With Billie (6 page)

The more he talked, the more nostalgic Skinny became for ‘the best days of my life’. He remembered how people were really close then. ‘There were nice people in the neighbourhood who knew you. They were good people, working people. It’s not like that now.’ And on Sunday mornings everybody would be cooking, and ‘You didn’t have to go out to get nothing to eat. Everybody would say, “Come on over and get some salad, or get some hot chicken and bread!” ’

Monday was always the best night of the week. It was called Blue Monday because then even working people went to the clubs and it was also a day off for the girls who were hustling on the streets. Linda Kuehl asked Skinny if his girls went out with him on Blue Monday, drinking and smoking and going to different houses and having a good time, but he got very indignant and said, ‘No! no! no! We might pick up a cute chick and take her with us’, but his working girls were never included in the party.

Talking about these girls, he explained that ‘You had to keep ’em clean, in order to present them in the street. But they didn’t need too many clothes, because they didn’t go to too many places. I might take them to a nightclub now
and then, but very seldom. They never took dope and they only drank a little whisky, but not too much or I beat their ass … They didn’t have other men, not that I know of, and if I’d a known, I’d a beat ’em to death. You’d have to keep ’em in line. They loved it. They’d be so proud of that black eye. They’d show it to everybody. “Look what mine done to me!” … You couldn’t be calm with ’em. If you was a chicken, you wouldn’t have ’em, ’cos other cats would try to take ’em from you.’
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By now Skinny had forgotten all about Billie and was full of his own memories. He used to have two girls hustling for him on the street and three others whom he took more care of, providing them with a room where they could work and a room where they could stay, always making sure that he kept them in different parts of the city. ‘I had a white girl and two others,
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and one around the corner … I’d see each of the girls each day, because I had to collect that money. I had certain days to go to bed with ’em, once a week. Sure, they knew each other. They had to be friends. But we didn’t all go to bed together like some fellas did. I didn’t take no chances.’

When Linda Kuehl asked him why the girls gave him all their money and let him use them like this, Skinny laughed his wispy laugh. ‘I don’t know. Because they loved me. They
said
they loved me. That’s what they said. I was a young man and they were satisfied, in the bed.’

He reckoned his girls used to bring in around $300 to $400 dollars a day,
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but no matter what he collected from them, ‘We’d blow it all up in a night. All of it.’ He’d go gambling and drinking and partying, but he didn’t bother to get himself a car. ‘We wasn’t so crazy about cars as they
are now. We wanted lots of money so as to spend it. We didn’t want to throw it away on no car.’ Clothes were a different matter. ‘We’d wear them big hats, ten-gallon hats. I liked white hats. And double-breasted suits, monkey-back or full-back; pin-stripe – you had to have that pin-stripe! I liked purple suits. I had my clothes made by Mike Turk in West Baltimore. A custom-made suit cost me forty to fifty dollars at a time!’

Skinny’s way of life came to an end with the Second World War. In 1942 he was drafted into the army and he was gone for three years. He said he never bothered to write to his women because he didn’t think he would ever come back, and anyway he knew that somebody was bound to take them from him while he was away.

And when he did finally come back, everything had changed. Two of his women had disappeared and the third had stolen all his clothes and moved to Cleveland. She wrote to Skinny and asked him to join her there, but he said he didn’t bother. He just stayed where he was.

I
 have been listening to the tape of Pony Kane talking about her childhood. She was interviewed on 27 October 1971 at her home on Bond Street in East Baltimore, which is not far from Durham Street, where she and Billie both lived in the same building for a while.
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Pony is sitting in a rocking chair and rocking backwards and forwards so that you can hear the rhythmic creak of the wood as she speaks. A man called Lenny is there with her and other people come and go. She laughs a lot as she talks and her voice is deep and mellow.

The house at 217 Durham Street had been connected to electricity when a white family was there, but in Pony’s time there was just the dim blue glow from cobalt lights, combined with the oily yellow illumination from a few kerosene lamps. The house had four main rooms, a ‘summer kitchen’, a bath in the back and a water tap out in the yard. There was also a tiny attic on the third floor, which was where Billie stayed, except when her mother came to spend a few days with
her lover, Wee Wee Hill. Then Billie moved to another bed, somewhere else in the building.

The house was owned by Miss Lucy Hill, whom everyone called Miss Lou. Pony described her as a ‘great big fat lady’ who was crippled because she had a hole in her leg. Pony thought this was caused by cancer, although Miss Lou’s son Wee Wee said it was the result of having slipped and hurt herself on an icy road. But anyway, the hole ‘ate and ate and ate’ and it gave Miss Lou a lot of pain and made it impossible for her to move about much. Mostly she just stayed in her room on the ground floor, lying on a metal hospital bed, but sometimes she managed to heave herself into a chair next to the stove and then she would sit and stir the cooking pots, while keeping both her legs raised on a wooden box.

