With Billie (5 page)

Christine Scott explained that she had never been an affectionate person. She didn’t like hugging or kissing; in fact she didn’t like to be touched at all. ‘Everybody knew it,’ she said, ‘because I could never let the children take hold of my hand. I was awfully touchy. That’s the truth. I am strange. Always was … I had nothing to do with nobody. I didn’t want to be bothered with people. You get into trouble when you have lots of friends flocking around.’

When she was asked about her first meeting with Billie,
she said she remembered how she was sitting on her own in the chapel one Monday morning, when the chaplain beckoned her over. He had a very shy young girl with him, whom he said was called Madge.
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Christine had hardly noticed the girl before and had never said more than two words to her, but now she looked at her for the first time. ‘She was a very nice-looking brown-skinned girl. She wasn’t quite as light as I am, but she was light. And she had a nice suit of hair. And her features were even and light. She was as tall as any fourteen-year-old would be and she was right plump.’

The chaplain explained that he wanted to have Madge baptised because he’d had an ‘awful time trying to find out where she came from and where her people came from’. He asked Christine if she would be the girl’s godmother.
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Something changed in Billie when she learnt she was going to be baptised; while she was being prepared for the ceremony she was no longer so silent and fearful and she told everyone in the House how excited she was. And when the day came, she was dressed like a bride in a white frock with a white veil and she rushed to show all the sisters how pretty she looked. Christine said, ‘She was so happy, poor child, she was grinning from ear to ear – you could almost see her back teeth, and she was just as light as a feather.’

As soon as the baptism and the First Communion that followed were over, the sisters gave Billie a string of rosary beads and her new godmother was told to present her with a prayer book. And Christine said that as long as she stayed
in the House, Billie ‘had that prayer book in her hand all the time, so she must have appreciated it’.

But once the brief immersion in the limelight had ended, the little girl withdrew back into her shell. She was clearly frightened of the other girls, but she felt safe with Christine and used to follow her everywhere like a lost puppy, padding after her from room to room and then sitting on the floor at her feet, silent and watchful.

‘She liked me and she didn’t want to be with the girls. She never told me her reason. I didn’t ask her a thing about herself or about her parents and she never told me anything … She very seldom had anything to do with anybody else and she was always down in the dumps … In the classroom she’d go to sit on a chair by herself, and when she went out in the yard she’d go to sit by herself. She never bothered with nobody. She very seldom spoke to anybody … She was almost like a stick … She sewed a lot: overalls, shirts …’

Billie, in the form of a child called Madge, was released back onto the streets of Baltimore on 3 October 1925, three months before she had completed her sentence. This was presumably because her silence and lack of contact with the other inmates were interpreted as good behaviour.
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Christine Scott said she did not know who came to fetch Billie when it was time for her to leave, but she was quite sure it was not her mother Sadie.

Apart from the period between 24 December 1926 and 2 February 1927 that Christine failed to mention, Billie made one final visit to the House, in around 1950. She came because she was planning to go to Europe and needed a copy of her Certificate of Baptism in order to be able to obtain a passport.

She arrived with John Levy, her current boyfriend and
manager, and in a flurry of excitement showed him around this place that had been one of her many childhood homes. She led him to the chapel where she had been baptised, to the dormitory where she had slept in a narrow bed, to the room where she had kept herself busy sewing shirts and overalls, to the kitchen where she had eaten her solitary meals and to the yard where she had sat in silence, ‘almost like a stick’. One of the sisters looked at John Levy’s pale skin and smooth black hair and asked him if he was Jewish. ‘Half-Negro and half-Jew,’ he replied.
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Then Billie agreed to sing a song for the girls. Perhaps one of the sisters was willing to accompany her on the piano, or she had a pianist with her, or she sang without any music at all. The song she chose for the occasion was ‘My Man’. The girls squealed with delight, while the sisters were appalled.

Christine Scott missed this performance, but she was told about it later. She thought she must have been out in the yard feeding the chickens at the time, and nobody bothered
to come and tell her that her famous god-daughter had returned. So she never had a chance to see for herself how the frightened child she knew as Madge had been transformed into such a bold woman, full of laughter and talk, her lips painted as red as blood, her mink coat slippery on her shoulders.

Linda Kuehl asked Christine what she thought had happened to Billie and why it had all gone so wrong. Her reply was, ‘She got off track. You see things and you know how it is; how a young girl feels.’

