Lady Sings the Blues - Billie Holiday [84]
I should have known something like this would happen. Almost twenty years before Hugh Panassie, the big French jazz authority, came over to America, I met him at Irene and Teddy Wilson’s. He flipped over my red beans and rice and I had to give him a big case of dried red beans to take back with him.
I’m still sending dried red beans to people in London.
Chapter 24
God Bless the Child
Well, Billie, you’re back again. We been expecting you. You know you won’t get a thing in here.”
It was the old woman doctor in the Philadelphia jail again, yapping good morning just before dawn on Thursday, February 23, 1956. She seemed unhappy because she hadn’t seen me—without paying—for nine years.
I straightened her wig right off. “I ain’t asked you for nothing and I’m not likely to. But you can’t even wait until I do before you tell me no.”
She was talking about dope and I knew it. But I was talking about human kindness and she knew it. Sure, I’d been busted again. And I was in jail. But nothing she could say or do could bug me. This went for the whole crew—the fuzz who busted in my hotel room, the magistrate sitting on his bench at dawn waiting for me to come on, the police inspector putting out big stories to the papers, the cameramen flashing those bulbs in the face of my little two-pound Chihuahua Pepi as he led me into the clink on his leash.
I knew the papers would say: “What, again?” It might look like just old times, but it wasn’t. There was a big difference. I didn’t feel lost. I didn’t feel alone. And I wasn’t alone. Louis was with me. They carried us off together and Louis held my hand and whispered: “Lady, don’t you worry about a thing. You and I are going to beat this thing. And I’m going to take care of you and see we do.”
God has blessed you when he lets you believe in somebody. And I believed in Louis.
I had worked that week at the Showboat in South Philadelphia. We stayed at a little hotel around the corner in a room with a kitchenette. After the last show Wednesday night, sometime after 2 A.M. when they closed the joint, Louis and I walked home. I had undressed, fed Pepi, and was standing there in my drawers with a little pot of lima beans in my hand. Somebody turned the key in our door from the outside, so quiet like it had been greased. I never heard a thing until I saw four men and a woman standing there with a warrant. Louis talked to them, looked over their papers, saw they were legit. He was cool and gentle as a lamb. He asked me to get dressed and go with them. He didn’t like what I started to put on. He reminded me the photographers were waiting, and asked me to put on something prettier.
The first thing they did, like they always do, is to lock the toilet bowl so it won’t flush. Then they started searching the place. The bathroom was about the size of an overseas trunk, but they wouldn’t even let me go in there alone. The plain-clothes woman climbed in there with me. Lucky for her she was skinny and didn’t take up too much room.
Before they were through they ransacked everything we owned; they threw around my gowns, looked through my coats, my shoes, my underwear; poked in my makeup; they looked in the dog food, under the rug, behind the drapes, in the bed and under it. The plain-clothes woman searched my body, looked in my ears, under my bra and my girdle. They turned Louis’ linings inside out the same way. But there was nothing there.
They found Louis’ gun smack on the top of his suitcase. That’s where he keeps it so it couldn’t be missed. He seemed relieved about that. He had told me a hundred times that if the local law ever went out on a limb to arrest me and couldn’t turn up any evidence, the gun would give them something to save face with. He thought they would arrest him for carrying the gun without a permit; he could take the rap and it would be easier than causing them the trouble of trying to get something on me that could be made to stick in court.
Don’t forget,