Lady Sings the Blues - Billie Holiday [16]
By the time Mom and I had got together and found us a place of our own in Harlem the depression was on. At least, so we heard tell. A depression was nothing new to us, we’d always had it. The only thing new about it was the bread lines. And they were about the only thing we missed.
We moved into an apartment on 139th Street, and not long after, for the first time since I could remember, Mom was too sick to make Mass on Sunday. For her, that was really sick. Give her coffee every morning and Mass every Sunday, and she thought she could go on working forever. But she had to quit working out as a maid. She couldn’t even walk, her stomach was so shot. She just had to stay put in bed.
What little money we had saved started running out and she was getting panicky. She had worked for most of her life, and it was beginning to tell on her. For almost half of that time she had been grieving over Pop. This didn’t help any.
I had decided I was through turning tricks as a call girl. But I had also decided I wasn’t going to be anybody’s damn maid. The rent always seemed to be due, and it took some scuffling to keep from breaking my vows.
About that time Fletcher Henderson’s band was working downtown at the Roseland Ballroom. It was the first Negro band to work there, and Pop Holiday was with them on the guitar. Sick as she was, Mom was too proud to turn to Pop and ask his help with the rent money. But not me.
I used to go right down there and haunt him. Pop was in his early thirties then, but he didn’t want anyone to guess it—especially the young chicks who used to hang around the entrance waiting for the musicians.
I was around fifteen then, but I looked plenty old enough to vote. I used to wait for him down in the hallway. I’d try to catch his eye and call out to him, “Hey, Daddy.” I soon found out just waving at him would make him feel like forty-five, and he didn’t like that. He used to plead with me.
“Please,” he’d say, “whatever you do, don’t call me Daddy in front of these people.”
“I’m going to call you Daddy all night unless you give me some damn money for rent,” I’d tell him. That would do it.
I’d take the money home to Mom, proud as all get out. But I couldn’t hurt her feelings by telling her where it came from. If she kept worrying me about it, I’d finally tell her I stole it. Then we’d have a fight and she’d tell me I was going to end up in jail again.
One day when the rent was overdue, she got a notice that the law was going to put us out on the street. It was in the dead cold of winter and she couldn’t even walk.
I didn’t know they did things like that up North. Bad as it was down South, they never put you out on the street. When we were due to get set out on the street the next morning, I told Mom I would steal or murder or do anything before I’d let them pull that. It was cold as all hell that night, and I walked out without any kind of coat.
I walked down Seventh Avenue from 139th Street to 133rd Street, busting in every joint trying to find a job. In those days 133rd Street was the real swing street, like 52nd Street later tried to be. It was jumping with after-hours spots, regular hour joints, restaurants, cafés, a dozen to a block.
Finally, when I got to Pod’s and Jerry’s, I was desperate. I went in and asked for the boss. I think I talked to Jerry. I told him I was a dancer and I wanted to try out. I knew exactly two steps, the time step and the crossover. I didn’t even know the word “audition” existed, but that was what I wanted.
So Jerry sent me over to the piano player and told me to dance. I started, and it was pitiful. I did my two steps over and over until he barked at me and told me to quit wasting his time.
They were going to throw me out on my ear, but I kept begging for the job. Finally the piano player took pity on me. He squashed out his cigarette, looked up at me, and said, “Girl, can you sing?”
I said, “Sure I can sing, what good is that?” I had been singing all my life, but I enjoyed it too much to think I could make any real money at it. Besides, those were the days of the Cotton