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“what you doin’ now?” And she would tell jokes in different voices … And there’d be little kids, dirty and all, and she’d grab ’em in her arms and not care, and hold ’em and they’d have molasses on ’em, and she wouldn’t care.’
    * Not Freddie Green the guitarist, ‘the quiet guy’ who played with Billie in the Count Basie band and with whom Baltimore Freddie said she had ‘something going for a while’, although he couldn’t ‘put them together’.
    † Billie’s first recording, with ‘Riffin’ the Scotch’ on one side and ‘Your Mother’s Son-in-Law’ on the other, was issued in 1933. In 1935 she made the first of a number of recordings for Columbia, with Teddy Wilson and his orchestra.

FIVE
Christine Scott

    ‘She never bothered with nobody.’
    O n 5 January 1925, the nine-year-old Billie Holiday was brought before the magistrate at the Juvenile Court in Baltimore. Her mother Sadie was there in court as a witness, along with the probation officer who had reported Billie to the authorities for playing truant. She was described as being ‘a minor without proper care and guardianship’ and was sentenced to spend a year at the local reform school, the House of Good Shepherd for Colored Girls.
    The school was a big, ugly, six-storey warehouse on Franklin Street and Calverton Road in West Baltimore. It was run by a dozen or so nuns who belonged to an order called the Little Sisters of the Poor. They were provided with an annual income of $3,000 by the State of Maryland, but that was not nearly enough for them to feed and clothe themselves, let alone a shifting population of about a hundred girls who were mostly between the ages of fourteen and eighteen.
    People who remembered the House of Good Shepherd from that time said it was an awful place, very bleak and grim. When Linda Kuehl asked some of the sisters to tell her what it had been like to live there, they did not wantto speak about it; they were simply glad the school had been moved to a new location and that conditions had improved. This was except for one very old and senile sister, who kept saying over and over again that it had been ‘Heavenly! Heavenly!’
    The sisters supplemented the school’s income by taking in washing. The girls helped to run the laundry and also did sewing, crocheting and knitting as well as their household duties. There were lessons in reading and writing for the younger ones and in organ playing for anyone who was interested. The days were regimented by prayers in the chapel.
    All the girls had their hair cut short. In the summer they wore blue capes and blue dresses with pleated or gathered sleeves and white cuffs and collars. In the winter they wore the same capes, with black skirts and white blouses. The sisters wore a similar uniform.
    Linda Kuehl spoke to two women who had been sent to the House of Good Shepherd. One of them was Billie’s childhood friend Mary ‘Pony’ Kane, who spent a few weeks there in around 1929, just after Billie had left for New York. Pony was then moved on to the training school, ‘where they put the real bad girls’. That was followed by a term in the local jail, which was where she learnt to steal and ‘do other things’.
    Pony Kane said that Sister Margaret, the Mother Superior, was a mean woman who would hit you and make you stand on one foot in the corner if you didn’t do what you were told. And every time you used swearwords she’d hit you across the fingers with a ruler. But it was the hierarchy of bullying among the inmates that she hated most, especially since all the sisters seemed to know what was happening, but turned a blind eye.
    Pony said, ‘Some of the girls were there five to ten years and some of them were tough. Girls used to get together and they used to fuck you, if they seen you and liked you. The older girls would fuck the younger girls, if they liked ’em. They would sneak ’em candy and talk to ’em … And if a girl didn’t come