Lady Sings the Blues - Billie Holiday [32]
So getting together the funeral was a mess. The immediate family was to ride first. But deciding who was more immediate than whom was when the stuff hit the fan. And I caught it because I was running everything. The preacher, the doctor, the funeral director, all were asking me for their orders.
Naturally Mom said she was the one, the first, if not the only. So a big squabble started between her and Fanny Holiday. Mom put her foot down flatly and said if Fanny was going to ride in the first car she was riding somewhere else. I tried to referee by saying “Liblab’s dead, nobody can bring him back. He’s going to be in the ground in about five damn minutes, and now what can you two women possibly have to fight about?” Liblab is the musician’s word for ad lib, and that was Pop’s nickname.
Mom was little Mrs. Five by Five, but she was a proud one. She said she wouldn’t ride with me and Fanny Holiday, and she kept her word. Clarke Monroe had loaned me his Cadillac, but Mom flew off and chartered a Cadillac of her own.
Fanny and I rode to the graveside together for the services. There were cars of flowers and delegations from the Masons, the Elks, and Local 802, but there was no sign of Mom. It wasn’t until I got back home that she finally rode up in her rented machine. She had gotten lost and couldn’t find the cemetery.
Mom never really recovered from the shock of Pop’s death. It took me a long time too. Especially a little while later when we finally learned how he had died. Big Sid Catlett had been in the room with him, in Don Redmond’s band, and he told us what happened.
He had caught a funny kind of pneumonia. I suppose it would be simple now with penicillin and all. But then it was a big deal. He couldn’t sleep, couldn’t sit down, couldn’t do anything except walk around town or pace the floor of his room.
And it wasn’t the pneumonia that killed him, it was Dallas, Texas. That’s where he was and where he walked around, going from hospital to hospital trying to get help. But none of them would even so much as take his temperature or take him in. That’s the way it was.
Pop finally found a veterans’ hospital, and because he had been in the Army, had ruined his lungs and had records to prove it, they finally let him in the Jim Crow ward down there.
By that time it was too late. He had a hemorrhage. All they could do for him was give him a bed to die in and notify his next of kin.
His death was an awful blow, but I kept right on singing after I heard about it. I don’t know why. No one else understood either. I needed something to do. And I was sure Pop wouldn’t have wanted me to stop on account of him or go in for any mourning or crying. For him, life had always been a ball. He loved it and lived it up and wanted me to do the same.
While he was laid out I kept singing at the Uptown House. The second night an old bitch waltzed into the club, heard me, and said, “You ought to be ashamed of yourself, singing like that while your pop’s lying up there in a funeral parlor.”
Until then I had been too broken up to talk to anybody about it. But this bitch was too much for me. I let go and slapped her across the face as hard as I could.
“I know it, I know it,” she answered back. “You’ll never turn out to be anything. You’re just cheap.”
This hurt so much I didn’t say a damn thing. I just walked away. If I hadn’t been sure she was long since dead, I could have sworn this bitch was my cousin Ida. She had her evil sound, her evil ways, and her evil, evil mind.
Chapter 8
Travelin’ Light
Don’t tell me about those pioneer chicks hitting the trail in those slip-covered wagons with the hills full of redskins. I’m the girl who went West in 1937 with sixteen white cats, Artie Shaw and his Rolls-Royce—and the hills were full of white crackers.
It all began one night at Clarke Monroe’s Uptown House.
Artie came in and got to talking and dreaming about his new band. He thought he needed something sensational to give it a shove.
“Something sensational? That’s easy,