ignorance—as if her performance, night after night and year after year, never prepared for such responses, as if there was no sophistication to Lady’s rigorous education in and of this love. But her artistry does not rely on the audience’s capacity to cognize its response, being concerned, instead, with training their perception and responsibility. The agency of her artistry may not be abated even as the audience falls short of what it asks of them, or reports to have closed their ears. And if sometimes Holiday refused to perform “Strange Fruit,” whether out of frustration with the crowd or mere exhaustion, at other times you might imagine her response to the desires of both critics and fans in the phrases of a love song just as difficult to hear: hush now, don’t explain.
Is this what is meant when it is said that her voice sounds wise? Even those convinced she didn’t understand the words she sang speak of her singing in this fashion, but what does it mean to attribute wisdom to the quality of her sound? (Lazy, they also call it, which may be easier to understand, if you can recognize preparation and skill in achieving the effect. “Lazy” sounds scornful, and often is, because laziness names the confrontation between fantasies of imperial privilege and everyday resistance, revolted and envious desire gazing down on a dream of freedom catching like a tune in the back of your head.) What kind of wisdom is this?
Formally speaking, schools would not teach it, though it might be learned there; what education Holiday received, in any case, is a matter of lore. Schools were part of a complex of uplifting institutions given to violent intervention in Holiday’s transient family life; eluding one’s embrace only brought on the attentions of another. Not yet ten, as Eleanora Gough, “cutting school on … a spectacular scale” got her hauled to juvenile court and sentenced to a year at Baltimore’s House of the Good Shepherd for Colored Girls, where, “for protection and confidentiality,” she was known as “Madge” (Nicholson 23). After nine months, she was returned to her mother, Sadie. The following year, on Christmas Eve, Sadie interrupted a neighbor in the act of raping her, and called the police, who arrested the rapist but took his victim back to the reformatory (25). It would take until February for Sadie to secure her daughter’s release, after borrowing money for a lawyer (27).
In Lady Sings the Blues, the stays at the House of the Good Shepherd are conflated, and the institution, run by Catholic nuns, is a place of nightmares. A girl, forced to wear a tattered red dress, is warned by the Mother Superior that God will punish her, before flying from a swing and breaking her neck. Later, Holiday is made to wear the same dress, locked overnight in a room with a dead girl, and beats her hands against the door until they bleed (17–18). In Stuart Nicholson’s biography, however, the reformatory is a positive influence, “a disciplined environment” offering “the guidance and security that were missing in her life”; the truancy bringing her there is a “cry for help” resulting from a lack of maternal attention (23). Her departure from the institution is reported with melancholy impassivity—“The House of [the] Good Shepherd marked her file, ‘Did not return to us’ ” (27)—as the poor girl follows her neglectful mother into an underworld of nightlife and prostitution. Alternately reported as benevolent and cruel, the reformatory, an explicitly gendered and racialized institution of education and incarceration, embodies all the contradictions of uplift from Baltimore to the Philippines.
In Julia Blackburn’s With Billie, the school is simply “an awful place, very bleak and grim” (23); one of Holiday’s contemporaries recalls the Mother Superior’s harsh discipline and systematic physical and sexual abuse by the older inmates (24–25). Another interviewee recalls Holiday’s visit to the institution a quarter-century later, seeking documentation for a passport. In this anecdote, the singer agrees to an impromptu performance for the girls, choosing “My Man,” a song now notorious for lyrics professing devotion to an abusive lover (28).18 Could this be true, and if so, what lesson passes from an alumna to a group of girls eager to identify with her escape? In the words of the song, love forecloses freedom.
Returning to Nicholson, you will find that the path from the reformatory leads to a different education, set in a brothel but conducted by Victrola: Holiday runs errands for the local madam so she can listen to her recording of Louis Armstrong’s “West End Blues” (27). Nicholson notes that Holiday herself particularly favored this anecdote, recounting it in her autobiography and multiple interviews, and though the juxtaposition with the reformatory is his own, it seems clear she meant it as a fable or origin myth of her own education. Its central elements include the setting, extravagant beauty defying disreputable poverty, the aesthetic experience of wonder, and a lesson in technique: Armstrong’s scat singing outstrips the impoverished meaning-making capacity of words.19
So if there is a model, a place of identification, a way out, it appears where the music outruns words. This is what there might be, for those who love the music, for poor black girls caught in uplift’s cruel embrace, for everyone not yet free, if you are willing to risk reading too much into stories made of other stories, old lies, cultivated memories, and half-forgotten desires. It should be a relief to know, as Farah Griffin admits in her book on Holiday, that you cannot “escape positing [your] own version of Lady Day,” and you should not “want to escape doing so” (6), because it is Holiday herself who escapes from behind all the tales. For myself, I prefer to recall the girl who demanded her mother get her out of that prison they called a school, and the struggling young woman who found a way to do so. Sadie died young, too, six years older than her daughter would, according to Nicholson’s careful accounting, or the same age, according to the sly voice of the autobiography: “Mom got to be thirty-eight when I was twenty-five. She would never have more than four candles on her birthday cake. So she was only thirty-eight when she died. I’m going to do the same thing. She never cared what calendars said, and neither do I” (125).20
no-way out
If the love of wayward mothers and daughters is to elude reformation, it must be prepared to face an accounting with violence, for the love of uplift is jealous and claims the violence as its prerogative. Even so, uplift’s love finds firmer ground when it attempts to intercede between dark fathers and their sons.
As with Kong, whose continuing fame, as well as proof of cultural relevance, relies on a series of remakes, following an underlying logic: he is reincarnated, every few decades, when new cinematic technologies succumb to vertiginous fantasies of a lost, primal embodiment. More forgettable are all the films, cartoons, texts, and products that follow the mercenary logic of the sequel—derivative efforts to extract diminishing revenue from the canon of the original and its remakes. The first in this line was hustled out in months by the original producers: “I don’t care what you make,” Merian Cooper recalled telling his partner, Ernest Schoedsack; “anything made called Son of Kong will make money” (qtd. in Vaz 249).
What they made, it happens, was a comedy, cobbled around the flimsy premise of a racist joke: Kong’s son is white. Though still a monstrous ape, he is drastically diminished in size, entirely white in color, and selflessly devoted to the service of Carl Denham, who has fled New York in the aftermath of the first film. Having dragged his father in chains to his doom, Denham discovers mild feelings of obligation to “little Kong,” who returns the sentiment in spades, giving his life to save his master in Skull Island’s climactic destruction. The film reads as imperialism’s affectionate self-parody: white love’s chuckling acknowledgment of its comical, loyal offspring.
Though Kong’s son deserves a thorough consideration of his own, as a footnote to his father’s story, Son of Kong merely confirms his entrapment, securing one dubious line of escape: the benevolence of uplift and the spectacle of conquest turn out to require the same sacrifice. That is, despite his long afterlife as a fictional celebrity, bigger than any vehicle paying his way, Kong remains trapped between the logic of the remake, which continually reenacts his lynching under a gauzy veil of color-blindness, and the logic of the sequel, which reimagines him as a pet—two manifestations of the same violence. Is there no way out for Kong?
Well, why should anyone care? Isn’t Kong a figure for everything antiracism seeks to abolish? Isn’t the
