Lady Sings the Blues - Billie Holiday [40]
When I was thirteen I got real evil one time and set in my ways. I just plain decided one day I wasn’t going to do anything or say anything unless I meant it. Not “Please, sir.” Not “Thank you, ma’am.” Nothing. Unless I meant it.
You have to be poor and black to know how many times you can get knocked in the head just for trying to do something as simple as that.
But I never gave up trying. And I tried to do it whether it was on my own home ground in Harlem or on somebody else’s.
I found out the main difference between uptown and downtown was people are more for real up there. They got to be, I guess. Uptown a whore was a whore; a pimp was a pimp; a thief was a thief; a faggot was a faggot; a dike was a dike; a mother-hugger was a mother-hugger.
Downtown it was different—more complicated. A whore was sometimes a socialite; a pimp could be a man about town; a thief could be an executive; a faggot could be a playboy; a dike might be called a deb; a mother-hugger was somebody who wasn’t adjusted and had problems.
I always had trouble keeping this double talk straight. And sometimes when I messed up, the fur and feathers would fly so you’d think nobody around there ever called a spade a spade before.
“What will people think?” is a big deal in ofay circles. It never mattered a damn to me, but I got interested in the way it worked and saw what it did to people who cared.
There was a girl, for instance, I first met at Café Society and got to know pretty well. I’m going to call her Brenda. She was a good-looking chick about my age. She lived on Fifth Avenue in a big apartment full of money. Her family had a corner of the paper business or something. Every time she blew her nose she made some more loot.
She came around night after night. She was crazy about my singing and used to wait for me to finish up. I wasn’t blind. I hadn’t been on Welfare Island for nothing. It wasn’t long before I knew I had become a thing for this girl. It got embarrassing. But I felt sorry for her too. Before long she got to depend on seeing me and being around. And I working in a public place. I couldn’t tell her I was sick and then show up for three shows a night. I couldn’t very well use the doorman for a maid and have him tell her I wasn’t home.
Then she started buying and sending me presents—slacks and jackets, suits cut and tailored like a man’s with butchy accessories.
This made no kind of sense. I might not be a lot of things, but one look at me and you can mark me down as a girl-type girl. No charge account at Abercrombie & Fitch could change that.
But there we were, a rich white heiress from Fifth Avenue and a Negro girl from uptown. Yet I could hang around on Fifth Avenue with Brenda and nobody so much as batted an eye—not the uniformed doorman, neighbors, servants, nobody, not even her mother. For all anybody cared, we could have been a couple of college girls out on a field trip studying race relations or some other damn kind of conditions.
But just let me walk out of the club one night with a young white boy of my age, whether it was John Roosevelt, the President’s son, or Joe Blow. Let us go around the corner to get a drink, and every sonofabitch and his brother would have his tongue out and be prepared to go to court and swear we were having a hot old affair and what will people think?
They still make it hot for a Negro girl who walks to the corner with a white man. But a black chick and a white chick can be married and carrying on and everything’s cool as far as the what-will-people-think people are concerned.
This is a mess for Negroes and a mess for white people. I’ve known black chicks in show business who were as feminine as me, but before long they got acting like lezzies because it’s so easy, and all the pressure is that way, and it’s less trouble.
But some girls like Brenda are sadder still. They can’t love or let themselves go with anybody—man or woman. They