Lady Sings the Blues - Billie Holiday [13]
I went to jail for refusing to go to bed with Blue. I tried to tell him it wasn’t anything personal, I just wasn’t going to bed with any more Negroes.
With my regular white customers, it was a cinch. They had wives and kids to go home to. When they came to see me it was wham, bang, they gave me the money and were gone. I made all the loot I needed. But Negroes would keep you up all the damn night, handing you that stuff about “Is it good, baby?” and “Don’t you want to be my old lady?”
Talk about women getting salty when they get scorned! You should have seen Big Blue.
“What the hell good is she?” he hollered at Florence. “She’s the only colored girl in the house and she won’t take Negroes?” Florence was a fine woman, but it would have been worth her life to stick up for me.
Blue knew I was a baby, but he had me busted just the same. He and Bub were real tight with the cops. The next morning I was in the kitchen with the other girls having breakfast when the cops broke in. They had stool-pigeon witnesses with them who screamed at me. “That’s her,” they said, pointing at me. “That’s her.”
So they hauled me off to jail, not for anything I did, but for something I wouldn’t do. Those were rotten days. Women like Mom who worked as maids, cleaned office buildings, were picked up on the street on their way home from work and charged with prostitution. If they could pay, they got off. If they couldn’t they went to court, where it was the word of some dirty grafting cop against theirs.
They booked me and hustled me off to the Jefferson Market Court. The place was full of what they called “wayward women” in those days, and of course the vice squad fuzz. When I saw who was on the bench I knew I was cooked. It was Magistrate Jean Hortense Norris, the first woman police judge in New York, a tough hard-faced old dame with hair bobbed almost like a man’s.
She had made a big name for herself, running around making sweet talk about how it took a woman to understand social problems. But I had heard from the girls who had been in her court that this was all a lot of crud. She was tougher than any judge I ever saw in pants before or since. If the girls had lawyers, they’d move heaven and earth to get their cases put off to some other judge.
I knew if you pleaded guilty you caught hell. If you pleaded not guilty, you might even get worse. I didn’t have anybody to get me a lawyer, not that it would have done much good. If that judge had guessed for a minute I was only fifteen she would probably have packed me off to Bedford Reformatory until I was twenty-one.
But Mom came down to court and stopped that. She swore on a stack of Bibles I was eighteen. If they had checked up on her, it would have showed Mom had given birth to me when she was nine. But they didn’t. It cost Mom a lot to tell a lie like that. She couldn’t stand lying and made me the same way. She never lied unless she had to save somebody’s life. And neither did I.
When my case came up, the judge picked up a piece of paper, read it off, said it was a health report that I was sick. This was pretty funny because they hadn’t tested me for anything; there hadn’t been time. Besides, I was clean, I knew I was clean, and the tests proved it later.
But this old girl judge didn’t believe me. She read her lecture about how young I was, and how sick, and said she was going to be lenient with me and send me to a city hospital in Brooklyn. They hustled me out the way they had hustled me in. And that was that.
At the hospital they were giving everybody shots of salvarsan for syphilis—only it was called “bad blood” then. I didn’t get any shots, I gave them. I worked with the doctors and saw girls coming in with their arms eaten up from big round sores where somebody missed a vein and gave it to them in the muscle. Later I got promoted to the bismuth kick, where I used to give shots in the ass all by myself. I learned to handle those needles real good.