Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (4 page)
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Authors: Johann Hari
Anslinger began to believe all his hunches would turn out like this. He only had to defy the “experts” and keep pursuing his instinct until, finally, he would be shown to be more right than anyone could have predicted.
He ramped up his campaign. The most frightening effect of marijuana, Harry warned, was on blacks. It made them forget the appropriate racial barriers
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—and unleashed their lust for white women. Of course, everyone spoke about race differently in the 1930s, but the intensity of Harry’s views shocked people even then, and when it was revealed he’d referred to a suspect in an official memo as a “nigger,” Senator Joseph P. Guffey of Anslinger’s home state of Pennsylvania demanded his resignation. Later, when one of his very few black agents,
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William B. Davis, complained about being called a “nigger” by Harry’s men, Anslinger sacked him.
Harry soon started treating all his critics this way. When the American Medical Association
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issued a report debunking some of his more overheated claims, he announced that any of his agents caught with a copy would be immediately fired. Then, when he found out a professor named Alfred Lindesmith was arguing that addicts need to be treated with compassion and care, Harry instructed his men to falsely
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warn Lindesmith’s university that he was associated with a “criminal organization,”
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had him wiretapped,
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and sent a team to tell him to shut up.
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Harry couldn’t control the flow of drugs,
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but he was discovering he could control the flow of ideas—and it was not only scientists Harry believed he had to silence.
It was clear from Harry’s writings that he was obsessed with Billie Holiday, and I sensed there might be a deeper story there. So I tracked down everyone
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who was still alive who had known Billie, to ask them about this, and one of them—her godson, Bevan Dufty—explained that his mother had been Billie’s best friend, and she believed Billie was in effect killed by the authorities. He had the remaining scraps of her writings on this in his attic, where they had been unseen for years. Would you like, he asked, to see them? When I put them together with Harry’s files, what her friends had told me, and the work of her biographers, I began to see this story more clearly.
Jazz was the opposite of everything Harry Anslinger believed in. It is improvised, and relaxed, and free-form. It follows its own rhythm. Worst of all, it is a mongrel music made up of European, Caribbean, and African echoes, all mating on American shores. To Anslinger, this was musical anarchy, and evidence of a recurrence of the primitive impulses that lurk in black people, waiting to emerge. “It sounded,” his internal memos said, “like the jungles in the dead of night.”
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Another memo warned that “unbelievably ancient indecent rites of the East Indies are resurrected”
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in this black man’s music. The lives of the jazzmen, he said, “reek of filth.”
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His agents reported back to him
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that “many among the jazzmen think they are playing magnificently when under the influence of marihuana but they are actually becoming hopelessly confused and playing horribly.”
The Bureau believed that marijuana slowed down your perception of time
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dramatically, and this was why jazz music sounded so freakish—the musicians were literally living at a different, inhuman rhythm. “Music hath charms,”
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their memos say, “but not this music.” Indeed, Harry took jazz as yet more proof that marijuana drives people insane. For example, the song “That Funny Reefer Man”
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contains the line “Any time he gets a notion, he can walk across the ocean.” Harry’s agents warned: “He does think that.”
Anslinger looked out over a scene filled with men like Charlie Parker,
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Louis Armstrong,
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and Thelonious Monk,
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and—as the journalist Larry Sloman recorded—he longed to see them all behind bars.
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He wrote to all the agents he had sent to follow them, and instructed: “Please prepare all cases in your jurisdiction
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involving musicians in violation of the marijuana laws. We will have a great national round-up arrest of all such persons on a single day. I will let you know what day.” His advice on drug raids to his men was always “Shoot first.”
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He reassured congressmen that his crackdown would affect not “the good musicians, but the jazz type.”
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But when Harry came for them, the jazz world would have one weapon that saved them: its absolute solidarity. Anslinger’s men could find almost no one among them who was willing to snitch,
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and whenever one of them was busted,
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they all chipped in to bail him out.
In the end, the Treasury Department told Anslinger
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he was wasting his time taking on a community that couldn’t be fractured, so he scaled down his focus until it settled like a laser on a single target—perhaps the greatest female jazz vocalist there ever was.
Billie Holiday was born a few months after the Harrison Act,
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the first law banning cocaine and heroin, and it would become her lifelong twin.
