Lady Sings the Blues - Billie Holiday [15]
“You come to my house and I’ll cook for you,” I told him. “I’m never coming back here.”
My job cooking for the warden made me a big shot in the joint. As a privileged character, I got to sleep in the bed by the window in the ward. Also, it meant I got out on time. They couldn’t keep books on the island. Girls that were supposed to do three years sometimes did three or four weeks extra because some bookkeeper goofed. Then one day they’d discover some girl still there who was supposed to be out. They’d ask her what she thought she was doing. “You were supposed to be out weeks ago,” they told one girl.
But I got out right on the nose at the end of four months. It was summer when I went in, without a stitch to my name except my one and only silk dress and my spike-heeled patent-leather shoes. It was winter when they let me out, and when they checked me through the exit I got the dress, but the chick in the check room told me she couldn’t find my shoes. I kicked up such a storm I thought they were going to keep me there. I raised so much hell the warden finally had to come down. When he found out what it was all about he said my shoes had to be there someplace. He gave orders for them to find them if they had to search the joint. The dame in the check room found them in a hurry. She handed them over—brand new and just her size.
So I got on that cold windy ferryboat to cross the East River in my spike shoes and my silk dress. But it hung on me like a prison uniform—I had dropped twenty-three pounds on the island.
When the boat hit the shore, it seemed like half the pimps in New York were there to meet us. They lined up at the docks to look us over. That’s their business, that’s where they auditioned their talent, and the cops did everything to make it easy, including directing the traffic. I must have looked sad, but there was a pimp there who gave me the “Hi, baby,” and asked me to go with him. He had a car waiting and wanted to take me to a house right off.
I had decided I was through with hustling, but I didn’t tell him. And I had learned a lot on Welfare Island. I needed some clothes, especially a warm winter coat. And I needed them quick. He could get them for me. And he did.
I let him take me to a house and set me up. But I wouldn’t give him any of my money. I was sending it all to Mom. When he found out, he flipped. I told him Mom was my pimp. He beat the hell out of me, and I had to hide out for a while.
So I went to Jamaica, Long Island. There I met Dorothy Glass. She had a big house out there where she ran poker games and other kinds of gambling. She was a real nice dame, the type of woman Mom thought Florence Williams was.
I stayed with her, waiting on tables and helping out to pay my way while I kept out of circulation. Once in a while I used to go to the Elks Club in Jamaica and sing. This way I could pick up a little change. But at Dorothy’s place the toughest job I had was keeping her husband Lee out of my hair. By this time I could see trouble coming, so I quit when it was still ahead.
I used to tell people later about the tough time I’d had with Judge Jean Hortense Norris, but they just didn’t believe it. I guess you have to live it before you can believe it.
Then in a few months everybody was talking about the judge I had been talking about. When the Seabury investigation hit the front pages in 1930–31, Judge Seabury himself took her to the Appellate Court, where he got her thrown off the bench by a unanimous vote, declaring her “unfit” to be a judge.
This was the old dame that sent me to jail as a “wayward woman.” This was the character who told me I was a bad character. She should have gone to jail herself, but she never did. There were hundreds of girls that she had sent up, and a lot of them were waiting for her. If she had gone to jail I’d almost have been willing to do another short bit myself just to get my hands on her.
Chapter 3
Painting the Town Red