Lady Sings the Blues - Billie Holiday [51]
Then you’d come back to 52nd Street in New York and find the joint full of cats in khaki. I gave so many going-away parties at the Famous Door and other places, I lost count. It was always the same: three or four young boys would spend the whole night in the joint; we’d lock up, have a final drink, and they’d walk off. A few weeks later I’d get a letter from some damn island somewhere, where they were fighting the bugs and snakes, the heat and the dry rot.
Some of these letters would break your heart. They came from kids I never really knew, or who knew nothing about me, but I was never able to throw them away. Sometimes when they came from kids who really freaked for me, I’d send and get a wind-up victrola and ship it off to them with a bunch of my records or some of Duke Ellington’s. These might be rich kids who had everything they wanted in the world back here, and yet when they got an old twenty-dollar victrola and twenty bucks’ worth of records they’d think this was the greatest thing that ever happened.
They’d write about waiting and waiting and never knowing for what, going around naked all day and covered up at night to fight off the bugs, and nothing to do except listen to my damn records.
It would be months before they’d see a woman, if ever. Oh, I carried on some torrid long-distance affairs with these kids. Most of them I never saw again. For that I was lucky. The few I did see when they came back tore me apart. One night in the Blue Note in Chicago, late in the war, a kid came in to see me and started talking about a party a couple years before at the Famous Door on 52nd Street. I went along with the gag and the reminiscences and then suddenly I recognized him. His hair had turned completely white and he looked forty years old, though he couldn’t have been more than twenty-five when he left.
But none of this stuff was real. Because no man of mine was ever taken away from me by the wars. I don’t know what I would have done if he had and some of the things had happened to him like happened to other Negro soldiers.
That stuff ate at you too. So much you didn’t know what to do. Negro boys I knew had spent a lifetime scuffling to get up from down South and to make it somewhere in New York. Then bam, they’d be drafted and end up right back in some camp in the South.
Take this cat I knew. He was as nice a guy as you’d want to see, with a wonderful setup in Harlem, a big Cadillac, a fancy apartment, and a beautiful white chick living with him. And all the things that plenty of money could buy.
Within two weeks of the time he kissed this chick goodbye in his Cadillac on Lexington Avenue he was kicking up dust in Georgia. It was his first taste of the South. He didn’t even know what he’d been missing.
He almost blew his top. Finally he couldn’t take it any more and split for New York. He was AWOL for a week before anyone could even talk to him. You could tell him all the terrible things that were going to happen when they caught up with him, but he could only think about what had already gone down.
Nothing could be worse than this. Finally his girl and me got so nervous we put through a call to the first sergeant of his outfit in Georgia. We told him our problem. He said they hadn’t even missed him yet, but something was up. The CO was on his trail. If he split right back, his topkick said, they might not ever know he’d been gone. With this we were able to convince him to go back and face the music.
And music it was, too. By Irving Berlin. When he got back they rushed him off to audition as a dancer for a part in This Is the Army. He spent the rest of the damn war in his tap shoes, with his chick following him from town to town.
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Then there were others. When I think of kids like Jimmy Davis I could cry to think of all the life and talent we lost in the damn war and that nobody even knows about. Jimmy was in the Army when he wrote “Lover Man” and brought it straight to me.
I loved it and wanted to record it. Before I could