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never told me anything … She very seldom had anything to do with anybody else and she was always down in the dumps … In the classroom she’d go to sit on a chair by herself, and when she went out in the yard she’d go to sit by herself. She never bothered with nobody. She very seldom spoke to anybody … She was almost like a stick … She sewed a lot: overalls, shirts …’
    Billie, in the form of a child called Madge, was released back onto the streets of Baltimore on 3 October 1925, three months before she had completed her sentence. This was presumably because her silence and lack of contact with the other inmates were interpreted as good behaviour. § Christine Scott said she did not know who came to fetch Billie when it was time for her to leave, but she was quite sure it was not her mother Sadie.
    Apart from the period between 24 December 1926 and 2 February 1927 that Christine failed to mention, Billie made one final visit to the House, in around 1950. She came because she was planning to go to Europe and needed a copy of her Certificate of Baptism in order to be able to obtain a passport.
    She arrived with John Levy, her current boyfriend andmanager, and in a flurry of excitement showed him around this place that had been one of her many childhood homes. She led him to the chapel where she had been baptised, to the dormitory where she had slept in a narrow bed, to the room where she had kept herself busy sewing shirts and overalls, to the kitchen where she had eaten her solitary meals and to the yard where she had sat in silence, ‘almost like a stick’. One of the sisters looked at John Levy’s pale skin and smooth black hair and asked him if he was Jewish. ‘Half-Negro and half-Jew,’ he replied. ‖
    Then Billie agreed to sing a song for the girls. Perhaps one of the sisters was willing to accompany her on the piano, or she had a pianist with her, or she sang without any music at all. The song she chose for the occasion was ‘My Man’. The girls squealed with delight, while the sisters were appalled.
    He’s not much on looks
    He’s no hero out of books
    But I love him.
    Yes, I love him.
    Two or three girls
    Has he
    That he likes as well as me,
    But I love him.
    I don’t know why I should,
    He isn’t true
    He beats me too.
    What can I do?
    Christine Scott missed this performance, but she was told about it later. She thought she must have been out in the yard feeding the chickens at the time, and nobody botheredto come and tell her that her famous god-daughter had returned. So she never had a chance to see for herself how the frightened child she knew as Madge had been transformed into such a bold woman, full of laughter and talk, her lips painted as red as blood, her mink coat slippery on her shoulders.
    Linda Kuehl asked Christine what she thought had happened to Billie and why it had all gone so wrong. Her reply was, ‘She got off track. You see things and you know how it is; how a young girl feels.’
    * In the small hours of the morning of 24 December 1926, Sadie discovered her daughter being raped by a neighbour called Wilbert Rich. Billie was bundled off to the House of Good Shepherd as a State Witness and might have languished there for years had not her uncle Charles Fagan paid for a lawyer to fight for her. She was released on the grounds of habeas corpus. At his trial, Rich was found guilty on the count of ‘Carnal Knowledge of 14–16-year-old’ (there were six counts against him in total), in spite of the fact that Billie was only eleven at the time and both the court and the House of Good Shepherd held her correct date of birth (Nicholson, pp. 26–7).
    † All the girls were given new names when they arrived. In theory this was to protect their identities, although it seems more like a way of making them forget who they were. Billie (whose name at the time was still Eleanor) was called Madge.
    ‡ This first baptism was on 19 March 1925 and Billie’s place of birth was