Lady Sings the Blues - Billie Holiday [17]
I thought that was the only way to make money, and I needed forty-five bucks by morning to keep Mom from getting set out in the street. Singers were never heard of then, unless it was Paul Robeson, Julian Bledsoe, or someone legit like that.
So I asked him to play “Trav’lin’ All Alone.” That came closer than anything to the way I felt. And some part of it must have come across. The whole joint quieted down. If someone had dropped a pin, it would have sounded like a bomb. When I finished, everybody in the joint was crying in their beer, and I picked thirty-eight bucks up off the floor. When I left the joint that night I split with the piano player and still took home fifty-seven dollars.
I went out and bought a whole chicken and some baked beans—Mom loved baked beans—and raced up Seventh Avenue to the house. When I showed Mom the money for the rent and told her I had a regular job singing for eighteen dollars a week, she could hardly believe it.
As soon as she could get out of bed she came down to see for herself and became my biggest booster. In those days they had five or six singers in the clubs and they called them “ups.” One girl would be “up” and she would go from table to table singing. Then the next one would be “up” and she’d take over. I was an “up” from midnight every night until the tips started thinning out, maybe around three o’clock the next morning.
In those days, too, all the girls took money off the tables, but I broke that up. With my first loot I got me a pair of fancy drawers with little rhinestones on them. But I didn’t like the idea of showing my body. There was nothing wrong with my body, I just didn’t like the idea. When the time came to take those bills off the table, I was always messing up.
One night a millionaire came in the joint and put out a twenty-dollar bill on the table. I wanted that twenty-dollar bill so bad. I really tried, but I dropped it so many times he got disgusted and said, “Why, you’re nothing but a punk kid. Get the hell away from here.”
When I finished my “up” he must have felt sorry for me. Anyway, he asked me to come back and have a drink with him. When I did, he gave me the twenty-dollar bill in my hand. I figured, if a millionaire could give me money that way, everybody could. So from then on I wouldn’t take money off tables. When I came to work the other girls used to razz me, call me “Duchess” and say, “Look at her, she thinks she’s a lady.”
I hadn’t got my title Lady Day yet, but that was the beginning of people calling me “Lady.”
When Mom came to hear me sing and I started to make the rounds, I would always start at her table. After I’d made five or six bucks in tips I’d split with the piano player and give the rest to Mom to hold. The first night I did this she decided she’d get into the act and do a little shilling. The next time around she made like a big shot and started the ball rolling by handing me a big tip—two or three bucks of my own money. I’d throw it in with the rest, and when I finished the round I’d split with the piano player again. She got me so mixed up, acting like a duchess and handing me my own money, I got into a helluva rassle with the piano player.
When it came time to settle up for the night I tried to get back the money that belonged to me. I had given it to Mom and she had given it back, and this way I was splitting with the piano player three or four times. When I tried to explain this to him and told him my mother had done it, he looked at this young woman sitting at the table and flipped.
“Bitch,” he said, “that’s not your mother.” There was a real hassle before I could convince him Mom was really my mother, and only trying to help. Later on I got Mom a job in the kitchen at the Log Cabin. We had the joint sewed.
Prohibition was on its last legs then. And so were the blind pigs, the cribs and club and after-hours joints that Prohibition set up in business. Some people thought it would go on like that forever. But