Billie's Reasoning and Billie's Body

Dear Billie,

Before I knew your voice I knew your face, or rather your faces. I knew that I could love you without question because of the spell you seemed to have cast on others. As Farah Jasmine Griffin states in her lectures on Black women’s vocality, “the voice is unfamiliar, uncanny, almost otherworldly. It is a voice capable of casting spells. It is a voice concerned with its connection to the world of the spirit, its ability to invoke the presence of the divine.” I once described your voice as being “haunting” yet this, what Griffin has articulated, is what I meant. Your voice resonates in some place inside of me that I do not have access to. This part of me is rarely stimulated. In fact, I am encouraged not to take notice of and develop what I suspect is a vital power, in our masculinist society. It is a forbidden, “dark place”, that cannot be registered using the reasoning tools that are valued in our society. But Billie, you do away with all of that. You grip and grasp that part of me and give me new tools to understand.

Yet, at the same time, I could not determine or own my love for you until I was certain of who you were. This was a dilemma since there are no images that pin you down. They are all different. I imagined you dazzling and glamorous in the photo where your chin is slightly tilted, your eyes are dim and smoky and gardenias are majestically pinned to the side of your head. But in other photographs you seemed cool and uninviting. I imagined you that sorrow sunken, pain laden Black Woman. And I wanted no part of the Sapphire, Mule Bitch. You were not plump...not sweet and I could not profess my love for you until I knew exactly who you were. But in your brilliance Billie, you cannot be deduced. The wonderful thing about you Billie, that I have learned to respect and honor in myself and in others when that uncanny feeling arises, is that you cannot be defined and limited to the scope of my imagination, or that of the worlds. You make clear, through your art form, the futility of such boundaries.

After awhile I decided to just claim you."Yeah I love Billie Holiday." You became my Billie despite the confusion...always so different...as if you were several people. As Farah Jasmine Griffin would say, you were my “mystery”.

I only really knew the songs “Strange Fruit” and “God Bless the Child”. I sat scribbling on the floor of a used bookstore in high school, inspired by your rendition of “My Man”. I did not know that it was you who sang that song until years later. But even then, I loved you.

During my first year of college I began collecting more of your music, downloading it from the playlists of strangers. But the same songs stayed in rotation, I never listened. If was as if I couldn't bear to listen. It felt like something was taken from me whenever I confronted the Billie I did not know. But as I reflect I realize that I did not know how to listen...so attached to the known.

I ventured for the first time when a friend sung the jazz standard “Willow Weep for Me”. Beautiful. I wanted to hear how you sang it. And that was when I understood what it means to sing. You flavored every word, “Willow (you draw on this) Weep for me/ Bend you branches along the ground (you sing almost matter of factly and your voice trails as it to say “here look, it’s so easy”) and weep for me/Listen to my plea (You utter this so sweetly yet there is this strong, sure unfamiliar sort of innocence in your voice. It is persuasive.)/Gone my lovely dreams” I could cry Billie.

I understood what the musician was to the singer after watching you perform with Lester Young, Cole Hawkins and the others when you sang “Fine and Mellow”.



You all were on stage smiling and conversing and you seemed to really like what they were saying. You nodded your head as if to yes “Yes. Yes. That’s True. That’s right Baby”. And it could have been a drug induced nod, but none of that really matters cause you were there. You were far away into some space of understanding that I longed to discover. You understood the language of their music, of the music that you all were creating, and it was all gospel Billie. I understood this relationship when Louie Armstrong sang through his horn and graciously and appreciatively handed the verse over to you when the two of you performed “The Brews are Brewing”. It was sweet. The musicians in the background were your chorus, echoing and supporting what it was that you were saying and conveying. It was all one big conversation and everybody added something unique and different. Everybody had an idea to contribute to this philosophy you all were crafting.

Conveying. I understood better what it means to perform after watching you sing “The Blues are Brewing”.



It seems that everything you do here has an impact on me. You phrased every movement in that way that you phrase every word. Every movement is purposeful and its all a part of you communicating that something. As Angela Davis explains in “Blues Legacies and Black Feminism” you moved the song pass the lyrics. You transcended the boundaries of mere meaning, speaking in a different tongue, ascribing new meaning to old things. Davis discusses how there were political implications to your love songs and if this is possible, well then other topics, beyond the political, can be communicated as well. Billie's philosophy. Your love songs are philosophical utterances on various topics.

"The Blues are Brewing." The song meant much more than the mere words and it’s meaning changed every time you performed it. I have heard you sing that song in three different ways and after I heard one then the other I explained, "She's talking about something else." In your performance with Louie there was something relevant about you put your whole body into the song. It was complex. You lift your eyebrow and gently thrust the lyrics. You sing “thirsting” and “bursting” and I understand exactly what that means to you because you squeeze your face and hold your body as if to say “ohhhh” and “yesss”. Passion inches from your lips and springs from your eyes. Then you sing, “You got the feeling you want to die”. You pause for a moment here but as if to recover from some fantastic feeling. Ecstasy? You sway back and forth on the rhythm and croon, “The blues are brewing”. You are delightful. Sexual. Sexy. Sultry. Sensual. And I believe everything that you are saying. Your performance has convinced me that yes it is a wonderful feeling to desire, “something that you’ve never had”. This song and your performance, it seems, is all about desire. It’s about the pleasure of working and building those feelings up inside of ones self. This is itself a wonderful, wonderful feeling but getting what you have desired and then finally, finally releasing, well that’s also great. This particular performance of the song may convey your philosophical theory of desire.

You performed a feeling. You performed eroticism. You performed the orgasm, linking the secular and the divine. It is the buildup to the break. This occurs in realms of other women's art was well. Note the rhythmic verses of the poets Onono Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, poet of the Heian period in Japan. These women understood this theory as well. The fact that it could be done and performed there on that stage demonstrates that it can exist anywhere. You helped me to see this about other things Billie. Sensations that are limited to the body and separated from the mind, as in the mind/body binary, are not separate because you were there reasoning with your body. You were there reasoning with your body.

Billie, this is a feminist feat. You disprove the binaries that have resulted in our perceived inferiority. You prove that things can exist that appear to be contradictory. You woman/ genius, black/woman, creative/philosopher.

I am stunned and delighted by what you can do to a song. You spark all sorts of things within me. I feel every turn you take in a song in my body through the theorizing that you have done with your body. I have come to know you through “this body, remembering yours”. I could cry sometimes. I have come a long way in getting to know you, Billie. Billie. Billie. Billie.