Another of Miss Lou’s sons had epileptic fits and he lived with her all the time; so did Pony, along with her mother, whose name I have not got. Wee Wee was there with his wife Mary, but she left when he started up with Billie’s mother. Pony described Wee Wee as a handsome man, who was always busy with so many different women that no one knew where he was or when he might next turn up. She said there were other boarders in the house as well, and I suppose one of them might have been the man called Wilbert Rich who was discovered raping the eleven-year-old Billie on Christmas Eve in 1926, but Pony made no mention of the rape.

Pony said she never saw much of Miss Sadie; she thought she had an after-hours drinking house on Pratt Street somewhere, but she was usually away in New York on jobs. ‘She used to stay there most of the time … She made nice money in New York.’ Miss Sadie would send boxes of clothes to her daughter and, on the occasions when she did come to Durham Street, she would bake cookies and cakes and pies. Pony said that of course Billie was nice when she was around her mother, because ‘all girls are nice when they are around their parents’, but as soon as Miss Sadie had gone, Billie ‘would be gone too’.

Billie was the same age as Pony, but she was a big girl
and ‘right plump’ and she seemed much older. When she first came out of the House of Good Shepherd, she was ‘too rough’ for the people in Durham Street. ‘She was fighting. She wasn’t scared.’ But she and Pony quickly became friends and went around together for a while and did things together.

They used to go to a five- and ten-cent store called Broadway and steal clothes, but Billie was not a professional shoplifter; she’d simply see a dress she liked and she’d ‘throw it under her coat’ and that was all. She once stole a skirt for Pony and told Pony’s mother that she had bought it with her own money. In those early days Billie used to wear ordinary pleated dresses and satin blouses with big puff sleeves and shiny belts that looked as though they were made of patent leather.

Billie had been brought up as a Catholic, but, as Pony explained, ‘Catholic churches were white’,
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so she went with the other girls to the little store-front Baptist churches on Dallas Street. Or a group of them might take empty jam jars to the Catholic church of St Michael on Wolf and Lombard, and the priest would come to the door at the back and fill the jars with Holy Water, which he kept in a big barrel. The water brought good luck, especially if you sprinkled it in the corners of a room when you had just moved house. Pony remembered that they were also given old Palm Sunday branches. She said that when Billie came back to Baltimore years later, she never bothered to go to the churches; it was just the bars she’d visit. She’d walk in unannounced ‘and we’d be playing her records’.

If the two girls wanted to smoke reefers, they’d go to the shop run by a lady called Miss Lura. She sold ‘real skinny ones’, which were rolled by a sailor who sat in the shop. They’d ‘get ’em and use ’em and go and play records’ or they might go to the movies, although they didn’t see many films
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because they didn’t have too much money, and so
instead they’d ‘hang out on the corner and whisper about the boy we’d like’.

But they spent more and more time at Alice Dean’s house on South Dallas Street. Pony said Alice Dean was a very pretty woman, and she was sorry she didn’t have a photograph to show just how pretty she was. Alice was quite short and plump and looked as though she had Indian blood in her veins. She had long hair, which she wore parted in the middle. She had diamond rings and nice clothes: flat-topped wide-brimmed hats, trimmed with bird of paradise feathers
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and black and grey Chinese mink, Hudson furs, coats with big collars and big sleeves. She had house dresses and street dresses, but she didn’t wear pants because ‘they were too much trouble to take off’.

Everyone agreed that Alice Dean ran her house very efficiently. She paid her protection money and never got into any trouble, mostly because ‘No one was stationed there, no, no, the girls would just walk in and clip ’em … I never seen people getting so much money so quick.’ The girls wore red velvet garters and satin slips and panties – ‘all colours,’ said Pony, ‘red, orange, black, lavender, green, you know, all colours … yellow’, and as she spoke it was as if she could again see those colours flashing kingfisher-bright before her eyes. The pimps would sometimes wear girls’ garters on their sleeves, and lots of them had bright silk handkerchiefs emerging like tropical flowers from their waistcoat pockets.

Pony remembered that house as a magical place, full of laughter and beauty and music. She and Billie used to ‘do anything to be in there. Just to be there.’ They took on any jobs that were offered to them, with maybe a dollar or fifty cents as a day’s pay.
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Alice Dean’s bedroom was painted all white and the furniture was white as well, while the bedroom
next door was all blue. Alice had sewn the lace curtains in the bedrooms herself, and they needed starching and ironing, while the front steps, which welcomed each new stranger through the door, needed scrubbing and Pony would polish the oilcloth on the floors until it ‘shone as yellow as the sun … so clean you could eat off it!’ She laughed as she explained how she would wipe a bedroom door very,
very
slowly, while peeping in through the keyhole to see what the women were doing with the men. ‘I tried to see as much as I could. I found out how it went.’