by Donald Bogle
But she also found herself around a lot of very attractive young women in the various shows. On the road, some grew lonely. Some might be homesick. Others might have boyfriends back in their hometowns that they planned to one day marry. Some were leery of the men around them. Though it would be difficult to say exactly what transpired between Ethel and some of these young women, she didn’t shy away from close friendships. During road tours, same-sex relationships flourished for some women and at times were even commonplace. “Often, we girls would33 share a room because of the cost,” entertainer Maude Russell once told an interviewer. “Well, many of us had been kind of abused by producers, directors, leading men—if they liked girls. In those days, men only wanted what they wanted, they didn’t care about pleasing a girl. And girls needed tenderness, so we had girl friendships, the famous lady lovers, but lesbians weren’t well accepted in show business.”
For Ethel, her same-sex alliances, if they had not started earlier, certainly began during this period. Perhaps she enjoyed the control she could exert with women, control that she felt she had to relinquish with men. One of her partners may even have been Jo Hill, with whom she shared a bed while the two traveled. Both Ethel and Jo had boyfriends. Ethel herself loved to recount the time the two had turned in for the night and were in bed together when they heard strange noises. As it turned out, underneath the bed was a man named Willie who had been in hot pursuit of Ethel and had hidden in her room to find out if she was seeing anyone else. Waiting outside the room was Jo Hill’s boyfriend, who was trying to find out if she was seeing someone else. What neither man apparently considered was that the women may have been “seeing” each other. Regardless, Ethel once confided to her friend Joan Croomes that she was a lesbian, and “best that did it.” Yet her same-sex relationships were never exclusive. She would always have some man in her life.
With the Hill Sisters, there were high times and low ones. When theater bookings weren’t coming in, they appeared in a carnival. At one point, they slept in a stable, along with the carnival’s fat man, Big Jim, and traveled with him in an open freight car. After an engagement in Savannah, Maggie Hill left the trio to marry another entertainer, while Jo and Ethel continued their travels. It had to be hard for Jo Hill because Sweet Mama Stringbean’s popularity grew. When they arrived in cities, theater managers and audiences didn’t care so much that now there were only two Hill Sisters, just as long as that long, skinny one was still in the act.
A big stop for Ethel and Jo was Atlanta, a bustling city with lots of clubs and many entertainers out to make their mark. The competition was stiff. There were two popular theaters on Decatur Street, only a few doors apart. Originally, Ethel and Jo were booked into 81 Decatur. There, Ethel had her first chance to try her hand at acting in olio shows, which were mini melodramas. The olios were hardly serious theater, but there was something to be gained from them. With dialogue that performers often made up as they went along, the olios provided an opportunity to improvise and learn more about timing and punching up dialogue to create a character or a mood. It also taught performers something about rhythm in a dramatic piece, building to a climax or bringing the action down after a high point. But Ethel’s booking at 81 Decatur ended abruptly. As Ethel later told the story, she panicked when she learned that the jealous woman of another performer had decided to go for dramatic realism and planned to stab Ethel onstage. Ethel told her boss she was sick and couldn’t go on. He didn’t believe her and fired her on the spot. She and Jo ended up performing at 91 Decatur, where Ethel’s idol, Bessie Smith, was headlining.
The two biggest female blues singers of the time were Bessie Smith and her idol, Ma Rainey. For Ethel, both were queens to be treated with respect. Each had her legion of devotees, dedicated, passionate followers as fascinated by the women offstage as on. For a time, Chattanooga-born Bessie Smith had been a protégée of Rainey’s. Born in 1894 and orphaned by the age of ten, she sang and danced on street corners to earn pennies, nickels, and dimes. Soon she entertained in road shows where she was seen by Ma and Pa Rainey, who took a liking to her. Smith and Rainey performed on the same bill with such troupes as the Rabbit Foot Minstrels. At first, Bessie wore street clothes onstage. Later she wore the horsehair wigs, the flashy glamorous gowns, and the jewelry that could be blinding. Early in her career, Bessie also danced as much as she sang. A large woman, heavier than Ethel, and brown-skinned with a big broad glorious smile, she had a powerful voice that earned her the title “Empress of the Blues.”
Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith were called moaners and shouters. Each went deep into the lyrics—the emotions—of their music, pulling from their guts their unique sounds, styles, feelings. Sometimes they could be risqué, which audiences loved. They also sent out messages in their music to women. In her song “Sleep Talking Blues,” Ma cautioned that if a papa talked in his sleep, he better make sure his mama was not awake. Men got the message of the song as well. Smith and Rainey could play with sexuality and gender roles too. In one song, Rainey sang that she liked to dress up like a man. In another, she sang of a fellow switching gender roles, which in the end caused her to lose her man. “No662w all the people wonder / why I’m all alone,” she sang. “A sissy shook that thing / and took my man from home.” She also could be somber and aching with pain, as in “Leaving Tomorrow,” in which she sang of heading out of town, going somewhere else, because things just hadn’t worked out right.
Bessie’s songs communicated various moods and attitudes too. During her career, which stretched into the 1920s and 1930s, she had a signature hit with her song “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out,” the story of a once high-living woman now down on her luck without money or friends. In “Taint Nobody’s Business If I Do,” she announced her independence by singing that if she had the notion to jump in the ocean, then ’taint nobody’s business if she did, and if her man should say he ain’t got no money and if she should tell him to take all hers, honey, then ’taint nobody’s business if she did. Eventually, audiences would love Bessie’s bawdy songs, numbers like “Do Your Duty,” “You’ve Got to Give Me Some,” “Need a Little Sugar in My Bowl,” “Kitchen Man,” and “I’m Wild About That Thing.”
Both women had larger-than-life lives, which put them at the center of many outlandish escapades and much gossip and speculation, some of which was based on fact. Bessie was a heavy drinker and a rowdy party gal. Both she and Ma loved having a good time, and this came across in their music. Always there were stories about their sexuality. Ma and Bessie were known to have their husbands and their girlfriends. Once when Ma was partying in Chicago with a group of lady friends, their clothes were strewn about and Pa Rainey was nowhere in sight. The police suddenly showed up in the middle of their revelry, and Ma was arrested. There was the tale of the time that Bessie had taken a fancy to a young woman. Once Bessie openly kissed her lady friend, who balked at such a public display of affection. “The hell with you, bitch,” Bessie reportedly said. Thereafter she ignored the young woman, who fell into a suicidal depression. She recovered, but thereafter realized that she would be kissed whenever and wherever Bessie pleased. Most significant, though, neither seemed to give a damn what anyone might have to say about their sexuality. There were no public pronouncements, but in show business circles, these were hardly closeted stars. Neither lived by the prevailing sexual attitudes of their day, and nor would Ethel. But as her fame broadened, she understood the importance of a certain public discretion.
Few women commanded as much respect from Ethel as did Ma and Bessie. She understood—and was in awe of—the depth of emotion that went into their music. Aware of their struggles to make names for themselves, she respected their fame, what it meant for a colored woman to rise as high as they did. But Ethel also understood that her approach to music was entirely different. “I was as crazy34 about her shouting as everyone else,” said Waters of Bessie, “even though hers was not my style.”
Though Bessie’s lyrics could be understood far bet
ter than Ma’s, still there were times patrons in the theaters—and later record buyers—might not understand exactly what either woman said in her music. Instead, the mood conveyed by each woman was more important than whatever story there was in the song. That would never be the case with Ethel, even in these early years. Every word, every lyric, was clear and commanding. As a girl, she had not been understood or appreciated in her family, but in her music she seemed to be insistent that listeners hear every word she uttered. She was announcing herself to the world, and words were crucial to her. As Ethel termed it, she was becoming known as a low singer, who gave a sweet, more restrained sound. Though she would always be able to give a blues singer’s growl, going down low into her gut, she would never be a moaner or a shouter, and rarely would she have the big sound of her idols.
