Lady Sings the Blues - Billie Holiday [38]
So I had to come in the back door. I don’t know why I didn’t walk out then and there, except Mom got such a kick out of listening to our nightly broadcasts. She was crazy about sitting home and hearing me on the radio.
The next thing I knew, I was singing less and less. Some nights I’d only be on for one song all night—and that would be before or after the band had been on the air.
Finally, when they cut me off the air completely, I said to hell with it. I just fired myself. I told Artie he should have told me when the big wheels cracked down on him. “Down South I can dig this kind of stuff, but I can’t take it in New York.”
The sheriff in Kentucky was at least honest. A real good cracker says, “I don’t like Negroes period.” Or “dot,” as they say in the South. Some just say, “I don’t want to socialize with Negroes.” They don’t tell you that behind your back, they tell it right to your face, and you know it. A cracker just wants you to clean up his house or take care of his kids and then get the hell out.
Even when they insult you they do it to your face. That’s the only way they can let you know they’re superior to you. They might die and leave you all their money, but somewhere in the fine print in that will they’ve got to let you know you were a good nigger but you’re still a nigger.
This sheriff in Kentucky called me “Blackie” to my face. The big-deal hotels, agencies, and networks in New York were giving me a fast shove behind my back.
I had been with Artie a year and a half. We had had some real times. I’ll always remember the night I sat on the piano bench in his hotel suite, looking across the Boston Back Bay for twelve hours, pounding out two bass notes while he finished writing his theme song, “Nightmare.”
There aren’t many people who fought harder than Artie against the vicious people in the music business or the crummy side of second-class citizenship which eats at the guts of so many musicians. He didn’t win. But he didn’t lose either. It wasn’t long after I left that he told them to shove it like I had. And people still talk about him as if he were nuts because there were things more important to him than a million damn bucks a year.
Chapter 9
Sunny Side of the Street
It’s only five miles—thirty-five minutes by the IRT—from Pod’s and Jerry’s at 133rd Street off Seventh Avenue to Sheridan Square, near Fourth Street on the same avenue. But the places were worlds apart and it took about seven years to make the trip.
The next big thing that happened to me was at Café Society Downtown. It was just a basement full of people mopping, cleaning, dusting, painting murals, and a hopeful notion of a Jersey shoe manufacturer named Barney Josephson when I first went down there. I met him through John Hammond.
Barney and his wife, a really wonderful girl, told me this was to be one club where there was going to be no segregation, no racial prejudice. “Everybody’s going to be for real in here.”
This was what I’d been waiting for. I was so happy. The opening bill included Meade Lux Lewis, the two-piano boogie-woogie team of Albert Ammons and Pete Johnson, Joe Turner, and Frank Newton had the band.
I’ll never forget that opening night. There must have been six hundred people in the joint, celebrities, artists, rich society people. And a big hitch. Barney had his liquor license, but nobody could go on until we had the cabaret license—and it hadn’t arrived. It got to be eleven o’clock, and we were getting panicky. The cops were standing by.
I couldn’t stand the suspense any longer. “Come on, let’s take a chance,” I told Barney. “One night in jail isn’t going to hurt anybody.”
We had already decided to take the chance and go on at eleven-thirty, when the license arrived at the last minute, like the Marines. So with the cops standing by, we went on. Meade Lux Lewis knocked them out; Ammons and Johnson flipped them; Joe Turner killed them; Newton’s band sent them; and then I came on. This was an audience.