‖ Almost everyone who knew John Levy hated him with a passion. When Billie heard of his death in December 1956, she said it was the best Christmas present she could have, while her pianist Bobby Tucker’s only regret was that he died of a heart attack and ‘didn’t even have the courtesy to let someone shoot him’. John Levy looked like a white man and people said you could only tell that he was black when you heard him say ‘motherfucker’.
SIX
Skinny ‘Rim’ Davenport
‘All the old-timers are dead.’
Skinny ‘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.* 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.†
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’.‡ 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.§ 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.’‖
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.
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.’a
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,b 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 th
ey 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,c 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.
* Ethel Moore was one of Billie’s close friends in Baltimore, someone who had ‘been like a mother to her’. Skinny described Ethel Moore as ‘a fast girl who had a good-time house on North Bond Street’.
† If you didn’t have a fixed job, then you might get one month’s employment during the tomato or the bean season, or a packing job at the wholesale fish market, but for a black man in Baltimore at that time there wasn’t much work to be had. Skinny said it was easier for the women, because they could usually earn a dollar a day scrubbing the white marble stone steps of the houses of the rich or doing domestic work.
‡ Linda Kuehl interviewed Alice’s son ‘Sleepy’ Dean, who owned a bar on the Point and lived up to his name by spending each day sleeping in the front seat of his brand-new Cadillac Eldorado, wearing dark glasses and with a hat pulled over his eyes. He didn’t have much to say and insisted that his mother rented out rooms, that was all. According to Pony Kane, she and Billie spent as much time as they could at Alice Dean’s.
§ The use of marijuana was legal until 1937 and then it was classified as a narcotic, every bit as dangerous as heroin.
‖ Skinny said, ‘This hard stuff come along for the last fifteen years. The youngsters are on it and that’s what makes it so bad. In the ’20s and ’30s people was more together.’
a At this point Linda Kuehl tried to bring up Billie’s reputation as a ‘masochist’, saying to Skinny, ‘Well, Billie went for men who would beat her up.’ But Skinny was not the slightest bit interested in that line of thought. ‘I didn’t have much dealing with her men. I liked her company,’ he replied.
b In Wishing on the Moon (1994) Donald Clarke quotes Skinny as saying at this point, ‘I had a white girl called Babe. I kept her in a house’, but I can’t find this in the original interview.
c This is a very different sum from the dollar a trick that Pony mentions.
SEVEN
Mary ‘Pony’ Kane
‘Around where the happenin’s 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.* 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’,† 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‡ 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§ 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.‖ 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.’
With Billie Page 4
