Sleepwalking Backward

When Billie Holiday died, police officers watched over her. Lying in a hospital bed, she was handcuffed and placed under arrest. Despite being sick and putting on the hospital’s critical list, Holiday was denied access to vital medical treatment. Her friends couldn’t see her. She died alone, written off as a long-suffering addict who passed away due to the side effects of her lifestyle... She died on July 17, 1959, at age 44. Holiday won four Grammy Awards, all of them posthumously, for Best Historical Album. She was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame and the National Rhythm & Blues Hall of Fame.

Billie Holiday was born Eleanora Fagan in 1915, the daughter of unwed teenage parents; her mother was thirteen years old, her father fifteen. Her father, a musician, left the family when Billie was a child, while her mother was often absent, working jobs that required travel.

Raised at times by the mother-in-law of her aunt, Billie had a difficult childhood. She was frequently beaten by a cousin, sent to reform school at nine, a survivor of attempted rape at eleven, employed running errands in a brothel at twelve, a victim of sex trafficking at thirteen, and arrested and sent to prison at fourteen.

Through all these experiences and others, Billie was in love with music and singing. "I used to love to sing all the time," she would say. At the brothel, instead of taking money for her work, she asked to listen to Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith on the victrola, spending hours with the music.

After her release from prison and in need of money, fourteen-year-old Billie looked for work as a dancer. During her audition at Pod and Jerry's Log Cabin, she performed poorly in dance. Asked if she could sing, she impressed the owner, who hired her to perform.

More opportunities to perform came her way from Pod and Jerry's Log Cabin. And over the years, she became well known, finding much success in her music career as a jazz singer, though always singing how she felt, never compromising a song to sell more.

But throughout her career, Billie struggled with drug and alcohol addiction. Arrested often, in 1950, she was barred from singing in any place that served alcohol because of her police record. From there, her health continued to deteriorate, and in 1959, Billie died of cirrhosis of the liver at forty-four years old. ❤️🖤💚

There is a lot of noise online about "light vs dark" and "feminine vs masculine" energy. But in African spirituality, these are not battles. They are relationships.

Light is not "good" and dark is not "evil." That is a religious import.

To us, light is clarity, visibility, consciousness. It is what you can name, see, and work with in the open.

Dark is depth, mystery, potential, the womb. It is sacred - the hidden place where things are formed before they are revealed.

The seed does not grow in light. It grows in the dark, in the soil.

The ancestors do not live in the light. They live in the dark, in the earth, where memory is kept.

So as an African child, you are taught to respect both.

You cannot have manifestation without incubation.

You cannot have truth without shadow.

The work is not to choose one over the other.

The work is to walk with both without fear.