Lady Sings the Blues - Billie Holiday [4]
Getting gassed was the end of his hopes for the trumpet but the beginning of a successful career on the guitar. He started to learn it when he was in Paris. And it was a good thing he did. Because it kept him from going to pieces when he got back to Baltimore. He just had to be a musician. He worked like hell when he got back and eventually got a job with McKinney’s Cotton Pickers. But when he went on the road with that band it was the beginning of the end of our life as a family. Baltimore got to be just another one-night stand.
While Pop was overseas in the war, Mom had worked in a factory making Army overalls and uniforms. When Pop hit the road, the war jobs were finished and Mom figured she could do better going off up North as a maid. She had to leave me with my grandparents, who lived in a poor little old house with my cousin Ida, her two small children, Henry and Elsie, and my great-grandmother.
All of us were crowded in that little house like fishes. I had to sleep in the same bed with Henry and Elsie, and Henry used to wet it every night. It made me mad and sometimes I’d get up and sit in a chair until morning. Then my cousin Ida would come in in the morning, see the bed, accuse me of wetting it, and start beating me. When she was upset she’d beat me something awful. Not with a strap, not with a spank on the ass, but with her fists or a whip.
She just didn’t understand me. Other kids, when they did something wrong, would lie their way out of it. But if I did anything wrong I’d come right out and admit it. And she’d have a fit, call me a sinner and tell me I’d never amount to anything. She never got through telling my mother I was going to bring home a baby and disgrace the damn family like she did. One time she heard me say “Damn it” and she thought this was so sinful she tossed a pot of hot starch at me. She missed, though, because I ducked.
She was always finding fault with whatever I did, but she never did pick up on Henry. He was her son and he could do no wrong. When I got tired of getting beaten because he wet the bed I got Elsie one night and convinced her we should both sleep on the floor. She was scared. It was cold and she thought we might freeze.
“All right,” I told her, “so we might freeze. But if we ain’t frozen to death in the morning, the bed’ll be wet and we won’t be in it.”
It was and we weren’t, so this time Cousin Ida beat me for being smart with her. “Henry’s weak,” she said.
You couldn’t tell her nothing about Henry, why that boy used to give us girls a terrible time. He even tried to do what we called “that thing” to us while we were sleeping. Sometimes we would be so tired from fighting this little angel off all night, we wouldn’t wake up in time for school. I used to try to plead with him because I knew it wouldn’t do any good to talk to Cousin Ida.
“Henry,” I’d say to him, “it ain’t so bad with me. I’m only your cousin. But Elsie’s your sister, and besides, she’s sick.”
Henry grew up to be a prize fighter and then a minister. But when he was little I had hell with that boy.
One day we were playing baseball and afterwards I was sitting on the curb. I was scared of the tiniest bugs, anything that crawled, and Henry knew it. This day he came up to me holding one of Baltimore’s biggest goddamn rats by the tail, swinging it in my face.
“Don’t do that, Henry,” I begged him.
“What’s the matter, you scared?” he said, grinning and swinging it closer and closer to me.
“All girls is scared of rats and bugs,” I said.
He kept right on swinging. Finally he hit me in the face with the rat. I took a baseball bat and put him in the Johns Hopkins Hospital.
I don’t think my grandma ever understood me either, but she never beat me like Cousin Ida did, and that was something. My grandpop loved me, though. He was half Irish and named after his father, Charles Fagan, who was straight from Ireland.
The one I really liked best, though, was my great-grandmother, my grandfather’s mother.
She really