Billie in Frankfurt
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Billie in Frankfurt
The German audiences— who often recognized
black artists in a way white
Americans could not—welcomed
her with an uproar,
hoots & hollers of joy & expectation—
My heart is jumpin,’ you started somethin . . .
At first,
tentative—
drug-slow & heartless—
as if she wasn’t (as Carmen McRae once said)
only happy when she sang, or as if maybe now, she was never
happy, near dead & propped up on the bones of her reputation.
Then, as if their [End Page 319]
desire for her finally broke ice,
she burned to heat & slowly rose
to the top
of the band, taking her
tag-turn, in & out—
Oh what a little moonlight can do . . .
the phrasing Pops had taught her; the phrasing Frank
confessed she had taught him. [End Page 320]
Toi Derricotte is Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh and author of five books of poems, including The Undertaker’s Daughter, Tender, and Captivity. She is also co-editor (with Cornelius Eady) of Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade, and author of a literary memoir, The Black Notebooks, winner of the 1998 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Nonfiction. Derricotte is currently a member of the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets.
