Read With Billie for Free Online Page A

had an after-hours drinking house on Pratt Street somewhere, but she was usually away in New York on jobs. ‘She used to stay there most of the time … She made nice money in New York.’ Miss Sadie would send boxes of clothes to her daughter and, on the occasions when she did come to Durham Street, she would bake cookies and cakes and pies. Pony said that of course Billie was nice when she was around her mother, because ‘all girls are nice when they are around their parents’, but as soon as Miss Sadie had gone, Billie ‘would be gone too’.
    Billie was the same age as Pony, but she was a big girland ‘right plump’ and she seemed much older. When she first came out of the House of Good Shepherd, she was ‘too rough’ for the people in Durham Street. ‘She was fighting. She wasn’t scared.’ But she and Pony quickly became friends and went around together for a while and did things together.
    They used to go to a five- and ten-cent store called Broadway and steal clothes, but Billie was not a professional shoplifter; she’d simply see a dress she liked and she’d ‘throw it under her coat’ and that was all. She once stole a skirt for Pony and told Pony’s mother that she had bought it with her own money. In those early days Billie used to wear ordinary pleated dresses and satin blouses with big puff sleeves and shiny belts that looked as though they were made of patent leather.
    Billie had been brought up as a Catholic, but, as Pony explained, ‘Catholic churches were white’, † so she went with the other girls to the little store-front Baptist churches on Dallas Street. Or a group of them might take empty jam jars to the Catholic church of St Michael on Wolf and Lombard, and the priest would come to the door at the back and fill the jars with Holy Water, which he kept in a big barrel. The water brought good luck, especially if you sprinkled it in the corners of a room when you had just moved house. Pony remembered that they were also given old Palm Sunday branches. She said that when Billie came back to Baltimore years later, she never bothered to go to the churches; it was just the bars she’d visit. She’d walk in unannounced ‘and we’d be playing her records’.
    If the two girls wanted to smoke reefers, they’d go to the shop run by a lady called Miss Lura. She sold ‘real skinny ones’, which were rolled by a sailor who sat in the shop. They’d ‘get ’em and use ’em and go and play records’ or they might go to the movies, although they didn’t see many films ‡ because they didn’t have too much money, and soinstead they’d ‘hang out on the corner and whisper about the boy we’d like’.
    But they spent more and more time at Alice Dean’s house on South Dallas Street. Pony said Alice Dean was a very pretty woman, and she was sorry she didn’t have a photograph to show just how pretty she was. Alice was quite short and plump and looked as though she had Indian blood in her veins. She had long hair, which she wore parted in the middle. She had diamond rings and nice clothes: flat-topped wide-brimmed hats, trimmed with bird of paradise feathers § and black and grey Chinese mink, Hudson furs, coats with big collars and big sleeves. She had house dresses and street dresses, but she didn’t wear pants because ‘they were too much trouble to take off’.
    Everyone agreed that Alice Dean ran her house very efficiently. She paid her protection money and never got into any trouble, mostly because ‘No one was stationed there, no, no, the girls would just walk in and clip ’em … I never seen people getting so much money so quick.’ The girls wore red velvet garters and satin slips and panties – ‘all colours,’ said Pony, ‘red, orange, black, lavender, green, you know, all colours … yellow’, and as she spoke it was as if she could again see those colours flashing kingfisher-bright before her eyes. The pimps would sometimes wear girls’ garters on their