Looking at notes from a conversation I had with the late William Dufty, author of Sugar Blues and decades before that co-author of Billie Holiday’s autobiography. I interviewed him for my Bankhead book at least twice, and have some tapes of him as well.
Anyway, in this conversation, he told me that Holiday had told him at one point in all sincerity that she couldn’t have a bank account because she had been an illegitimate child.
Was it possible for her to be so credulous, I thought to myself and out loud to him. “It was no more insane than some of the other things that circumscribed her life.” To Holiday it was “just more white-people craziness.”