Crazy They Call Me
Zadie Smith
In this story, Smith takes on the voice of singer Billie
Holiday. This piece is adapted from Jerry Dantzic: Billie Holiday at Sugar Hill, a book by photographer
Jerry Dantzic, published in April.
In her Q&A with Cressida Leyshon, Smith says something very interesting about getting close to her subject, and basically inhabiting the character of the person she is writing about. I think this is a great way to think about your fictional characters---get into their heads and become them as you write about them. Smith says: “I always thinks
critical writing should meet its subject in sympathy. If you write about
Borges, get a little Borgesisan. If you write aout Bergman,write Bergmanly. And
son on. The stronger the voice of the artist under consideration the more I feel
this. But Billie’s voice is so distinct I couldn’t find a way to write about it
from any distance at all. In the end I just looked at the pictures and felt my
way in.”
What I love about this story is the intimacy of it.
“Holiday” is talking to herself, and addresses herself in the second person. Not
only that, she is distancing herself from the person she used to be (born
Eleanora Fagan, abused child, former prostitute, daughter of a prostitute, wife
of abusive men, drug addict, alcoholic, victim of prolonged racism, etc.) So
it’s a story told in the second person, by a first person narrator. This is a
great device to use, especially if you have a character who is wrestling with
her or himself---there’s an inherent tension built into the second person
narrator. It very easily takes on a confrontational or confessional tone and
draws the reader in right away. When a writer writes, “You,” the reader
immediately thinks the writer is talking to him or her.
In this story, the stakes are raised right away in the first
paragraph. Just the mention of the words “cops” or “IRS” in the audience makes
us wonder what this narrator is running from and what she’s running towards.
She has abandoned her old self, Eleanora Fagan, her recording self, Billie
Holiday, and is now only Lady Day. The elimination and abandonment of old
selves and the fierce clinging to a desirable new self, is always fascinating
to read about:
Page 1: “In fact,
though many aren’t hip to this yet—not only is there o more Eleanora, there
isn’t any Billie, either. There is only Lady Day. Alligator bag, three rows of
diamonds nice and thick on your wrist---never mind that’s it’s three o’clock in
the afternoon. You boil an egg in twinset and pearls.”
Page 1: The tension continues to build towards the end of
the first page: The narrator is giving everything away and we have the
impression that she is at the end of something. Whenever we think we are
reading a story about the end of something (or the beginning), the stakes are
raised. The reader begins to fear for the narrator:
“Girl, you must give
away twenty smokes a day .You give it all away, it streams from you, like
rivers rolling to the sea: love, money, smokes. What you got, everybody
wants—and most days you let ‘em have it. Sometimes it’s as much as you can do
to keep ahold of your mink.”
Pages 1-2: The tension continues to rise. The narrator
continues to speak to herself, and sends a warning to the reader that she is a
dangerous woman who is not afraid of danger. The stakes continue to rise as the
narrator describes how she sees herself, a woman who gets beaten by men and
sleeps with married men:
“It’s not that you
don’t like other women, exactly, it’s only that you’re wary. And they’re wary of
you right back. No surprise, really. Most of these girls live in a completely
different world. You’ve visited that work on occasion ,but it’s not home.
You’re soon back on the road. Meanwhile, they look at you and see that you’re
unattached---even when you’re hitched—they see you’re floating, that no one
tells you when to leave the club, and there’s nobody crying in a cot waiting
for you to pick them up and sing a lullaby. No, nobody tells you who to see or
where to go, and if they do, you don’t have to listen, even when you get a sock
to the jaw. Now, the women you tend to meet? They don’t know what to do with
that. They don’t know what to do with the God-blessed child, with the girl
that’s got her own, who can stay up drinking with the clarinet player till the
newspaper boys hit the corner. And maybe one of these broads is married to that
clarinet player. And maybe the two of them have a baby and a picket fence and
all that jazz. So naturally she’s wary. You can understand that. Sure.”
Page 4: The narrator announces her love of dogs, which
establishes her as a relatable narrator, even if she is also a dangerous
character. “You get a dog,” she writes. She will continue to use drugs
and have a near death experience, but her dog saves her from death:
“Later, you’ll open
your vanity case and take a trip on the light fantastic---but right at this
little moment you’re grateful for your little dog.”
The narrator explains why dogs are reliable and life-saving:
“You did have a huge great dog, a while
back, but she was always knocking glasses off the side tables, and then she
went and died on you, so now you got this tiny little angel. Pepi. A dog don’t
cheat, a dog don’t lie. Dogs remind you of you: they give everything they’ve
got, they’re wide open to the world. It’s a big risk! There are people out
there who’ll kick a little half-pint dog like Pepi, just for something to do.
And you know how that feels. This little dog and you? Soul maters. Where you
been all my life? He’s like those dogs you read about, that sit on their
master’s grave for years and years and years. Recently, you had a preview of
this. You were up in the stratosphere, with no body at all, floating, almost
right there with God, you were hanging off the pearly gates, and nobody and
nothing could make you come back. Some fool slapped you , some other fool
sprayed seltzer in your face---nothing. Then this little angel of a dog licked
you right in your eye socket and you came straight back to earth just to feel
it, and three hours after that you were on a stage, getting paid. Dogs are too
good for this world.