At 91 Decatur Street, she was nervous for two very good reasons. For one, appearing on the bill was the team Stringbeans and Sweetie. How would Stringbeans respond to her use of his stage moniker? As it turned out, Stringbeans—Butler May—was gracious about the matter, and Waters became friends with the couple. But she was also nervous because of the headliner, Miss Bessie Smith, who was clearing between $50 and $75 a week and raking in large sums of coins thrown onstage. Ethel estimated that Bessie was averaging a couple of hundred dollars a week. This was what the big time looked like. Before Ethel was officially hired at 91 Decatur, she had to be approved by the Empress of the Blues, who might not want a younger blues singer coming onto her turf. Ethel was asked to sing for Bessie, who appeared to like her and may even have had an eye for her: looking her over, Bessie called Ethel “long goody.” But whether she liked Ethel or not, Miss Bessie, as Ethel always called her, let it be known in no uncertain terms that Ethel was not to sing blues. Ethel agreed.
But in the first show that evening, when Ethel performed only nonblues songs, the audience shouted out for her to sing the blues. There was such a ruckus that the theater manager rushed backstage to tell Bessie that Sweet Mama had to be permitted to sing the blues. Reluctantly, Bessie said that Ethel could perform “St. Louis Blues,” but she also complained about these “northern bitches.” Throughout the run of the engagement, the requests for Ethel to sing the blues kept coming and Ethel always acquiesced. When the show closed, Miss Bessie said, “Come here, long goody35. You ain’t so bad. It’s only that I never dreamed that anyone would be able to do this to me in my territory and with my own people. And you know damn well that you can’t sing worth a fuck!” As far as Ethel was concerned, Bessie would always be the Empress, the most royal of blues royalty, yet she understood, at least intuitively, that a shift might be coming in the way the blues were performed. Audience tastes were always changing.
Waters and Jo Hill went onward with their travels. There was the thrill of meeting more famous stars like Ma Rainey and the Whitman Sisters. Rarely did Waters seem disappointed with the great women of the era or appear to compete with them. It became almost second nature to know what parts of town to stay away from, what stores or restaurants to avoid. On the road, entertainers jokingly said that they sometimes saw signs that read:
Nigger, read and run.
If you don’t read, then run anyway.
On the tour, she heard the word “nigger” shouted and witnessed indignities heaped upon Negroes by Southern whites. Once she saw a young boy shot in the stomach by a cop.
A frightening experience occurred in Birmingham. Waters always loved high-style automobiles, partly because they represented a chance for adventure and escape, but also because the design of the cars dazzled her. Sometimes a company automobile carried cast members from one town to another, and when a group of friends from the show badgered her to join them for a ride in a spiffy Buick, she agreed. Three women and three men piled in, along with the driver. But there was an accident when the driver swerved to avoid hitting a horse and buggy, and the car flipped over. Four passengers and the driver were able to get out, but Ethel and another woman were pinned underneath. Scalding water from the automobile’s radiator burned Ethel’s stomach and breasts. One man stayed, trying to get help. The others disappeared.
The white passersby did nothing to help, but made loud taunts about ignorant “niggers” and “nigger bitches.” They didn’t care if she lived or died. Ethel prayed for some kind of relief or rescue. Finally, she and the other young woman were taken to a hospital in Anniston, Alabama. There, a white doctor discovered that Ethel had a torn tendon. A long cut ran from her knee to her hip. But the physician showed little sympathy. Though in excruciating pain, she was made to walk to the Negro quarters. There, she was ignored or left unattended. Her money was stolen. Her bandages were not frequently changed, and no one took her complaints seriously. Perhaps more than anything else that occurred during this period of her life, her treatment by whites and those in the colored wing of the hospital left her resentful and embittered. The treatment fed her suspiciousness of people around her—and also her enduring feelings of being an outsider.
