Muilti-award winning author Carole Boston Weatherford won a Coretta Scott King Author Honor Award for this title, a biography in verse based on the life of Eleanora Fagan, whom the world knew as Billie Holiday. Weatherford imagines a first-person narrative for Eleanora/Billie, sharing her life from her difficult childhood through her early fame, singing about her own pain and the pain of the Black community as a whole.
The book unfolds as a series of poems, each one an interconnected vignette of part of Holiday’s life. The story ends after the 25-year-old Holiday gives a stunning performance of “Strange Fruit,” her signature song. Although we do not see her later years of addiction and abusive relationships, this is far from a glossed-over story. Weatherford does not shy from mentioning the hardships of Holiday’s earlier life, including her rape by a neighbor (for which he got three months in jail and she was asked to repent by the nuns at the Catholic reform school where she had been confined as a state witness).
Weatherford acknowledges Holiday’s bisexuality with the verse:
Mom wouldn’t hear
of my boyfriends sleeping over
but never said a word with I brought
girls home: prostitutes, socialites,
and stars. I won’t drop names,
but I had them call me “Bill.”
Weatherford’s lightly fictionalized (but fact-based) approach gives young readers an accessible way to learn about Holiday’s life. While the narrative includes some topics that place this at the upper end of the middle-grade range, it is a powerful and insightful book and highly recommended.
The book is based on a real life, but with an imagined first-person perspective, so I am tagging it both “fiction” and “nonfiction.”
Content warning: scene of rape.
