, and Thursdays for kitchen maids, who had one free night in the week. Everything was kept very dignified and orderly and, even when Prohibition had been repealed, the Savoy served only ginger beer. One in five of the guests was white and mixed dancing was commonplace.

But the excitement of the 1920s gave way to the Great Depression and, by 1934, half of the black working population in all of the United States was without employment, as opposed to less than a quarter of the white population. Almost half of all families in Harlem were receiving benefit, and because the provision was eight cents a meal for food, and nothing at all if a man of working age was part of the household, it was not uncommon to see whole families foraging in garbage cans in search of scraps to eat.

When Billie first arrived in Harlem in 1929, she stayed with her mother in a brothel belonging to a woman called Florence Williams on 151 West 140th Street, between Lenox and 7th Avenues. A few weeks later, on 2 May, the Police Department of the 19th District organised a big round-up of prostitutes in that area and Billie, along with her mother and Florence Williams and two other women from the same address, were brought in for questioning. Billie gave her age as twenty-one and called herself by her grandfather’s surname of Fagan. Her mother gave her age as thirty-four and used her middle name of Julia and her maiden name of Harris. Neither of the two women let it be known that they were related.

Sadie and the three other women were discharged, but Billie was taken into custody. She had the misfortune of being tried by a woman magistrate called Jean Hortense Norris, who was notorious for giving harsh sentences in an
effort to rid the streets of New York of what she called ‘wayward minors’. Billie was found guilty of being a ‘vagrant and dissipated adult’ and was sent to Welfare Island, now known as Roosevelt Island, on the East River.
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Billie was released in October 1929. For a while she and Sadie lived in Brooklyn and then in 1930 they returned to Harlem, to a small room off Lenox Avenue. A report on Negro housing was presented to President Hoover around that time. It stated that ‘one notable difference appears between the immigrant and the Negro populations. In the case of the former, there is the possibility of escape, with improvement in economic status in the second generation’, whereas for African-Americans there was hardly any opportunity to make a decent living and to climb onto the ladder of success, because ‘the more things changed, the more they worsened’.
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So this is the sort of world that Billie came to know and to see as home. No doubt in the early days she sometimes turned to prostitution in order to make a few dollars, but she also had her voice to sell. Her first singing job in New York was in 1930 or 1931 with the Hat Hunter Band, playing at the Grey Dawn cabaret bar on Jamaica Avenue. She earnt whatever money was thrown down on the floor for her.

When she and her mother moved to a tiny room on West 127th Street, Sadie had a job working at Mexico’s restaurant, while Billie waited at the tables and sang for tips. This was followed by Ed Small’s Paradise, the Alhambra and then Pod and Jerry’s, where she was accompanied by the pianist Bobby Henderson and was able to earn a steady two dollars a night as well as the tips.

She spent all the spare time she had with musicians; smoking marijuana with them, drinking with them and luxuriating in their company. Everyone said how shy she
was, ‘with a shyness so vast that she spoke in practically a whisper’. And everyone was impressed by her character. ‘She was an uncompromising, devastatingly honest kind of girl … very attractive, very cool, very gentle … an extremely quiet person who liked to laugh … She had a gingham gown on her and she was vivacious and young and nice. Oh, she was so vivacious, she was like sunshine!’
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It was during this period that she decided to change her name. She took the first name of Billie, after the white actress Billie Dove, who was billed as the ‘American Beauty’ of silent films and who was often cast as a damsel in distress, awaiting rescue at the last minute by a handsome hero.
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And she chose the strangely evocative surname of her young father, the banjo player Clarence Holiday, who was only sixteen years older than she was.