Lady Sings the Blues - Billie Holiday [31]
Then suddenly one night in February 1937, when I was working at the Uptown House, ten minutes before going on I was called to the phone. It was a long-distance call for me from Dallas, Texas.
A real cold voice said, “Is this Eleanora Billie Holiday?”
I said yes.
“Is Clarence Holiday your father?”
I said yes again.
“He just died,” the voice said. He went on with some words I was too dazed to make out. “You want to send for the body?”
I didn’t know what to do or say. I stood there with the phone in my hand and couldn’t say a word. Clarke Monroe, luckily, was nearby. He came to the phone. It was some veterans’ hospital in Texas trying to weed out their morgue. Clarke was wonderful. He took over, loaned me his car, and took care of all the arrangements.
When his body arrived we found they had laid Pop out in his bandstage tuxedo. But his white dress shirt was covered with blood. I never knew who to blame for that, but anyway Clarke got him straight before we let Mom in to see his body.
Mom walked up to Pop’s coffin, and I can see her there now. She knelt there for four hours and twenty minutes. I know because I waited out every minute of it for her. She didn’t shed a tear or make a sound. She just held her rosary in her hand, and if you looked closely you could see her lips move.
After a couple hours the man who ran the funeral parlor and I tried to get her up, but nobody could move her.
He was the only man she ever really loved. They hadn’t been together for years, but that didn’t ever change the way she felt about him. She felt he still belonged to her, or some part of him did, and she never got over his death.
She was very, very sentimental and just as religious. She could understand and forgive people who took marriage more lightly, but it was always a holy sacrament to her. A doctor had told her once when she was about to have the change of life that she should forget Pop and try to live normally and take a natural interest in some other man. But she wouldn’t. He was her man.
People have really to feel deeply about something or somebody before a tragedy like Pop’s death could turn into a comedy like his funeral.
The cast was not large, but it was crazy and complicated. First there was Mom and me. Then there was his second wife, Fanny Holiday, who was my stepmother. So I didn’t have one crazy woman on my hands, I had two.
But that wasn’t all. There were a few sporting girls claiming to be his one and only. But it wasn’t long before I found out I had two stepmothers—the second one a white woman.
She showed up at Pop’s coffin with two kids—my half brother and sister, who were white too. All this was news to me. But she was a lovely woman and the two kids were handsome. It turned out she was very wealthy, had met Pop when he worked at Roseland, and they had these two kids which she was raising as white.
Seeing my half sister and brother reminded me how crazy this country is. There was the Roseland management, the place where I used to hang out in the downstairs hall and wait for Pop so I could bug him about the rent. Anybody who worked there and so much as looked at a white girl within sight of the management would lose his job in a minute. If they had caught Pop having a drink with a white bitch the management would have flipped.
But this was all for show, or it was for nothing. If they were trying to keep Negroes from sleeping with white girls, it sure worked in reverse. All the cops in the precinct couldn’t have stopped if they tried. And here were the two kids to prove it.
I talked with her about the kids and about Pop. She told me she was bringing them up as white. I told her she could do as she damn well thought best, and if they could pass, let them. But I still thought she was wrong not to tell them the truth. They would catch on sometime—if they hadn’t already, looking at their mother’s face as she looked at Pop’s body in that funeral parlor. Who did she think she was kidding? If I had been their age I’d have been wise the minute I walked in. And I wasn’t