Free With Billie by Julia Blackburn Page B

then he
knew
what he had to do and he said, ‘I can’t tell you, Mr Marquet, but give my books to the Principal with my best regards, because I’m leaving school right now!’ And all the class turned round and laughed at him, but he walked out and never returned, even though he later admitted that it took ‘a lot of guts’ to do it.
    He remembered how he hopped on the back of one of those open streetcars and rode right up to Harlem. He told his mother what he had done and ‘The tears came down and I grabbed her and hugged her and explained to her, “Mama, I’m playing music now!” ’ He had already been earning seven dollars a night by playing at parties and he was sure he could earn even more.
    Not long afterwards a man called Jack Sneed ‖ took him one morning to Pod and Jerry’s. It was an integrated club where the ‘sporting element’, Negroes with plenty of money, mixed with white people from downtown who also had plenty of money. Bobby Henderson said that in those days the area was ‘completely integrated and people could walk on the side-streets anywhere and nobody was knocked on the head’. And in spite of Prohibition, at Pod and Jerry’s there was always a jug of corn liquor in the corner, made by people from the South who knew how to make real corn liquor. It gave you ‘an appetite like a horse’. The musicians would come and ‘hit the jug’ and send out for another milk bottle full, which cost a quarter for a quart.
    So there was Bobby Henderson at Pod and Jerry’s and the boss, Jerry, came over and said, ‘Hello, son, can you play the piano? That’s Willie “The Lion” Smith a you see there. He’s one of the greatest piano players playing. Well, Willie’s made plenty of money, and Willie’s going to move downtown to another spot … So, play a tune, kid.’
    Bobby Henderson was very scared, but he said to himself, ‘Play what you can play and that’s all you can do.’ He started with ‘I Got Rhythm’ and after a while he relaxed and went on for about twenty choruses.
    Somebody said, ‘Who is this kid?’
    Somebody else said, ‘You’re all right, kid!’
    And the boss said, ‘Don’t stop there, kid. Play a little blues. I like you. What you drinking? You want the job?’
    So Bobby turned up again at eleven o’clock that night. There was a mirror fixed over the piano so that he could watch the girls dancing and picking up the money between their legs. ‘I’m looking around and my eyes are poppin.’ But the girls who were singing loved him at once for the way he could transpose to any key they wanted, even to the difficult F sharp. ‘Nobody played for us like you play for us,’ they said.
    There was a waiter who had the job of gathering up all the money and putting it into an ‘entertainers’ fund’ that could be shared out at the end of the night. This waiter had to make sure that the girls didn’t secretly stuff dollar bills down their fronts, or hide them ‘you know where’, and as the night moved on the waiter was putting more and more money into Bobby’s pockets. By the time the club was closing in the early morning he had earned himself $150.
    Bobby Henderson went home and, before falling into bed, he emptied the money from his pockets onto the kitchen dresser. His mother woke up and looked at ‘all those twisted-up twenty-dollar bills, ten-dollar bills, five-dollar bills, two-dollar bills, one-dollar bills and she let out a yell. “What’s the matter, Mom? House on fire?” ’ he said, and explained that he had not stolen the money and she could go right out and get herself some new dresses.
    Later that same day he took ten of his own dollars and bought a bottle of dry white wine. Then he walked to the boating lake in Central Park and hired a boat and rowed out as far as he could go. He sat there quietly for a long time, thinking about this sudden change in his fortunes and the new direction his life was taking.
    It was not long after this that he met