Lady Sings the Blues - Billie Holiday [5]
We used to talk about life. And she used to tell me how it felt to be a slave, to be owned body and soul by a white man who was the father of her children. She couldn’t read or write, but she knew the Bible by heart from beginning to end and she was always ready to tell me a story from the Scriptures.
She was ninety-six or ninety-seven then and had dropsy. I used to take care of her every day after school. No one else paid any attention. I’d give her a bath sometimes. And I’d always bind her legs with fresh cloths and wash the smelly old ones.
She’d been sleeping in chairs for ten years. The doctor had told her she’d die if ever she laid down. But I didn’t know. And once after I’d changed the cloths on her legs and she had told me a story, she begged me to let her lie down. She said she was tired. I didn’t want to let her. But she kept begging and begging. It was pitiful.
Finally I spread a blanket on the floor and helped her stretch out. Then she asked me to lie down with her because she wanted to tell me another story. I was tired too. I’d been up early that morning to scrub steps. So I laid down with her. I don’t remember the story she told me because I fell asleep right away.
I woke up four or five hours later. Grandma’s arm was still tight around my neck and I couldn’t move it. I tried and tried and then I got scared. She was dead, and I began to scream. The neighbors came running. They had to break Grandma’s arm to get me loose. Then they took me to a hospital. I was there for a month. Suffering from what they said was shock.
When I got home Cousin Ida started right in where she had left off, beating me. This time it was for letting Grandma out of her chair. The doctor tried to stop her. He said if she kept it up I’d grow up to be nervous. But she never stopped.
I was a woman when I was sixteen. I was big for my age, with big breasts, big bones, a big fat healthy broad, that’s all. So I started working out then, before school and after, minding babies, running errands, and scrubbing those damn white steps all over Baltimore.
When families in the neighborhood used to pay me a nickel for scrubbing them down, I decided I had to have more money, so I figured out a way. I bought me a brush of my own, a bucket, some rags, some Octagon soap, and a big white bar of that stuff I can’t ever forget—Bon Ami.
The first time I stood on a white doorstep and asked this woman for fifteen cents for the job, she like to had a fit. But I explained to her the higher price came from me bringing my own supplies. She thought I had a damn nerve, I guess, but while she was thinking it over I said I’d scrub the kitchen or bathroom floor for the same price. That did it. I had the job.
All these bitches were lazy. I knew it and that’s where I had them. They didn’t care how filthy their damn houses were inside, as long as those white steps were clean. Sometimes I’d bring home as much as ninety cents a day. I even made as high as $2.10—that’s fourteen kitchen or bathroom floors and as many sets of steps.
When I went into the scrubbing business it was the end of roller skating, bike riding, and boxing, too. I used to like boxing. In school they used to teach us girls to box. But I didn’t keep it up. Once a girl hit me on the nose and it just about finished me. I took my gloves off and beat the pants off her. The gym teacher got so sore, I never went near the school gym again.
But whether I was riding a bike or scrubbing somebody’s dirty bathroom floor, I used to love to sing all the time. I liked music. If there was a place where I could go and hear it, I went.
Alice Dean used to keep a whorehouse on the corner nearest our