Lady Sings the Blues - Billie Holiday [12]
Mom wasn’t really a square at all. Yet in many ways she was. The place she found for me to live was nothing less than a fancy apartment house off 141st Street in Harlem. People paid some high old rent there then. Mom got me a room in a beautiful apartment belonging to a lady named Florence Williams. I hadn’t emptied basins, laid out Lifebuoy soap and towels in Alice Dean’s place in Baltimore for nothing. I knew what was cooking. But Mom didn’t. She paid my rent in advance to Florence, and with the straightest face in the world asked this handsome sharply dressed madam to take care of her little girl. Florence was one of the biggest madams in Harlem.
She might just as well have asked little Eleanora to take care of Florence. I thought I was a real hip kitty. In a matter of days I had my chance to become a strictly twenty-dollar call girl—and I took it. The Jelke stuff they made a big deal out of wasn’t even new then. The only thing new about it—even to me—was the fancy telephone. I had seen those funny-looking telephones in the movies—the ones you answer lying in bed instead of the old-time wall jobs. From the moment I saw them I knew that was for me. Not just any kind, though. It had to be a white telephone. And that’s what I had at Florence’s place.
I soon had two young white cats to match I could depend on regular every week, one on Wednesday, one Saturday. Sometimes one of them would make it twice a week. The madam took five out of every twenty dollars for the rent. This still left me more than I could make in a damn month as a maid. And I had someone doing my laundry. It was a small place. Florence only had two other girls, a yellow one named Gladys and a white girl whose name I don’t remember.
It wasn’t long before I had money to buy a few things I’d always wanted—my first honest-to-God silk dress and a pair of spike-heeled ten-dollar patent-leather pumps.
But I didn’t have what it took to be a call girl. In the first place, and for damn good reason, I was scared to death of sex. First there had been the deal with Mr. Dick. Then when I was twelve a trumpet player from a big Negro orchestra had had me for the first time on the floor of my grandmother’s parlor. That was rugged enough to finish me with men for a while. I remember being hurt so, I thought I was going to die. I went to Mom, took my bloody clothes and threw them down in disgust.
“So this is what you and Pop used to do when I slept at the foot of your bed in a cedar chest,” I screamed at her.
What could she say? Nothing. She moaned a little about her baby having had a man and she worried herself half to death for days for fear I would have a baby the way she had had me. I had hit her where she couldn’t hit back. I swore then I was through with men and I told her she needn’t worry any more about me doing what she and Pop had done.
Then one day at Florence’s place a big Negro had come in and insisted on having nobody but me. He gave me fifty dollars. He should have. It was a small price to pay for nearly killing me. I was out of commission for days and couldn’t even put my two feet on the floor. Mom came to see me during that time and found me sick in bed. She didn’t know what had been going on, but after one look at me she said she was taking me to the hospital.
I was so sick I didn’t care if I went—until I saw the letters on the cap of the cat who came with the ambulance cart. I had heard about that hospital he came from. Girls I knew went there with pneumonia and came out without any ovaries. So I sat right up in bed, sent the ambulance away, crawled to the bathroom, had something to eat later, and I was all right.
No wonder I was scared to death of sex. And no wonder I did what I did when a Negro cat came around by the name of