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Carl Hart
Billie Holiday was a world-famous Black jazz singer and activist. She remains widely known for the anti-lynching protest song “Strange Fruit” and classic jazz standards like “All of Me.” As a child, she suffered extreme trauma: she was raped, forced into prostitution, and abused at a reform school. As an adult, she turned to heroin for comfort. By the 1930s, her drug use, fame, and antiracist activism made her a perfect target for Harry Anslinger, who wanted to help spread anti-drug sentiment around the country and repress Black and immigrant activists. Anslinger repeatedly had his Bureau of Narcotics agents arrest Holiday for heroin possession, including by planting the drugs on her when he deemed it necessary. He even re-arrested her when she was dying of liver, heart, and respiratory failure in the hospital. Hari uses Holiday’s tragic life and death to demonstrate how the harshest consequences of the war on drugs have largely fallen on addicts themselves.
Billie Holiday Quotes in Chasing the Scream
The Chasing the Scream quotes below are all either spoken by Billie Holiday or refer to Billie Holiday . For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 1 Quotes
Billie didn’t blame Anslinger’s agents as individuals; she blamed the drug war itself—because it forced the police to treat ill people like criminals. “Imagine if the government chased sick people with diabetes, put a tax on insulin and drove it into the black market, told doctors they couldn’t treat them,” she wrote in her memoir, “then sent them to jail. If we did that, everyone would know we were crazy. Yet we do practically the same thing every day in the week to sick people hooked on drugs.”
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Chapter 4 Quotes
There would be many more bullets, but I was going to learn on my journey that Arnold Rothstein has not yet died. Every time he is killed, a harder and more vicious version of him emerges to fill the space provided by prohibition for a global criminal industry. Arnold Rothstein is the start of a lineup of criminals that runs through the Crips and the Bloods and Pablo Escobar to Chapo Guzman—each more vicious because he was strong enough to kill the last.
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And I was going to see that, like Rothstein, Harry Anslinger is reincarnated in ever-tougher forms, too. Before this war is over, his successors were going to be deploying gunships along the coasts of America, imprisoning more people than any other society in human history, and spraying poisons from the air across foreign countries thousands of miles away from home to kill their drug crops.
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Chapter 10 Quotes
That is when Marisela heard rumors that started to make it possible to make sense of this whole story. Sergio, she was told, is a Zeta. That is why the police would not touch him. That is why he kept escaping. When Marisela got her final lead on where Sergio was, the police were finally honest with her. “If he’s with the Zetas, we’re not going to be able to do anything, because they run the state,” they told her. “If we do a bust, it’s because they allow us to do it. We don’t bust people just like that.” They were apologetic, but they explained that the Zetas give them money if they serve them and death if they don’t.
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Conclusion Quotes
I try now to picture Harry as the first dose of opiates washes through his system and it makes him still and calm. What does he think in that moment? Does he think of Henry Smith Williams and Billie Holiday and his order to his agents to “shoot first” when they saw drugs? Does he think of the scream he heard all those years before as a little boy in a farmhouse in Altoona, and of all the people he had made scream since in an attempt to scrub this sensation from the human condition—or does he, for a moment, with the drugs in his hand, hear, at last, the dying of the scream?
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Billie Holiday Character Timeline in Chasing the Scream
The timeline below shows where the character Billie Holiday appears in Chasing the Scream. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 1: The Black Hand
...drug trade and grew up to become a vicious killer. The third key figure, Billie Holiday, spent her childhood helping clean a local brothel because the madam agreed to pay her...
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...anxieties about drugs by outlawing and destroying them through the Harrison Act. In 1939, Billie Holiday famously began singing “Strange Fruit,” a haunting song about lynching that helped launch the civil...
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Anslinger was also fixated on Billie Holiday. (When investigating this connection, Hari manages to meet Holiday’s godson and get access to her...
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Billie Holiday grew up poor in segregated Baltimore. When she was 10, a neighbor raped her—she screamed...
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Harry Anslinger hired the Black agent Jimmy Fletcher to bust Billie Holiday. Fletcher found that, while Holiday was using drugs, she also desperately wanted to quit. They...
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Hari returns to Harry Anslinger and Billie Holiday. To pursue Holiday, Anslinger hired the sadistic agent George White, who bragged about murdering suspects...
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A few years later, Holiday collapsed from a combination of malnourishment, cirrhosis, and heart and respiratory disease. But Anslinger’s agents...
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Chapter 4: The Bullet at the Birth
...war on drugs. And it’s also why Hari sees Arnold Rothstein, Harry Anslinger, and Billie Holiday as the three key people who can help us understand it.
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Chapter 12: Terminal City
...can prevent them from constantly “feel[ing] disgusting and ashamed.” (Indeed, this describes addicts like Billie Holiday, Deborah Hardin, and Marcia Powell, who all used drugs to cope with traumatic childhood experiences.)...
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Both Billie Holiday and Harry Anslinger recognized that there is a relationship between early trauma and addiction, but...
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Chapter 14: The Drug Addicts’ Uprising
...away, it even enabled him to have sex for the first time—while listening to Billie Holiday. Then, for five years, Osborn fled across the country to avoid fighting in Vietnam. He...
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Conclusion: If You Are Alone
...victims. For over a century, they have been dying unnecessarily. Among others, Hari remembers Billie Holiday, Deborah Hardin, and Marcia Powell. He thinks of Marisela Escobedo and her daughter Rubi, Bud...
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...a century ago, even Harry Anslinger concluded that alcohol Prohibition was a mistake. Today, Billie Holiday’s godson—who works with heroin addicts at a San Francisco homeless clinic—clearly sees that the drug...
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...a difference if they start to speak up and persuade people. Edward Williams and Billie Holiday have demonstrated that even people who fail during their lifetimes can set the stage for...
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