With Billie (8 page)
Authors: Julia Blackburn
Linda Kuehl was obviously not convinced. She asked Wee Wee, ‘Well, how did she make money?’
‘Well, like I said, her grandfather was pretty good to her,’ he replied.
‘And she was hustling?’ said Linda Kuehl.
‘Yeah, probably so,’ came the answer. ‘Yeah, definitely so. When she hung around with Alice Dean and them girls, that’s what they did. So she had to be doing the same thing …
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She was on her own for maybe two years. People knew. That’s what gave her a bad name. My mother loved her, and Billie would come and spend a night at Durham Street and eat, and my mother tried to talk to her, about being a good girl. She’d come up to the house, get a meal, listen, but she never give a damn.’
Wee Wee said that Billie stayed with him and his mother at the house on Durham Street on the night before she set off to join Sadie in New York. Wee Wee took her to the station the following morning. He didn’t mention that she was wearing a white voile dress with a shiny red belt around her waist.
He heard nothing more about her until the summer of 1932 or 1933, when Sadie contacted him to let him know that Billie was coming to Sparrow’s Beach and was singing with Count Basie’s band, and could Wee Wee ‘spread it around and build her up’.
‘A lot of her friends were excited and a lot didn’t believe it,’ he said. ‘They didn’t think it could be her. All of East Baltimore went to Sparrow’s Beach that Sunday to see if she could sing. They said she did good. She was all right. She could sing. She made good … Practically all the guys I knew went that Sunday.’
After this meeting Billie always tried to see Wee Wee whenever she came back to Baltimore. As he said, ‘I was her stepfather. She knew I wasn’t her father, but she didn’t have no father.’
The last time they met was when Billie was appearing at the Royal. She had heard that Wee Wee’s wife Viola was sick in bed and so she went to visit her at the house. When she learnt that Wee Wee was in the barber’s shop downstairs she followed him there and sat with him while he got a shave and a haircut. The people in the shop wanted her to sing and Billie said she couldn’t because of her contract with the Royal. She bought drinks for everybody instead.
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Billie’s first cousin John Fagan gave a very different account of these family relationships, saying that Sadie was treated ‘kind of cool, because of Billie’. It wasn’t the fact of her illegitimacy (he calls it bastardy), but it was because Clarence Holiday, ‘he ain’t from the Point, from the East Side, I don’t know exactly where he’s from. So they gave Sadie a hard time … Billie was disgusted by this … One night we went to the Astoria – me and my father and my sister, and after she finished a set … she came over and she made a remark that, “So far as I’m concerned, all the Fagans are dead!” What she meant was that she carried that feeling over till after she was successful, because her mother had gotten this hard time from her family when she was small.’
†
This is contradicted by Pony Kane, who said that Wee Wee was married to a woman called Mary who moved out of Durham Street when he started with Sadie.
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When John Fagan was asked the same question, he said, ‘Of course Billie turned tricks. What else are you going to do in those times. You had to make ends meet. You had to survive.’ He also insisted that she was ‘not like a slut. No, no, no, no! She was not staggering from one bar to another. She just lived fast. The difference is this. Some people are good-time people, but they have their principles about themselves. They are out after hours and … they go in and wash their faces and clean up and sleep half the day and go out all night and sleep again. Billie had that pride and respect for herself.’
The Pursuit of Happiness
I
n 1776 the Declaration of Independence stated that all men were created equal and every American was promised ‘certain unalienable Rights’. These included the right to ‘the pursuit of happiness’, as if happiness were a wild animal lurking in the woods and bushes of life, and you and everyone else must go out and follow its trail, dogs on the scent, guns at the ready.
You search and search, trying to flush out this elusive, fleeting creature, and there is always the possibility that as the years move on you might fail to catch a glimpse of it, or even fail to recognise it as it races past you. But what happens if you do manage to find happiness and you have it in your grasp? Must you allow it to escape, just so that you can continue with the joy of the hunt? Or is it something you can keep hold of for ever, in spite of the vicissitudes of time and circumstance?
And if you have the right to pursue the promise of happiness, do you also have a similar right to eradicate any evidence of unhappiness that gets in your way? To remove all the perceived threats that surround you, in order to provide more space, where the happy things you long for can increase and multiply?
Alcohol is a case in point. During the years after the Civil War the American press was flooded with articles and editorials that blamed alcohol as the chief cause of poverty, crime, disease and insanity. In the isolated rural communities of the South, huge crowds would flock into the Baptist and Methodist churches to listen to their preachers describing the abominations caused by the demon drink. It was said that in order to clear the path for paradise on Earth, it was first necessary to stamp out this sin, and whole congregations were united in a mood of wild hysteria. It was suggested that fatal poisons should be added secretly to hard liquor and, if thousands died as a result, the price would still not be too high. It was said that drinkers should be deported, excluded from the churches, forbidden to marry, branded, tattooed, sterilised, tortured, whipped and even executed along with their children, as far as the fourth generation.
