Lady Sings the Blues - Billie Holiday [73]
And he had split back to New York, and I hadn’t heard from him again. So this convinced me Ehrlich was right, that I had to go to the trial, go on the stand and talk.
I had to live for months with a hammer over my head, waiting for it to fall. We didn’t go to trial until May 31.
Mr. Ehrlich sweated over the picking of that jury. So did I. He asked each one of them if they had anything against Negroes. One woman was dismissed because she did. We ended up with six women and six men, and I was only scared of one guy. I was sure he was going to vote to hang me.
I wouldn’t have known the first team from the scrubs, but Ehrlich told me the prosecutor and the judge were the best they had, and he should know.
The first witness was Colonel White. He told his story well and in great detail.
Then it was my turn to go on the stand.
How many times have I been in court in my life? It started when I was ten; then again when I was fourteen; then there are a couple times in between. One time when I was working on 52nd Street, a dressmaker brought a cheap dress in, tried to overcharge me, we got into an argument. She called me a name and I got so mad I stuck her head in a toilet bowl and flushed it. She took me to court, said I tried to drown her. But the judge listened, looked at me, and asked if she expected anyone to believe a famous lady singing star like me would do a thing like that, and that was that.
Then one time on 52nd Street after the war a cracker Navy officer at the bar had called me that same old thing. I picked up a bottle of beer, smashed it over the bar, and invited him in the street to a duel. There was a mess about that. But I came out on top.
Then there was the trial in Philly which wasn’t a trial at all. And now here I was back on the stand again, telling my life story again, and scared to death again.
There were those doctors from that San Francisco sanatorium. The D.A. tried to say their testimony was irrelevant, that it didn’t matter whether I used anything or not, the only thing that mattered was whether they had found it on me. But I think it impressed the jury that I had gone to this trouble to prove that I was clean. But I knew they wanted to hear it from me. So I just busted out and told them.
“I’d been in trouble before. Two years ago. I volunteered for the narcotics cure. It wasn’t for opium. But I ain’t had no drugs since. I came home and society took me back. Thank God for allowing me my second chance.”
It was soon all over but the important part. The jury went out and we had to sweat it out for an hour or so, smoking in the hallway, talking to reporters, getting my picture taken.
When the jury came in and the foreman reported “Not guilty,” you’d think I had just finished a concert. People applauded and cheered and crowded round me like it was my dressing room after an opening.
That one cat on the jury who had worried me, the one I thought was going to vote to hang me, even he came over. He looked me square in the eye and said, “You really didn’t know, did you?”
I said no.
On the first ballot the jury had voted nine to three for acquittal. The second vote was unanimous.
And who was the first person to call me up and say, “Darling, I’m so happy for you?”
Mr. John Levy.
I didn’t have carfare back, let alone the money to pay the attorney. He charged me thirty-seven hundred dollars, I think it was. John Levy had paid him a thousand or twelve hundred before he left.
John Levy offered to send me money to get back to New York. I refused. A couple years later I found out John Levy had still not paid Mr. Ehrlich. Ehrlich told me he was sorry for me and I was a fool, but he wanted his money.
By then Levy was far from the scene, and this was just one of a hundred people I owed, and I arranged to pay him five hundred dollars a week.
Good old Joe Tenner gave me money enough to get back to New York. He was good to me and he had been my friend. I came back to New York the way I had so many times before, poor