Becoming Billie Holliday, by Carole Boston Weatherford

Becoming Billie Holiday
A fictional verse memoir
By Carole Boston Weatherford
Art by Floyd Cooper

The world knew her as Billie Holiday, but first she was Eleanora Fagan--neglected by her parents, raped by a neighbor, and sent to reform school. She scrubbed marble steps, drank bootleg liquor, smoked then-legal weed, worked in a brothel, and found her voice--all before leaving Baltimore. She hit New York just as the Harlem Renaissance gave way to the Great Depression. Luckily, Eleanora had a voice. She began her singing career as a teen and, by age 25, had not only fronted the era’s hottest bands, but recorded her signature song “Strange Fruit.” Poems by Weatherford trace the singer's journey from B-girl to jazz royalty. Cinematic, sepia-toned art by Cooper completes this fictional verse memoir.

Ages: Teen-adult
Hardcover, 120 pages, $19.95
Boyds Mills Press/Wordsong
October 2008
ISBN: 1-59078-507-X
ISBN-13: 978-1-59078-507-2







Baltimore-born and -raised, I composed my first poem in first grade and dictated the verse to my mother. My father, a high school printing teacher, printed some of my early poems on index cards.

Since my literary debut with Juneteenth Jamboree in 1995, my books have received many literary honors. Moses: When Harriet Tubman Led her People to Freedom (2006), illustrated by Kadir Nelson, won a Caldecott Honor, the Coretta Scott King Award for Illustration and an NAACP Image Award. Birmingham, 1963 won the Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award, the Jane Addams Children's Literature Honor and the Jefferson Cup from Virginia Library Association. The Sound that Jazz Makes (2000) won the Carter G. Woodson Award from National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) and an NAACP Image Award nomination. Freedom on the Menu: The Greensboro Sit-Ins (2005) and Remember the Bridge: Poems of a People (2002) both won the North Carolina Juvenile Literature Award. Dear Mr. Rosenwald received a Golden Kite Honor from the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators. And, in 2007, I received the Ragan-Rubin Award from the North Carolina English Teachers Association. More about my books.

I earned a Master of Arts in publications design from the University of Baltimore and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of North Carolina-Greensboro. I teach at Fayetteville State University and live in High Point, N.C. with my husband Ronald and our college-age son and daughter.

Three poems from BECOMING BILLIE HOLLIDAY



YOU GOTTA SHOW ME

After-hours jam sessions
were a crash course in jazz.
Every chance I got,
I saw beside piano players,
studying their fingers
striding the keyboard,
striking sharps and flats
and major and minor chords,
trilling syncopated melodies.
I trailed their fingers
for octaves as they charmed
the secretsof swing.
Piano masters offered up
music's mysteries.
I put myself in their hands.


HOW DEEP IS THE OCEAN?

Without the microphone,
there would be no spotlight,
no band backing me
with buesy swing.

My voice was small,
barely an octave,
but the mic enlarged my songs,
let me hold listeners close.

With the microphone,
my voice was an ocean,
deep as my moods,
and audiences dove in.


I ONLY HAVE EYES FOR YOU


I guess I'm a sucker
for a sad-eyed pooch
'cause I was a stray myself,
running the streets, going from pillar
to post as a girl, not sure when
or where Mom would pawn me off
on neighbors or distant kind.

Someday when I settle down,
I'm gonna get a dog to wag its tail
like a metronome when I come home
and nudge me with its nose.
I'll take my pooch everywhere--
clubs, restaurants, even church--
and dare a soul to throw us out.