Lady Sings the Blues - Billie Holiday [36]
I kept doing this for so long, come rain and come shine, hot or cold, that it finally began to tell on me. The nervousness and strain finally fixed me so, I was good and sick. Every day riding that bus was torture. I finally went to one old doctor who took one look at me and treated me for clap. He put some packs on me, and that only made it worse.
Finally in Boston one day I couldn’t get out of bed and I called my mother. She must have flown up there from New York, she got there so fast. Max Kaminsky played trumpet with us then. He came from Boston and knew his way around. His mother still lived there. She was in her nineties, but when she heard about it she went to bat and sent me a doctor she knew in Boston. He was a woman’s specialist. He diagnosed it right—a bad inflammation of the bladder. After I’d gone through three months of torture, this specialist had me on my feet in three days.
When we got to Detroit, we played on the same stage in the same big theater where they tried to black me up because I was too light for the boys in the Basie band. The management never asked me to wear pink make-up to sing with a white band, but if they had I wouldn’t have been surprised.
Detroit was almost as far north as we ever went, but it was still full of crackers and I was always uneasy. One night Chuck Peterson asked me to go with him to a little backstage bar on the corner and have a drink. I didn’t want to go for the same old reason. But he insisted, and so we did.
In a matter of minutes some woman at the bar piped out that she wasn’t going to drink in the place if that nigger stood there, making clear she meant me. Chuck wanted to answer back, but I talked him out of it and we went on to finish our drink.
The next thing we knew, a man came over and started after Chuck. “What the hell’s going on?” he said. “A man can’t bring his wife in a bar any more without you tramp white men bringing a nigger woman in.”
Chuck wouldn’t stand for that, but before he knew it this guy and a couple more were on him, beating and kicking him. While everyone else stood around with their mouths open, this guy kept kicking Chuck in the mouth and saying, “I’ll fix it so you don’t play trumpet tonight.”
If my maid hadn’t come in just then from backstage to tell me it was show time and helped me get him out of there, they might have beat him to death.
I was sick for the rest of the booking in Detroit. Eventually Chuck’s mother, who happens to be a lawyer, sued the management for damages and collected a few thousand dollars.
There’s something weird about that town. Ten years later, it didn’t seem so much better. When I was headlining at the Paradise Theater in Detroit’s Negro section in 1949, I walked in a nearby bar. The bartender greeted me by telling me he couldn’t serve me because I had enough.
I asked him what he meant. “Do you really think I had enough or don’t you serve Negroes?”
“There she goes,” he said, “trying to start trouble. She must be drunk.”
The next time there was a riot in Detroit, I heard that this particular little saloon got taken apart.
There are traces of most of my musical days around on records. But the period with Artie is a big gap. That’s because the two of us got in a squeeze between two record labels. I was under contract to Columbia. They issued my records on their thirty-five-cent Vocalion label. Artie was under contract to Victor. When we wanted to do some sides together, Columbia agreed it would be O.K. for me to record with Artie and his band because Victor would release them and sell them for seventy-five cents a side. That wasn’t considered competition.
So we did a few things together. But when the time came to release them, Victor decided to issue them on their thirty-five-cent