Lady Sings the Blues - Billie Holiday [6]
A victrola was a big deal in those days, and there weren’t any parlors around that had one except Alice’s. I spent many a wonderful hour there listening to Pops and Bessie. I remember Pops’ recording of “West End Blues” and how it used to gas me. It was the first time I ever heard anybody sing without using any words. I didn’t know he was singing whatever came into his head when he forgot the lyrics. Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba and the rest of it had plenty of meaning for me—just as much meaning as some of the other words that I didn’t always understand. But the meaning used to change, depending on how I felt. Sometimes the record would make me so sad I’d cry up a storm. Other times the same damn record would make me so happy I’d forget about how much hard-earned money the session in the parlor was costing me.
But Mom didn’t favor her daughter hanging around the house on the corner. And especially she couldn’t understand why I wasn’t bringing home any loot. “I know Eleanora,” she used to complain, Eleanora being the name I’d been baptized under, “and she don’t work for nobody for nothing.” When Mom found out I was using my hard-earned money paying rent on Alice’s parlor to listen to jazz on the victrola, she nearly had a fit too.
I guess I’m not the only one who heard their first good jazz in a whorehouse. But I never tried to make anything of it. If I’d heard Louis and Bessie at a Girl Scout jamboree, I’d have loved it just the same. But a lot of white people first heard jazz in places like Alice Dean’s, and they helped label jazz “whorehouse music.”
They forget what it was like in those days. A whorehouse was about the only place where black and white folks could meet in any natural way. They damn well couldn’t rub elbows in the churches. And in Baltimore, places like Alice Dean’s were the only joints fancy enough to have a victrola and for real enough to pick up on the best records.
I know this for damn sure. If I’d heard Pops and Bessie wailing through the window of some minister’s front parlor, I’d have been running free errands for him. There weren’t any priests in Baltimore then like Father Norman O’Connor of Boston, who loves jazz and now has a big radio congregation listening to his disc-jockey shows.
About the only other place you could hear music those days was at dances. So I used to go to as many dances as I could get near. Not to dance, just to listen to the band. You couldn’t expect Cousin Ida to believe that, though. She accused me of staying off the dance floor so I could hang around the edges and pick up boys. So she’d beat me for that too.
She was always worried about me and boys. We lived next door to a junk shop. The junk wagon was always parked in front after making the rounds that day. The neighborhood boys used to hang around in the junk wagon shooting marbles and dice. And I used to hang around with them. I used to shoot with them and fight with them, but that’s all. One day a nosy old lady hung herself out a second-story window and started shaking her finger at me. Then she came down and hollered at me, saying I was a disgrace to the neighborhood for what I was doing with the boys.
I had no eyes for sex and I was doing nothing with the boys that another boy couldn’t do. I was one of the boys. So when this nosy old bitch shook her finger at me I hollered right back. “You think I’m doing that thing with them, don’t you?” I asked her.
When she heard the naughty word she forgot what she was raising hell about and started hollering about my language. She thought it was terrible for me to say what she had been thinking. I didn’t care about what she thought,