Billie’s Backstory: A Selection from Johann Hari’s Chasing the Scream (2019)

“Billie Holiday was born a few months after the Harrison Act, the first law banning cocaine and heroin, and it would become her lifelong twin. Not long after Billie’s birth, her nineteen-year-old mother, Sadie, became a prostitute, while her seventeen-year-old father vanished. He later died of pneumonia 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. 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 and listen to stories from her youth, when she had been a slave on a Virginia plantation. . . .

When she was ten, one of her neighbors—a man in his forties named Wilbert Rich—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, 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.

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.’ 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 until her hands bled, but nobody came.

When she escaped—out of the convent, and Baltimore—she was determined to find her mother, who was last heard from in Harlem. When she arrived on the bus 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 for having sex with strangers. She was fourteen years old. Before long . . . Billie was caught prostituting by the police, and once again, instead of rescuing her from being pimped and raped, they punished her. 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, 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 called Speck showed her how to inject herself with heroin. You just heat up the heroin in a spoon and inject it straight into your veins. When Billie wasn’t drunk or high, she sank into a black rock of depression and was so shy she could barely speak. She would still wake in the night screaming, remembering her rape and imprisonment. ‘I got a habit, and I know it’s no good,’ 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 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, ‘Body and Soul,’ there were tears running down their cheeks. . . .

When Billie sang ‘Loverman, where can you be?’ she wasn’t crying for a man—she was crying for heroin. But when she found out her friends in the jazz world were using the same drug, she begged them to stop. Never imitate me, she cried. Never do this. She kept trying to quit. She would get her friends to shut her away in their houses for days on end while she went through withdrawal. As she ran back to her dealers, she cursed herself as ‘No Guts Holiday.’

Why couldn’t she stop? ‘It’s tough enough coming off when you’ve got somebody who loves you and trusts you and believes in you,’ she wrote. ‘I didn’t have anybody.’ Actually, she said, that’s not quite right. She had Anslinger’s agents, ‘betting their time, their shoe leather, and their money that they would get me. Nobody can live like that.’ The morning he first raided her, Jimmy took Billie to one side and promised to talk to Anslinger personally for her. ‘I don’t want you to lose your job,’ he said.

Not long after, he ran into her in a bar and they talked for hours, with her pet Chihuahua, Moochy, by her side. Then, one night, at Club Ebony, they ended up dancing together—Billie Holiday and Anslinger’s agent, swaying together to the music. ‘And I had so many close conversations with her, about so many things,’ he would remember years later. . . . The man Anslinger sent to track and bust Billie Holiday had, it seems, fallen in love with her. . . .

When Billie was busted again, she was put on trial. She stood before the court looking pale and stunned. ‘It was called “The United States of America versus Billie Holiday,”’ she said, ‘and that’s just the way it felt.’”—Johann Hari, Chasing the Scream: The Opposite of Addiction is Connection (2019)