Lady Sings the Blues - Billie Holiday [20]
I opened with Bernie Hanighen’s song, “If the Moon Turns Green.” By the time I went into “The Man I Love” I was all right. Then the house broke up. There’s nothing like an audience at the Apollo. They were wide awake early in the morning. They didn’t ask me what my style was, who I was, how I had evolved, where I’d come from, who influenced me, or anything. They just broke the house up. And they kept right on doing it. I played the Apollo for the second week. This was one of the few times it happened there, if I do say so myself. And I damn well do.
Of all those nights in all those spots in Harlem, the one I remember best was a rough night at the Hotcha. I was walking by the bar when I spotted a young, handsome cat sitting there fast asleep. While I was keeping an eye on him, I saw a whore getting ready to clip his wallet out of his back pocket. I told that broad to leave him alone.
“What do you care?” she said. “I’ll split the loot with you.”
“No you won’t,” I said. “He’s my old man.”
He was no such thing, of course, but what did she know? She gave the wallet to me and I gave it back to him. And that’s the way I met Louis McKay. One time when he was real sick I took him home to our place and Mom nursed him back into shape. We went around together for quite a while.
Later, it was sometimes years between the times I saw him again. He went his way and I went mine. But when I told that broad he was my man, I thought I was lying. Later it turned out I had been speaking the truth and didn’t know it.
Chapter 4
If My Heart Could Only Talk
My great-grandmother was a white man’s mistress, doxy, common-law wife, whatever you want to call it. She was also just a slave on his plantation. Bad as things were in those days, black people and white people at least lived in the same world. The white people made it—built the quarters, decided who’d work in the fields, who’d pick cotton, and who’d squeeze mint in the big house. They decided who got what to eat, who got bought, and who got sold.
The white women didn’t have as much to do with it as the men. But they only had to look out their windows to see what was going on. There was damn little “segregation” on the plantations in the daytime, even less at night. Many a night my white great-grandfather went out in back of the little house where my great-grandmother lived—with her kids and his. He didn’t need any social worker to tell him about “conditions.” He knew what it was like back there.
In the early thirties when Mom and I started trying to kick and scratch out a living in Harlem, the world we lived in was still one that white people made. But it had become a world they damn near never saw. Sure, some of them patronized the after-hours joints; they came to the Cotton Club—a place Negroes never saw inside unless they played music or did the shakes or shimmies. But these were just side shows specially set up for white folks to come and pay their money for kicks.
These places weren’t for real. The life we lived was. But it was all backstage, and damn few white folks ever got to see it. When they did, they might as well have dropped in from another planet. Everything about it seemed to be news to them.
It was rugged. Sometimes I wonder how we survived. But we did. If we didn’t have what it took at the beginning, we picked it up along the way.
Our little flat was more than a home. It was a combination YMCA, boardinghouse for broke musicians, soup kitchen for anyone with a hard-luck story, community center, and after-after-hours joint where a couple of bucks would get you a shot of whisky and the most fabulous fried-chicken breakfast, lunch, or dinner anywhere in town.
Mom just loved people. Part of this might have come from never wanting to be alone, where she could only brood over Pop. Part of it must have come from her fears for me. She knew she wouldn’t be around for very long