Read With Billie for Free Online Page B

sleeves, and lots of them had bright silk handkerchiefs emerging like tropical flowers from their waistcoat pockets.
    Pony remembered that house as a magical place, full of laughter and beauty and music. She and Billie used to ‘do anything to be in there. Just to be there.’ They took on any jobs that were offered to them, with maybe a dollar or fifty cents as a day’s pay. ‖ Alice Dean’s bedroom was painted all white and the furniture was white as well, while the bedroomnext door was all blue. Alice had sewn the lace curtains in the bedrooms herself, and they needed starching and ironing, while the front steps, which welcomed each new stranger through the door, needed scrubbing and Pony would polish the oilcloth on the floors until it ‘shone as yellow as the sun … so clean you could eat off it!’ She laughed as she explained how she would wipe a bedroom door very,
very
slowly, while peeping in through the keyhole to see what the women were doing with the men. ‘I tried to see as much as I could. I found out how it went.’
    Pony said that the ‘rich guys who came around the neighbourhood looking for sport’ were white men mostly, simply because ‘Very few coloured men ever had the money … Shit, there weren’t no money in those days. A girl would make a dollar a trick, sometimes a quarter. She’d go to bed all night with a man for two or three dollars.’
    A man would go upstairs with a girl, to the blue bedroom or the white, and he would give her the ‘few pennies he was going to give her’. But what she wanted was his wallet, especially if she had seen that he had a ‘big roll and good bills of money in it’. If he left his trousers folded over the chair by the bed, then it was easy, and Alice Dean or someone else could creep in softly, remove the wallet, empty it and return it to its pocket. But if he kept his trousers on, it was more difficult. Pony was asked in the interview how it was done then, and on the tape you can hear her swivelling her chair round with a noisy squeak as she tells the man called Lenny to stand in front of her so that she can demonstrate the technique.
    ‘OK. So he’s going to trade with me. When we lay down I have to put my hands on him, you understand. But my hand is working on his wallet. On the bed. His pants are down.’
    Again she laughs her big fat laugh and at that moment you can hear a child calling for her and she tells him to help himself to a biscuit from the biscuit tin.
    Pony wasn’t going with men then; that came later, after she had been released from prison. But Billie was muchquicker. She learnt the trade from working in the house and soon she was ‘ready to catch tricks in there too’. But as Pony said, ‘She wasn’t doing anything unusual. She did just like all the rest of ’em … Her friends were all doing that … She’d get a pair of stockings, wash ’em out and put ’em on half-dry and go out. She didn’t have too much of clothes or nothing … She wasn’t making money … She was getting a meal, missing a meal getting a trick or two … She wanted to be around where the happenin’s was, round this way, down this corner, out this way.’
    Billie already had a lot of men. ‘She was a tall girl, shaped pretty nice. She was liked by a whole lot of boys, but she used to call them country boys; they were working fellas and she would get the money and she wouldn’t have no time for them … Hustling men liked her. They would come around and take her for nights out. She didn’t have no time for the others.’
    Billie liked men who ‘dressed nice’: leather nob shoes with wing toes in brown or black or a wine colour; grey pinstriped suits; caps from that shop called Matterburg’s. She liked a very ‘pretty-skinned’ boy called Dee Dee who worked in the packing house, but she found him too much of a country boy and anyway he had another girl. She liked Willie Diggs, who made a lot of money and blowed it, and Charlie Diggs