Following are the first two chapters of my current novel-in-progress, The Lady’s Last Song, the story of the U.S. Government’s war on singer, Billie Holiday, and the beginning of the government’s ‘war on drugs.’
1.
January 1, 1939, Café Society, Greenwich Village, New York
Tap. Tap. Tap.
“Five minutes, Miz Holiday,” the somewhat muffled voice said through the dressing room’s flimsy door.
Billie Holiday, whose name on her birth certificate read, Eleanora Fagan Gough, looked at her reflection in the fly-specked mirror. Satisfied with what she saw, she turned her head, looking toward the door.
“I’ll be right out,” she said.
While she was satisfied with her physical appearance, her caramel-colored skin, full lips painted bright red, dark brown eyes, and her brown-tinted black hair, meticulously straightened with a hot comb, reflecting the glow from the make-up light, her inner self was conflicted. She was about to do something that could make of break her career as a jazz singer.
She listened to the sounds of footsteps moving away from the door. When they’d faded into silence, she caught her own eyes, gazing back at her from the mirror.
“How did I let myself get talked into this?” She asked her reflection.
She didn’t answer herself, at least, not aloud. She knew full well why she’d agreed to sing the damn song, she was just having second thoughts about the wisdom of doing so. At times, she cursed Barney Josephson, the Café Society’s owner and manager, for convincing her to sing it, but deep down inside, she knew that she really wanted to do it for her own personal reasons.
Josephson had opened Café Society to allow black and white lovers of jazz to have a place in New York City to come together and enjoy it. He’d opened the place the year before in an effort to replicate the political cabarets he’d seen in Europe before the war. Located at 1 Sheridan Square in Greenwich Village, the bohemian capital of America, it became the first racially integrated night club in the country, although the way it worked out in practice, almost all of the performers were black, and the majority of the patrons were rich white people, come to see and hear the likes of Count Basie and Ella Fitzgerald. The place was packed every night, especially since she’d been signed as a headliner. Most of the people sitting at the tables with expensive bottles of wine in front of them loved her music, the way she put so much feeling into standard jazz songs, but in such a large crowd, there was bound to be one or two who would be offended by what Barney wanted her to sing.
Not that she was a stranger to being hated or being the target of or reason for peoples’ ire. She’d been experiencing it since childhood. If they didn’t like the song, well, she thought, screw them.
She smoothed her hair, took a last look to make sure her lipstick hadn’t smeared, and stood, smoothing the body-hugging yellow silk dress she wore.
“Break a leg, kid,” she said to her reflection in the mirror.
The hallway outside her dressing room, the eight by twelve room Josephson reserved for the feature performer, was crowded with musical instruments, racks of costumes, and acts waiting to go on, some lounging against the grimy wall trying to look nonchalant, some pacing nervously, others smoking. They all nodded and smiled at her as she glided past.
“Evening, Lady Day.” “Knock ‘em dead, Miss Holiday.” “Can’t wait to hear you sing, Billie.” Greetings flowed her way from almost everyone she passed, and she acknowledged them with slight bows of her head, saving her voice for the song, for the all-important song.
She came to the edge of the stage, standing there in the semi-darkness watching the master of ceremonies, an ascetic looking indeterminate race man with a deep, melodic voice totally out of character with his appearance, standing in the circle of a single spotlight. He turned his head slightly, caught sight of her, smiled, and nodded. Then, turning his attention back to the audience that was shrouded in the darkness of the club’s cavernous interior, he held the microphone to his lips and began speaking.
“Ladies and gentlemen, please turn your attention to the stage, and prepare to welcome tonight’s feature performer who is going to sing a special song for you.” He paused for what seemed like too long a time to her. “Ladies and gentlemen, please give a warm welcome to Miss. Billie. Holiday.”
There was scattered applause as she walked onto the stage, a single spot on her as she made her way to the pole microphone at the center.
She wrapped her hands around the mike and stood there, her gaze roaming the gloomy space before her, and as her eyes adjusted to the light level, she began to make out shapes; the flash of jewelry here, the white flag of a tuxedo shirt there. In the back and off to the sides, she could see waiters, standing quietly, resplendent in their tuxedos.
It felt as if all eyes in the place were on her, which, in fact, they were. The silence was palpable.
The spot on her widened slightly, just enough to show her face. She inclined her head toward the orchestra and nodded ever so slightly.
The haunting wail of a trumpet split the silence, a crying sound from the darkness, sharp at first, a slight warble, and then it faded slowly into silence, and she began to sing, “Southern trees bear strange fruit, Blood on the leaves, and blood at the roots,” and on she went until she reached the end, ‘here is a strange and bitter crop.”
Her voice was husky, not quite as raspy as the whiskey voice of many of the cabaret singers, and lacking the high pitches of singers like Ella, it was in a class of its own, and singing this particular song, a song that talked in lyrical terms of the lynching of black people that was endemic in America’s south at the time, it was a voice that cracked with emotion.
As she sang, she thought back to her father, dead from blood loss because the white hospital in Dallas, Texas wouldn’t admit a ‘colored’ patient, and the only medical facility that would treat blacks was too far away; she thought of the photos she’d seen of mutilated black bodies hanging from trees as crowds of whites, often including children, watched as if they were at a circus.
