I was fifteen or sixteen when I learned about Billie Holiday. I'm not sure how but it was probably reading liner notes. If you never owned an album (LP) you might not know what liner notes are. Records were in paper sleeves to protect them. The sleeves often had lyrics, names of who was playing on a given record, biographical info. When I got a new album I sat for hours reading the liner notes.
I bought a Billie Holiday album when I was still living with the mommie. I was listening to it one day when my bedroom door came flying open. The mommie was used to hearing folk, rock and roll, Motown, pop, blues coming from my room. None of which she liked. Billie was singing her music. We sang together for a few tunes.
The mommie and I had a long standing tradition of singing together. She would be in the bath and I would be sitting on the toilet while we sang Chattanooga Choo Choo. We kept that tradition during her days of Dementia. But in those teenage years we just didn't like the same music.
Suddenly she stood up and said something about the people she had heard sing the songs were better and walked out. I was confused and a bit stung.
It felt like it was about race. I don't have the musical vocabulary to explain why I thought that. It had to do with the way Billie bent notes. She was not Patti Page. I liked Pattie Page. I just liked Billie ... better. I felt the music differently.
When I interrogate the racism that lives in me it's often about absence. I grew up in White space. Black people were not in my church or school. They didn't live in my neighborhood. I saw them on buses and street cars. Black culture fascinated me. The music especially. I read Black writers. I read Baldwin although having recently reread him I don't feel like I got it. Black people were exotic. I knew about slavery although not in depth. I wanted to believe racism was in the past.
In my twenties I spent hours in the bath tub. I had some kind of bath stuff that turned the water lime green. I went through a vodka Gimlet phase. Gimlets matched the water. I had a chair near enough to hold an ash tray and my smokes. My Gimlet. A small mirror on which a few lines of coke were drawn. And Billie on the boom box. Once a friend came by and found me passed out in the tub. He assumed suicide because he saw the razor blade I used to chop the coke. If it was suicide it was a passive act. I just wanted to get mellow and sing with Billie.
That moment with the mommie in which we connected while singing I Cover the Waterfront and Embrace Me has been coming back to me. I know there are things packed into it.