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given as Philadelphia. For some mysterious reason she was given a further ‘conditional baptism’ on 14 August 1925, when her birthplace had become Baltimore. When she returned to the House of Good Shepherd on 24 December 1926, she was baptised a third time and again her birthplace had become Philadelphia. The ceremony was performed by a different pastor on each occasion, so perhaps people forgot it had been done before and Billie, as always in such situations, kept silent.
    § In 1994 Stuart Nicholson interviewed one of the sisters from the House of Good Shepherd. He was told that Billie often visited the institution when she came to Baltimore and that Sister Margaret, the Mother Superior mentioned by Pony Kane, ‘retained a great affection for “Madge” ’. Nicholson concluded that ‘in the disciplined environment of the House of Good Shepherd, Eleanor [Billie] found the guidance and security that were missing in her life.’
    ‖ Almost everyone who knew John Levy hated him with a passion. When Billie heard of his death in December 1956, she said it was the best Christmas present she could have, while her pianist Bobby Tucker’s only regret was that he died of a heart attack and ‘didn’t even have the courtesy to let someone shoot him’. John Levy looked like a white man and people said you could only tell that he was black when you heard him say ‘motherfucker’.

SEVEN
Mary ‘Pony’ Kane

    ‘Around where the happenin’s was.’
    I  have been listening to the tape of Pony Kane talking about her childhood. She was interviewed on 27 October 1971 at her home on Bond Street in East Baltimore, which is not far from Durham Street, where she and Billie both lived in the same building for a while. * Pony is sitting in a rocking chair and rocking backwards and forwards so that you can hear the rhythmic creak of the wood as she speaks. A man called Lenny is there with her and other people come and go. She laughs a lot as she talks and her voice is deep and mellow.
    The house at 217 Durham Street had been connected to electricity when a white family was there, but in Pony’s time there was just the dim blue glow from cobalt lights, combined with the oily yellow illumination from a few kerosene lamps. The house had four main rooms, a ‘summer kitchen’, a bath in the back and a water tap out in the yard. There was also a tiny attic on the third floor, which was where Billie stayed, except when her mother came to spend a few days withher lover, Wee Wee Hill. Then Billie moved to another bed, somewhere else in the building.
    The house was owned by Miss Lucy Hill, whom everyone called Miss Lou. Pony described her as a ‘great big fat lady’ who was crippled because she had a hole in her leg. Pony thought this was caused by cancer, although Miss Lou’s son Wee Wee said it was the result of having slipped and hurt herself on an icy road. But anyway, the hole ‘ate and ate and ate’ and it gave Miss Lou a lot of pain and made it impossible for her to move about much. Mostly she just stayed in her room on the ground floor, lying on a metal hospital bed, but sometimes she managed to heave herself into a chair next to the stove and then she would sit and stir the cooking pots, while keeping both her legs raised on a wooden box.
    Another of Miss Lou’s sons had epileptic fits and he lived with her all the time; so did Pony, along with her mother, whose name I have not got. Wee Wee was there with his wife Mary, but she left when he started up with Billie’s mother. Pony described Wee Wee as a handsome man, who was always busy with so many different women that no one knew where he was or when he might next turn up. She said there were other boarders in the house as well, and I suppose one of them might have been the man called Wilbert Rich who was discovered raping the eleven-year-old Billie on Christmas Eve in 1926, but Pony made no mention of the rape.
    Pony said she never saw much of Miss Sadie; she thought she