Billie Holiday by Donald Clarke

Author:Donald Clarke [DONALD CLARKE]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2012-01-29T22:00:00+00:00

People in the theatre kept turning round and staring at them, and Lady thought it was because she was a black woman with a white boy, but Johnson thought it was because she was so beautiful. Afterwards she took him to a club in Harlem where his was the only white face, and everybody stared at him. (Neither of them thought much of Katherine Dunham.) Finally she sent him home in a taxi.

He had become a Holiday fan through listening to her records; the record shop on Main Street in Lexington had given him strange looks because he was ordering what was then called ‘race music’. He said that there was never any discrimination at any of the places where he saw her; she mixed with the customers and drank at the bar. But some of the customers and the cops were occasionally a problem.

This was a long time after I had gotten established on that street and they knew who I was. I can tell you about somebody coming up behind me, and literally feeling a sharp pain in my behind. Somebody had kicked me right smack in the ass and said, ‘What are you waiting for the black bitch for?’ ... I’d been told by the police, ‘You don’t really want to do this.’ ... I laugh when I hear about today’s liberated youth. They don’t know what we did without any kind of banners . . It’s such a screaming joke.

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