Lady Sings the Blues - Billie Holiday [50]
I came to New York as quick as I could. Joe Glaser had gone ahead and made all the arrangements for the funeral. They brought me to the funeral home, and he came with me. Everybody thought I was terrible because I didn’t want to look at Mama in the coffin. Joe insisted that I look at her. The way I felt went way back to Baltimore when my great-grandma had died in my arms; when they made me look at Cousin Ida in her coffin. But Joe Glaser had already put up the money for the embalming and the funeral and he wanted me to realize how much he’d spent on it and how good he’d put her away.
Finally they made me look and see what I didn’t want to see. When I did, I really blew my top. She always had lovely clothes, but they had some old kind of an angel-pink lacy shroud on her instead of one of her good suits.
I made them change that. There wasn’t anything else I could do. I couldn’t cry. When I die people can maybe cry for me because they’ll know they’re going to start me off in hell and move me from bad to worse. But wherever Mom was going, it couldn’t be worse than what she’d known. She was through with trouble, through with heartache, and through with pain.
I went back to Washington and finished the week.
Mom got to be thirty-eight when I was twenty-five. She would never have more than four candles on her birthday cake. So she was only thirty-eight when she died. I’m going to do the same thing. I’ve staying thirty-eight myself, maybe forty tops. She never cared what the calendars said, and neither do I. Sometimes I feel twenty and sometimes I feel two hundred, and when you do, no arithmetic can pep you up or slow you down.
Chapter 13
One Never Knows
These were the war years—strange ones for me, too.
My great-grandma had seen the Civil War right outside the windows of her little house on the backside of the Virginia plantation. People like her knew what war was all about, but most of them were dead. The rest of us, what the hell did we know about what was going on.
Parades, War Bond rallies, USO tours, ration books, and letters with weird postmarks, they were far from being the real thing.
I sang to different kinds of audience, saw them change from flannel to khaki, and it always felt like everybody was closer together than before, like we were all stranded in the same big storm. It was like just after an earthquake, everybody talked about the same thing. But it went on so long you got used to it, just like you get used to anything.
I’ll never forget the first time I set off on a USO tour, I showed up at the airport all dressed up in a real sharp outfit. I started waltzing up the steps to the Army plane, leading my dog Mister on a real long leash, when suddenly a guy in uniform barked out at me, “Where do you think you’re going, miss?”
“I’m going to Florida to sing and I ain’t getting paid, so don’t give me no hard time,” I answered him back.
He straightened me out real quick. I had to get down off that stairway, take off my sharp duds, get myself into uniform, leave my dog behind. When I saw the inside of the plane I could see what they were getting at. It was a stripped-down bucket-seated job. You sat on your parachute, staring at somebody else across the way sitting on theirs. By the time you got where you were going you felt like a green recruit who’d spent his first day drilling in the sun.
I don’t know how many miles I traveled singing to the troops during those days, by plane, train, even our own white bus. Every time I looked around, Joe Guy had me flying somewhere for a show.
Soldier audiences were so great they spoiled you for the spoiled audiences back home. They loved everything I did, but they never got tired of asking for “Billie’s Blues,” “Fine and Mellow,” or “Body and Soul.”
There was nothing you could see more pitiful than a couple of thousand cats, stranded off somewhere in cracker country, with no music, no women, no nothing. After every show they’d pick me to pieces, take the flowers out of my hair and divide them petal by petal. They’d even ask for pieces of