Page 5: The tension continues to rise as the narrator tells
us and tells herself that there are people waiting for her who want to “escort”
her to the club. But she also reminds us that she is (mostly) a professional,
and always a star:
“I guess somebody thinks you’re not going to
get there at all without these---now what would you call them? Chaperons. Guess
somebody’s worried. But with or without your chaperons you’ll get there, you
always get there, and you’re always on time, except during those exceptions
when exceptional things seem to happen which simply can’t be helped. Anyway,
once you open your mouth all is forgiven. You even forgive yourself. Because
you are exceptional, and so exceptions must be made. And isn’t the point that
whenever a lady turns up onstage she’s always right on time?”
Page 6: Here, “Billie” describes what it’s like to be up on
stage. As we’ve talked about in class, process is always interesting, and here
the narrator tells us her process for getting ready to perform and then
protecting herself on stage. She also continues to establishes herself as a
somewhat dangerous narrator who is not afraid of dissing her competition (Ella
Fitzergerald and Sarah Vaughan) or her audience. This aggressive dismissal of
her rivals and her paying customers continues to raise the stakes of this
story: Even if we didn’t know Billie Holiday’s tragic story, we know that we
are listening to the story of a woman who is troubled and headed for more
trouble, and we read on to see what happens. She mentions the song StrangeFruit , a sad and beautiful song about lynching. In doing this, Zadie Smith gives the
reader a micro-education about the importance of the song:
“It’s my hair on my
goddam head. It’s arranged just so around my beautiful mask---take a good look!
Because you know they’re all looking right at it as you sing, you place it
deliberately in the spotlight, your death mask, because you know they can’t help
but seek your soul in the face, it’s their instinct to look for it there. You
paint the face as protection. You draw the eyebrows, define the lips. It’s the
border between them and you. Otherwise, everybody in the place would think they
had permission to leap right down your throat and eat your heart out.
“People ask: What’s it
like standing up there? It’s like eating your own heart out. It’s like there’s
nobody out there in the dark at all. All the downtown collections and the white
ladies in their own fancy furs love to talk about your phrasing---it’s the
fashion to talk about your phrasing—but what sounds like a revolution to others
is simple common sense to you. All respect to Ella, all respect to Sarah, but
when those gals open their mouths to sing, well, to you it’s like someone just
opened a brand new Frigidaire. A chill comes over you. And you can’t do it like
that. Won’t It’s obvious to you that a voice has the same work to do, musically
speaking, as the sax or the trumpet or the piano. A voice has got to feel its
way in. Who the hell doesn’t know that? Yet somehow these people don’t act like
they know it, they always seem surprised. They sit in the dark, drinking
Martinis, in their mink, in their tux. People are idiots. You wear pearls
and you throw them before swine, more or
less. Depends what pearls, though, and what swine. Not everybody , for example,
is gonna get ‘Strange Fruit.’ Not
every night. They’ve got to be deserving---a word that means a different thing
depending on the night. You told somebody once, I only do it for people who
might understand and appreciate it. This is not a June-Moon-Croon-Tune. This
song tells a story about pain and heartache. Three hundred years of heartache.
You got to turn each room you play into a kind of church in order to
accommodate that much pain. Yet people shout their requests from their tables
like you’re a goddam jukebox. People are idiots. You never sing anything after
‘Strange Fruit,’ either. That’s the last song no matter what and sometimes if
you’re high, and the front row looks rich and stupid and dull, that’s liable to
be your only song. “
Pages 7-8: The last paragraphs of this piece are beautifully
written: Defiant, irreverent, stress-inducing, educational, precise, funny,
ironic and ultimately, bittersweet but gloriously conclusive about the pleasures
and perils of being a singer, performer and star:
“In the end, people
don’t want to hear about dogs and babies and feeling your way into a phrase or
eating your heart out---people want to hear about you as you appear in these
songs. They never want to now about the surprise you feel in yourself, the sense
of being directed by God, when something gin the modulation of your throat
leaps up, like a kid reaching for a rising balloon, except most kids miss while
you catch it—yes, you catch it almost without expecting to—landing on an
incidental note, a perfect addition, one you never put in that phrase before,
and never heard anyone else do, and yet you can hear at once that it is perfection.
Perfection! It has the sound of something totally inevitable---it’s better than
Porter, it’s better than Gershwin. In a moment you have written over their
original versions finally and completely…
“No, they never ask
you about that. They want the cold, hard facts. They ask dull questions about
the songs, about which man goes with which song in your mind and if they’re a little
more sneaky with no manners, they’ll want ot know if chasing the drink or the dragon
made singing those songs harder or sweeter. They’ll want to know about your
run-ins with the federal government of these United States. They’ll want to
know I you hated or loved the people in you audience, the people who paid your
wages, stole your wages, arrested you once for fraternizing with a white main,
jailed you for hooking, jailed you for being, and raided your hospital room,
right at the end as you lay conversing with God. They are always interested to
hear you don’t read music. Once, you almost said---to a sneaky fellow from the Daily
News, who was inquiring---you almost turned to him and said Motherfucker I AM
music. But a lady does not speak like that, however, and so you did not.”