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Not long after Billie’s birth, her nineteen-year-old mother, Sadie, became a prostitute,
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while her seventeen-year-old father vanished. He later died of pneumonia
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in the South because he couldn’t find a hospital that would treat a black man.
Billie brought herself up on the streets of Baltimore, alone, defiant. It was the last city without a sewer system in the United States,
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and she spent her childhood among clouds of stinking smoke
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from all the burning shit. Her cold slum district was known as Pigtown, and many people lived in shacks. Every day, little Billie would wash and clean her great-grandmother
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and listen to stories from her youth, when she had been a slave on a Virginia plantation.
Billie soon learned there were lots of places she couldn’t go because she was black. One store that sold hot dogs
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would let her in if nobody was looking but gave her hell if she tried to eat inside, in case anybody saw. She knew in her gut this was wrong and had to change, and she made a promise to herself: “I just plain decided one day I wasn’t going to do anything
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or say anything unless I meant it. Not ‘Please, sir.’ Nor ‘Thank you, ma’am.’ Nothing. Unless I meant it. You have to be poor and black to know how many times you can get knocked in the head for trying to do something as simple as that.” This promise would reshape her life—and her attitude toward Harry.
When she was ten, one of her neighbors—a man in his forties named Wilbert Rich
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—turned up and explained that he had been sent by her mother to take Billie to her. He took her to a house and told her to wait. She sat and waited, but her mother didn’t come; as night fell, Billie said she was drowsy. The man offered her a bed. When she lay down on it, he pinned her down and raped her.
She screamed and clawed at the man
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, howling for help, and somebody must have heard, because the police arrived. When they barged in, the officers decided at once what was going on. Billie, they declared, was a whore who had tricked this poor man. She was shut away in a cell for two days. Months later, Wilbert Rich was punished with three months in prison, while Billie was punished with a year in a reform school.
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The nuns who ran the walled-in, sealed-off punishment center looked at the child and concluded she was bad and needed the firm thwack of discipline. Billie kept spitting their attempts at control right back at them—so they decided they needed to “teach her a lesson.”
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They took her to a room that was empty except for a dead body, slammed the door shut behind her, and left her there overnight. Billie hammered on the doors
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until her hands bled, but nobody came.
When she escaped—out of the convent, and Baltimore—she was determined to find her mother,
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who was last heard from in Harlem. When she arrived on the bus
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into a freezing winter, she stumbled to the last address she had been given, only to find it was a brothel. Her mother worked there for a pittance and had no way to keep her. Before long, Billie was thrown out, and she was so hungry she could barely breathe without it hurting. There was, Billie came to believe, only one solution. A madam offered her a 50 percent cut
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for having sex with strangers. She was fourteen years old.
Before long, Billie had her own pimp. He was a violent, cursing thug named Louis McKay, who was going to break her ribs and beat her till she bled. He was also—perhaps more crucially—going to meet Harry Anslinger many years later, and work with him. Within a few years, Billie’s mother was telling her to marry Louis:
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he was, she said, such a nice man.
Billie was caught prostituting
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by the police, and once again, instead of rescuing her from being pimped and raped, they punished her.
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She was sent to prison on Welfare Island, and once she got out, she started to seek out the hardest and most head-blasting chemicals she could. At first her favorite was White Lightning,
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a toxic brew containing 70-proof alcohol, and as she got older, she tried to stun her grief with harder and harder drugs. One night, a white boy from Dallas
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called Speck showed her how to inject herself with heroin. You just heat up the heroin in a spoon
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and inject it straight into your veins. When Billie wasn’t drunk or high,
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she sank into a black rock of depression and was so shy she could barely speak.
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She would still wake in the night screaming,
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remembering her rape and imprisonment. “I got a habit, and I know it’s no good,”
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she told a friend, “but it’s the one thing that makes me know there’s a person called Billie Holiday. I am Billie Holiday.”
But then she discovered something else. One day, starving, she walked a dozen blocks in Harlem, asking in every drinking hole if they had any work for her, and she was rejected everywhere. Finally she walked into a place called the Log Cabin and explained she could work as a dancer, but when she tried a few moves, it was obvious she wasn’t good enough. Desperate, she told the owner maybe she could sing. He pointed her toward an old piano man in the corner
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and told her to give him a song. As she sang “Trav’llin’ All Alone,” the customers put down their drinks and listened. By the time she finished her next song,
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“Body and Soul,” there were tears running down their cheeks.