S
kinny ‘Rim’ Davenport was born in 1906. Linda Kuehl interviewed him on 30 October 1971, in the back seat of a brand-new brown Cadillac convertible belonging to Ethel Moore’s son, Lenny.
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It was parked outside Carter’s Club in East Baltimore. When I played the tape, Skinny’s voice sounded very old and frail and he spoke in a high-pitched whisper. Linda Kuehl described him as a ‘string bean of a man’ and said he had lost all his teeth.

Skinny was currently employed as a school janitor, or, as he put it, ‘a custodian of the schools system’, but in the 1920s and ’30s he didn’t need to work because he was living the fast life. ‘I was pimping, yeah,’ he said with a thin little laugh. ‘All the fellas was pimping.’ That way he was able to make more money in one night than his father could make in a month, working at the steel mill down on Sparrow’s Point.
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Skinny said it was hard to remember things, because ‘all the old-timers are dead and I’m the only one that’s living’. But as he spoke, everything started to come back to him. He began with the whorehouses. He knew of four or five main whorehouses in the city, where ‘The girls used to trade with the white cats, because the black cats didn’t have no money. The black cats had nothing.’

There was Snapper’s Big House on Eastern Avenue, but Snapper got killed; she had been shot by one of the big toughs years ago. There was Geneva’s, but she’s dead too. And there was Alice Dean’s house on Dallas Street, but that was not really a house, because Alice had no women who stayed there and so it was more of a ‘clip ’em and let ’em go joint’.
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Everyone in this business needed to pay regular protection money to the police, but the police were easier in those days; you might get bail or a short jail sentence if they decided to catch you, but if you had enough money to give them, ‘you could always beat it’.

Skinny said that of course he knew Billie. ‘The fellas all knew her and liked her and she liked to be with the boys.’ He never saw her around the big houses, because she preferred the after-hours places, like Ethel Moore’s whisky house on 20 North Bond Street, where there was a little bar upstairs and a jukebox. ‘You’d bring your own reefers and drink a little and play records and get high. Reefers was three sticks a quarter, and they was good stuff.’ Everyone in those days smoked marijuana, which was still not illegal, or they drank bootleg whisky and sickly home-made concoctions like blackberry wine.
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Skinny said, ‘They was also usin’ a little
coke – snortin’ now and then. But we didn’t make it no habit. It was just somethin’ to do. We wasn’t usin’ no hard stuff.’
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Skinny said you could take a girl to Ethel Moore’s place and go to one of her rooms, but her house was just a good-time house and she didn’t make any money out of it. Billie was very fond of Ethel. ‘She looked up to her as a guardian, you know what I mean. Ethel was older and smarter, and she told Billie right from wrong and tried to steer her right.’

Skinny thought that Billie must have been about sixteen years old when he knew her, although in fact she would have been between the ages of twelve and fourteen. He found her a ‘nice, pleasant girl … and she wasn’t too fast and didn’t like to hustle around … She liked to sing and she used to sing every night, and every night she’d go to different places and she’d tell people where she’d be and they would follow her.’

She might begin at a club such as George’s, which later became a barber’s shop; or Carter’s on East Fairmount, where Skinny was being interviewed; or the one that got torn down on Pratt and Bethel Street. That would be until about two or three in the morning and then she’d go on to the after-hours joints. ‘We’d be partying together, and she would sing a song if we’d ask her.’ There was a boy who used to play piano for her, if there was a piano to play. Otherwise they might put on a record that had no words to it and she’d sing to the music, or she’d just sing with no music at all. ‘She had singing on her mind,’ said Skinny.

By five or six in the morning people would get tired and they’d go home to sleep for a few hours. Skinny had a room at the York Hotel. He had no idea where Billie went; he thought perhaps she stayed with her girlfriends, ‘perhaps Tooty or Nitey’.

And then in the early afternoon they’d get up and take a bath and be ready to return to the streets. They’d start in
a bar somewhere and move on to a club. Goldfield, owned by the prizefighter Joe Gans, was usually the first to open and soon the others would follow and they could again drift from one place to the next. Sometimes Billie was there with Skinny’s group, or she might go off with a different lot. She was ‘fine and talkin’ good’ and she was accepted wherever she went.

And then Skinny was gone somewhere and Billie had gone somewhere too, and when he saw her again it was 1937 and she was at the Royal with Count Basie. Skinny went backstage to talk to her a bit and then they went on to Ethel Moore’s together. He didn’t think she’d changed at all. ‘She was high, so it was all the same to me.’ Word had got out that she was using hard stuff and that she had a connection on the Avenue, close to Snapper’s Big House, but it was only hearsay and Skinny said he saw nothing to prove it was true.