Lady Sings the Blues - Billie Holiday [11]
It was dark by then. This social worker was white, but she was nice as she could be. She asked me where I had come from, what my name was, where I was going, who my mother was, and all that stuff. But I wouldn’t tell her anything, not even my name. Nobody was going to stop me from getting to Harlem. It turned out this woman was with the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. She was going to put me in the shelter they had, but it was too late already, the place was closed for the night. This turned out to be a break.
She took me and bought me dinner and then we went to a beautiful hotel where she got me a fine room with a bed all to myself. This place knocked me out. Years later I went back there to see the place and found it was only a YWCA—but it looked like the Waldorf Astoria then. This woman was so nice I tried to get her to give me a job.
“I’ll work for you hard,” I told her. “I’ll clean your house, wash your steps, scrub your floors.” But then she’d ask me my name and I still wouldn’t tell her. She was wise to me. She’d smile when I refused to tell her my name. “I know you,” she’d tell me. “You’re smart.”
The next morning she came and took me to the home run by the Society. It was nice there. The food was good. There were plenty of kids around and nothing to do but play. There was a huge playground out back, with slides and swings and things, screened at the sides and the top.
I must have stayed there a couple of weeks before Mom found out where they had me. They took me downstairs one morning to meet the lady who had come to pick me up. It wasn’t my mother, though. It was a woman by the name of Mrs. Levy.
“I’m not going with you,” I told her right off. “I’m staying.”
“Why?” she asked me. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing,” I told her. “I like this place.”
“But I came to take you to your mama,” she told me.
I noticed she didn’t say “mother” and she didn’t say “mammy.” She said “mama.” And the way she said it kind of made me think I might take a chance. Mrs. Levy was the lady from Long Branch Mom worked for. Mom was taking care of her kids, she told me, and she had drove down in her car to take me home with her.
When I heard she had a car, that settled it. And when I saw the pretty automobile, I was ready to go anywhere just for the ride. I hadn’t been in a car so many times I could take a chance missing a ride. We drove from downtown New York to Long Branch.
Sadie and I were going to be together again at last. We were going to make it. She even had a job lined up for me—as a maid, naturally. What else?
The woman I was to work for was big, fat and lazy. She didn’t do a thing all day except lay her big ass on the beach. I didn’t do much more. All I had to do was sleep and eat, peel a few onions and vegetables to keep her hands pretty, wash a few dishes to keep them from getting rough, and dust a little so she wouldn’t have to move around.
This great big greasy bitch didn’t do a thing all day until about fifteen minutes before her old man was due home for dinner. Then she would kick up a storm. I didn’t know my way around her fancy kind of joint. Instead of telling me what she wanted me to do, she’d get excited because her husband was waiting, start hollering at me and calling me “nigger.” I had never heard that word before. I didn’t know what it meant. But I could guess from the sound of her voice. It was weird, that house—filled with crazy furniture and junk that just collected dust—and pillows all over. How she used to dog me about those pillows!
It didn’t last long. One day, just before she hauled off to the beach, she dragged out a big old blanket, threw it at me, and told me to wash it. I flipped. I wasn’t supposed to do laundry, so I told her what she could do with her damn blanket. That was the end of that job. In the first place, I didn’t want to be her maid, or anybody’s. I figured there had to be something better than this.
When I went back to Mom’s and told her what happened, she didn’t know what the hell to do with me. She knew I’d never make