Free With Billie by Julia Blackburn Page A

sexual intercourse with each other at the same time’ (
Dictionary of American Slang
).

FOURTEEN
Bobby Henderson

    ‘The way she handled a fork.’
    M ae Barnes first got to know Billie in 1928, when they were both ‘doing the tables’ at a club called the Nest. * Billie stood out from the other girls because she refused to sing dirty songs and only took tips with her hands. ‘She felt if she couldn’t make a dollar standing on her own two feet, she didn’t want it. And if a guy offered her ten dollars to go with him to a house, she’d say, “Shit! I can make that standing up!” Even for a hundred bucks, she’d refuse.’
    Mae Barnes met Bobby Henderson around 1930 when he and Billie were sweethearts for a couple of years. She saw how different he was from the other men Billie went with later, the ‘hustlers, pimps and all kinds of smooth-talking cats,rough-talking cats, who could protect her’. She said that Bobby Henderson was the only man Billie ever loved. He was someone who ‘showed her a lot of affection and he was a good man and a beautiful pianist … He had his own style.’
    People spoke of Bobby Henderson as the warmest, kindest, gentlest person they knew. † He was quiet in the company of strangers and he could be aloof in his way, but when he was working in a club he was very lively and would ‘juice a lot’ along with the best of them. He always got on well with everyone: with the girls who were singing or dancing, with the club owner and with the guests; he was even on friendly terms with difficult men such as the gangster Dutch Schultz and the pimp Dickie Wells. ‡
    Away from the night-life of work, Bobby Henderson lived quietly with his mother on 109th Street, just across from Mayor La Guardia. He spent a lot of time alone, walking the streets of New York with a bottle of wine in his pocket to keep him company. He said that was the only way he could think about what he called the ‘process’ of his life and could listen to the stream of music playing inside his head. ‘I had a habit of walking … I know every path in Central Park; I know every path in every park in New York City. I’m one of the few people that walked from the Battery to the Bronx, from the Hudson River to the East River – you hear what I say? Through Chinatown. I don’t think there’s a street in New York I haven’t walked on. It’s a big city, but since I was a kid I knew it. And thank God I could always hear some music when I was walking, whether a jukeboxwas playing or not, I was hearing sounds. And when I came to the piano at night, the girls used to say, “Where you been today? What you been doin’? You sound mighty fresh on those keys!” ’
    Bobby’s mother was unmarried and already middle-aged when he was born in Harlem in 1910. He was her only child. She worked as a janitress and brought him up on her own, but she was visited regularly by a much younger man who ‘acted like a little chippy girl’ and ran a musicians’ club on 134th Street and 7th Avenue. Bobby had always known this man as Uncle Fred, but when he was seventeen a friend told him that Uncle Fred was his father. He kept this knowledge to himself for another ten years. He remembered the one occasion when Uncle Fred ‘showed me that he loved me’. He clapped Bobby on the shoulders and said enigmatically, ‘This is
my
boy.’ §
    Bobby said his mother was full of love and never judged him, but she was also very strict and very religious. She was keen for her son to go to college to study bookkeeping so that he might have a better life than the one she had known. But then, when he was twenty-two years old, he was sitting one day in the classroom with the music of Duke Ellington’s ‘Sophisticated Lady’ going round in his head and suddenly he asked himself, ‘Who is going to keep whose books in
this
administration?’
    His teacher was calling to him, ‘Mr Henderson! Mr Henderson! Where are you, Mr Henderson?’
    And right