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For white southerners, the dangers of alcohol took on an extra dimension. As Congressman Richmond Pearson Hobson from Alabama explained to the House of Representatives in 1914, ‘Liquor will actually make a brute out of the Negro, causing him to commit unnatural crimes … The effect is the same on the white man, though the white man being further evolved, it takes longer to reduce him to the same level.’ At this same debate, Congressman Edward W. Pou of North Carolina reminded the House that the South had been ‘forced’ to take away the ballot from the Negro, ‘as an adult takes a pistol from the hand of a child’, and now it was time to remove the bottle as well.
The Eighteenth Amendment, bringing in Prohibition, was finally passed on 16 June 1920, in the aftermath of the First World War and at a time when America saw itself as a last refuge of peace and virtue in a degenerate world. As the leader of the Anti-Saloon League explained in 1919, ‘It is the business of the Church of God to make a democracy that is safe for the world, by making it safe and sober everywhere.’
As a result of these new laws, no more intoxicating liquors were to be manufactured, sold or transported within the United States. The legal loophole about
drinking
the stuff was immediately apparent; all that needed to be organised were the logistics of illegal production and distribution.
Prohibition was not responsible for creating the criminal gangs, syndicates and protection rackets, but it did provide a means for criminals of all sorts to make an easy and steady income. And money was soon made on such a vast scale that the underworld was able to ‘buy’ judges, state attorneys and whole police forces. In some instances they had the power to take over local and even State government.
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Prohibition was brought to an end on 5 December 1933, but by then a new demon was all ready and waiting to be attacked. Drugs, rather than alcohol, were seen as the cause of ‘crime, disease, poverty and insanity’.
There were laws against the use of cocaine and opium, but during the years of Prohibition it was marijuana that had become increasingly popular, especially among those on the fringes of society. It was cheap and legal and easy to obtain and was considered to be no more harmful than tobacco.
In 1930 the Federal Bureau of Narcotics was created and H. J. Anslinger was appointed its first director. He was of Swiss extraction and had been raised in a small town in Pennsylvania. He was short and thickset with a pock-marked neck and a fondness for dressing like a gangster in iridescent suits and big ties decorated with Chinese pagodas.
During the early 1930s, the Bureau did not do very well. Its budget was cut by almost half during the three worst years of the Depression and it was in danger of being closed down altogether. In 1935 Anslinger was hospitalised with nervous strain, but when he returned he had a new fighting spirit and a new zeal. For the sake of increasing and maintaining the power of his Bureau, this man waged an almost single-handed fight to bring in federal legislation against
marijuana. His campaign was conducted with all the fiery rhetoric of a Baptist minister and he used his natural flair for publicity and vivid scaremongering to get his point across.
Anslinger confidently assured the House of Representatives that, under the influence of marijuana, ‘some people will fly into a delirious rage and may commit violent crimes’. He gave talks on the radio and addressed public meetings in which he blamed many of society’s ills on this one drug, asking his audiences if they had any idea ‘how many murders, suicides, robberies, criminal assaults, hold-ups, burglaries and deeds of maniacal insanity’ were precipitated by the use of marijuana.
On 14 June 1937, the Marijuana Tax Bill was brought before the House of Representatives and successfully passed. It was now illegal to grow, transport, use or sell marijuana. The new Act came into force in October, and a week later a fifty-eight-year-old man was arrested, charged with possession and sentenced to four years’ imprisonment and a hefty fine. The presiding judge declared enthusiastically, ‘I consider marijuana the worst of all narcotics – far worse than the use of morphine or cocaine … Marijuana destroys life itself.’
Suddenly there was no distinction to be made between cocaine, opium, heroin and marijuana. In spite of the prevailing scientific evidence, Anslinger insisted that marijuana had all the characteristics of a narcotic and, as far as he was concerned, it was the most dangerous of all the forbidden drugs. Of course this meant that he and his agents now had access to a huge number of potential criminals; enough to keep the Bureau well funded and in business for years.
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It also meant that people like Billie and her friends
in the jazz world, who were fond of smoking reefers, were suddenly in serious contravention of the law and liable to be arrested and punished whenever the police decided it was time to teach them a lesson.
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Much of the material for this chapter is taken from Andrew Sinclair,
Prohibition
:
The Era of Excess
, 1962.
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Sinclair, pp. 221–4.
‡
Research by New York hospital physicians published in 1942 showed that ‘the use of marijuana does not lead to physical, mental or moral degeneration and that no permanent deleterious effects from its continuous use were observed’. Another report put together by psychiatrists, physicians, chemists, sociologists and officials and published in 1945 also challenged Anslinger’s claims about the dangers of marijuana, calling it ‘essentially a harmless drug’. Anslinger disregarded the study.
Billie Comes to Harlem
A
fter Emancipation, those who had once been slaves were now in theory the equal of everyone else, but in practice they were never allowed the freedom of movement that was part of the definition of the freedom of the individual. Other men and women could move from one state to another and could vanish into the swelling hubbub of the cities, forgetting their past and inventing a new future for themselves at will. But for black Americans it was different, because when they abandoned the southern states in their thousands in search of a better life in the North, they were denied their democratic rights wherever they went.
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