Lady Sings the Blues - Billie Holiday [21]
Mom not only loved people, she believed in them. She believed God made them, so there had to be some good in everybody. She found good in the strangest places and in the strangest people. She could find good in pimps and whores, even in thieves and murderers.
A bitch might be turning fifteen tricks a day and come to Mom in trouble, and Mom would go to bat for her, saying, “She’s a good little thing deep down underneath, and that’s what matters.”
She’d have a fit if someone dropped their hat on the bed or dropped salt on the floor. These were things she really took seriously. But she wouldn’t bat an eye at the other things people did. She kept her eye on the good spots she found in them somewhere.
You could be the biggest thief and scoundrel on the face of the earth, but all you had to do was tell Mom you were a musician and give her a little story and she’d give you everything in the house that wasn’t nailed down.
People took advantage of her, sure. But there wasn’t a cat around in those days who didn’t respect her. If Mom caught herself saying “goddamn” she’d have to go confess it. She was that proper and respectable. The house might be full and she’d be fixing fried chicken for a party of characters, and a fracas would start—some cat would be cussing out some broad a blue streak. But he’d always stop somewhere in the middle, out of respect to Mom, and say, “Excuse me, Mom, I’m sorry, but I got to straighten this whore out.”
I never got beyond the fifth grade in school—and they were Baltimore’s broken-down segregated schools at that. But I guess you could call that progress. Mom was only thirteen years older than me and had never got to school at all.
In my time the Board of Education didn’t care enough about it to send some social worker chasing after me. In Mom’s time they didn’t care at all.
One of the things we did together in those early Harlem days was hold classes. I was the teacher, Mom the pupil. And I taught her to read and write. Nothing I ever did gave me such a kick as getting a handwritten note from her later when I was on the road, or watching her fall out when she read a letter from Louis Armstrong signed “Red Beans and Ricely Yours.”
In between the time I got off Welfare Island and started singing around Harlem, I must have spent six months doing nothing. This drove Mom crazy. When she used to heckle me, I used to heckle back. “I ain’t in jail,” I’d tell her; “I ain’t disgracing nobody.” I had a little loot and I wasn’t going to do nothing until it was gone.
One day, in order to break up this same old argument, I was taking Mom to the old Lafayette Theatre in Harlem. Louis Armstrong was playing there and Mom was crazy about him.
We were crossing Seventh Avenue when a cat I knew hollered at me.
“Girl,” he said, “come here. Jimmy’s got the best panatella you ever smoked in your life.”
I tried to brush him off, but he wouldn’t brush.
I tried to shove him away like I’d never seen him before and at the same time give him a sign to shut up, I wasn’t alone.
He kept right on. “That’s all right,” he said. “Who’s she? Your sister? Bring her along too. There’ll be blue lights and red lights and we’ll pitch a ball.”
Mom knew about reefers, but she didn’t know I’d been smoking them for a year. She flipped. “You get out of here,” she told our friend. “If you don’t, I’m going to put her away until she’s twenty-one, and you in jail.”
We never got to see a movie, or Louis Armstrong, or nothing that day. When we got home I told Mom I had been smoking reefers for a year.
“If you’d seen any change in me,” I tried to tell her,