She willed her eyes to remain dry, and her voice to remain steady. Some emotion leaked through. How could it not?
Normally, during performances, one could hear the occasional clink of glasses, or muffled conversation, but not this time. Josephson had instructed the waiters to remove all glasses from the tables before her performance, and once she started singing, the audience was so rapt, all they could do was stare open-mouthed.
And then, she was done. She stood there, eyes closed, the mike clutched close to her bosom.
There was silence. A long, heavy silence. Then, someone began clapping. Then another. And soon, the room was vibrating from the many hands coming together.
She remained still for a long time. Then, she opened her eyes, and as she did, the club went dark.
Without a word, she released the mike and walked off the stage and into the darkness.
When the lights came on, the stage was bare.
2.
December 27, 1938, Café Society, Greenwich Village, New York
Strange Fruit, the song Billie sang, did not start out as a song. In fact, it’s doubtful its author originally intended for it to be sung. But after it was published, he set it to music and played it for club-owner Barney Josephson, who then convinced Billie to sing it.
Abel Meeropol was an English teacher at Dewitt Clinton High School in the Bronx. Meeropol was disturbed by racism in America, and a photo of two lynched black men angered him to the point that he wrote Strange Fruit as a reaction to it. The poem was printed in a teachers’ union publication first, but afterwards, Meeropol, an amateur composer decided to convert it into a song.
While it never explicitly mentioned lynching, the implication was unmistakable.
As soon as he heard the song, Josephson thought of Billie, and he called and asked her to come to his office.
“Billie,” he said when she entered. “I have a song here that I think would be perfect for you.”
He showed her the song sheet. After reading it, she put it back on his desk.
“I don’t know, Barney,” she said. “It’s powerful and everything, but it’s not jazz, at least, not the kind I usually sing.”
“Come on, lady, given your history, I’d think you’d jump at the chance to showcase this song.”
She looked down at the paper. It was tempting, and Lord knows she’d suffered prejudice enough to relate to the words written there. But, her singing career was just beginning to take off. Could she afford to alienate so many potential fans?
But then, she thought of everything she’d been through in her life up to that point.
Born Eleanora Fagan on April 7, 1915, in Philadelphia to Sarah ‘Sadie’ Fagan and Clarence Holiday, both teens at the time, Billie was left often in the care of Sarah’s older half-sister, Eva Miller, who then left her to be raised by her mother-in-law, Martha Miller om Baltimore, when Sadie left to work jobs on the passenger railroads. Clarence abandoned them early to pursue a career as a jazz musician. For two years, Sadie was married to a man named Phillip Gough, but that marriage ended in divorce.
With her mother’s frequent absence, and being left in the care of an older, inattentive woman, Billie had it rough growing up, and often skipped school. This resulted in her being brought before a juvenile court when she was nine years old and then being sent to a Catholic reform school, where she served for nine months. She was then released into her mother’s custody where she worked long hours alongside her in a restaurant she’d opened, the East Side Grill.
When she was eleven she dropped out of school, was sent back to the reform school when she was nearly twelve, this time not as a prisoner, but as a material witness in the case against a neighbor who tried to rape her, and upon release from the school got a job running errands and doing odd jobs in a brothel. It was there that she first heard the music of Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith, which gave her a love of jazz.
In 1928, when Billie was thirteen, her mother moved to Harlem, New York, and a few months later, in early 1929, Billie joined her. Under the influence of her landlady, Sadie became a prostitute, and in a matter of days after arriving in Harlem, Billie, not yet fourteen, was doing tricks for five bucks per client. A few months after she stated tricking, the police raided the brothel, and Billie and her mother were sent to a workhouse.
After her release from the workhouse, Billie started singing in Harlem clubs under the name, Billie Dove, after an actress she admired, but eventually changed it to Billie Holiday, to honor her father, Clarence. By the time she was seventeen, she’d come to the attention of record producers, and John Hammond, who’d heard her sing at Covan’s on West 132d Street arranged for her to make a record with Benny Goodman when she was just eighteen. She was an instant hit, and at the tender age of twenty, was cast in a small role in a Duke Ellington movie, Symphony in Black.
While she’d had an amazing career, given her lack of formal training or education, life had also been tough. Men saw her as an easy lay, and many women resented her good looks and voice.
After her career took off, she made contact with her father, Clarence, who was playing in a jazz band, but their relationship was short-lived because he died from a lung disorder while he was on tour in Texas because the segregated medical facilities in Dallas refused to treat him.
“These words remind me of my father and how he died,” she said quietly. “I don’t like to be reminded of that.”
Josephson’s expression was soft, but he was adamant. “Look, Billie, things like this, like what happened to your father, still happen in the South, but most people are fat, dumb, and happy and unaware. This song, that amazing voice of yours, will help wake them up.”
She knew that he was right. People needed to be told. But, the reaction of some was likely to be extremely negative, violent even. Was she up to it? Then, she thought, screw it. If not me, who?
“Okay, Barney, I’ll do it,” she said. “But, it has to be staged just right. The club has to be quiet, and I mean quiet, and I think I’d like to have just a light on my face, with the rest of the stage in total darkness.”
His face lit up.
“Damn, girl, that sounds amazing. Talk about a powerful message. This will knock ‘em dead.”
She smiled ruefully. “Let’s just hope it don’t kill me.”
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