Yet the accident opened her eyes to something else. A white nurse took pity on her and helped at one point. In the colored community, word spread about the accident, that Sweet Mama Stringbean had been seriously injured, that there would be a large medical bill to be paid. Though without much themselves, people took up a collection, donating whatever they could. After she was released from the hospital in Anniston, a crowd showed up when her train arrived back in Birmingham. A sympathetic Negro surgeon also tended to her injury and led her on the long and painful road to recovery. Ethel would never forget this kindness, this other side of human nature, this goodness of the common people, white as well as Black. In the years to come, these two sides would be at war with one another: the resentful, angry Ethel who expected only the worst from everyone and the gracious, warmhearted Waters, appreciative and grateful to those who had helped.
Months of Recuperation Followed. Twice a day her leg had to be rebandaged. But she had to work, partly to pay off her medical bills. Thinking Ethel would be unable to perform again, Jo Hill had found another partner, but when audiences still wanted to see Sweet Mama Stringbean, Jo dropped the new partner and entertained again with Ethel at theaters in Birmingham, Anniston, and Ensley, then Petersburg, Virginia. By now, Ethel, feeling homesick, wanted bookings that would carry her back to Philadelphia. She and Jo made their way to Washington, D.C., where they gave a special Sunday performance at the Howard Theatre. Though they weren’t headliners and though Ethel was resentful of the Howard’s Sunday policy—to admit only light-skinned Negroes—there was the thrill nonetheless of appearing at one of the great Negro theaters. Finally, Ethel arrived in Philadelphia and did so in style, with an engagement at the Standard. She still wasn’t the main event on the lineup of entertainers, but her old friends and family were aware that the local girl had done all right for herself.
Once back home, she became aware of events both around the globe and in her own backyard. On April 6, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson informed Congress that “the world must be made safe for democracy,” and the United States entered World War I. Young men, Black and white, were called into service. Though there was the new policy of segregation in government agencies, official records revealed that 370,000 Black soldiers and 1,400 commissioned Black officers served during the war, half of them stationed in Europe. At home, long-festering racial tensions reached the boiling point in 1917: in Houston, Black soldiers of the 24th Infantry Regiment clashed with white citizens, with deadly results. Two Blacks and eleven whites were killed. Later, thirteen Black soldiers were hanged for their involvement. In East St. Louis, Illinois, between forty and two hundred people were killed in a race riot. Martial law was finally declared. A congressional committee concluded that at least “thirty-nine Negroes and eight whites were killed outright and hundreds of Negroes were wounded and maimed. ‘The bodies of the dead Negroes,’ testified an eyewitness, ‘were thrown into a morgue like so many dead hogs.’ ” During the summer of 1918, bloody race riots had also erupte
d in Chester and Philadelphia, resulting in the deaths of four Blacks and five whites. On the road, all anyone thought about was the next show. With no radio broadcasts and few available newspapers, it was easy to lose sight of the bigger picture, of a world outside one’s own. But in the future, Ethel never lost sight of major events at home and abroad.
Ethel moved in with her mother and her aunt Vi, then living on Fawn Street in Philadelphia. Genevieve was around too, along with a family newcomer, her baby daughter whom she named Ethel. Though Ethel would never be fond of her sister, Genevieve may have looked up to her more than Ethel ever realized. She also had seen the money that Ethel sent home, money that had benefited the entire family. The household was as chaotic as ever. The baby, whom Ethel adored, might be crying. Vi might be drunk. Her Uncle Charlie might show up, disoriented and disconnected and asking for money. Charlie’s perpetual state of bewilderment led to his being briefly sent to the psychiatric ward of the Philadelphia General Hospital, but soon he was back at Fawn Street. Through all these comings and goings, Momweeze would loudly praise the Lord, at times in such a religious fervor that she ran through the house, demanding that the whole family get on their knees to pray.
