Lady Sings the Blues - Billie Holiday [8]
When my mother came back to Baltimore one day she had nine hundred dollars she had saved. She bought a real fancy house on Pennsylvania Avenue in North Baltimore, the high-class part. She was going to take in roomers. We were going to live like ladies and everything was going to be fine.
All the big-time whores wore big red velvet hats then with bird-of-paradise feathers on them. These lids were the thing. You couldn’t touch one for less than twenty-five dollars—a lot of money in the twenties. I always wanted Mom to have one, and when she finally made it I loved it so I’d throw a fit unless she wore it from the time she got up in the morning until she went to bed at night. If she left the house without it, I’d carry on. She looked so pretty in it, and I thought she should look pretty all the time. She was no more than five feet tall and she weighed less than eighty pounds. In her red velvet bird-of-paradise hat she looked like a living doll.
When she went out in this fancy outfit she’d always talk about getting a rich husband so both of us working girls could retire. But her heart was never in it.
A while after Pop had married again Mom met Phil Gough. He was a Baltimore longshoreman but he came from a very high-class family. His sisters were all office workers, and besides, they were very light-skinned and thought it was terrible he was taking up with Mom and me, because we were a shade or two darker.
But he didn’t pay any attention to that. He married Mom anyway and he was a good stepdaddy to me as long as he lived, which was only a little while.
I was happy for a little bit. It couldn’t last.
One day when I came home from school Mom was at the hairdresser’s and there was nobody in the house but Mr. Dick, one of our neighbors. He told me Mother had asked him to wait for me and then take me a few blocks away to somebody’s house, where she would meet us.
Without me thinking anything about it, he took me by the hand and I went along. When we got to the house, a woman let us in. I asked for my mother and they said she would be along soon. I think they told me she had called them on the telephone and said she would be late. It got later and later and I began to get sleepy. Mr. Dick saw me dozing and took me into a back bedroom to lie down. I was almost asleep when Mr. Dick crawled up on me and started trying to do what my cousin Henry used to try. I started to kick and scream like crazy. When I did, the woman of the house came in and tried to hold my head and arms down on the bed so he could get at me. I gave both of them a hard time, kicking and scratching and screaming. Suddenly, when I was catching my breath, I heard some more hollering and shouting. The next thing I knew, my mother and a policeman broke the door down. I’ll never forget that night. Even if you’re a whore, you don’t want to be raped. A bitch can turn twenty-five hundred tricks a day and she still don’t want nobody to rape her. It’s the worst thing that can happen to a woman. And here it was happening to me when I was ten.
I couldn’t figure out how my mother had managed to find where they had taken me. But when she had come home, one of Mr. Dick’s girl friends, a jealous hustler, was waiting on the porch. She warned Mom to keep me away from her man.
Mom tried to brush her off, telling her I was just a kid and to quit being jealous and silly.
“Just a kid?” said this hustler, laughing. “She ran off with my man. She’s with him right now, and if you don’t believe me I’ll tell you where you’ll find them.”
Mom didn’t waste no time. She called the police and took this jealous bitch by the arm and dragged her to the house where they had me. And a house it was, too.
But that wasn’t the worst of it. The cops dragged Dick off to the police precinct. I was crying and bleeding in my mother’s arms, but they made us come along too.
When we got there instead of treating me and Mom like somebody who called the cops for help,