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It Like to Broke My Heart |
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"Don t you realize you're selling out for peanuts when I'm trying to go for the millions."
He wouldn't admit to anything, i told him that our contract didn't mean anything if one of the partners didn't play fair. 1 showed him I had the goods on him. He told me, "Morton, everything m this office is in my name and belongs to me/" We started to fight and the super of the building came running and hollering, "Don't hit him in here. He will sue the building.3* That gave the West Indian a chance to escape, which he did. He hollered back, as he ran away, "Jelly Roll Morton, you will lose everything you have/*
That night he tried to get back in the office, but I had beat him to it and changed the lock on the door. He then had the phone cut off—which it was in both our names—and from then on I couldn't get a phone for love nor money. In many ways that was the most peculiar thing that happened to me. I still don't understand why I couldn't get a phone. But the phone business was just the beginning.
I had a young lady working for me by the name of Billy Young. She was an actress friend who was down on her luck and I occasionally was able to give her things to do in the office.* After I kicked the West Indian out, she told me she had noticed that people would come to the door, and stop, seemingly unable to step across the sill; that was strange to her, because formerly a lot of people came to the office. We pulled up the rug near the door and there, underneath were four different colors of powder—gray, white, brown and pink. We started searching the office. We found powder sprinkled everywhere, even in the woodwork of the desk. There wasn't a piece of stationery that was clean of it
How we found out the stationery was fixed—Billy was writing a letter and by this letter being to a friend, she had her head in her hands, thinking. When she took her hands away from her face, her cheeks busted out in a horrible looking
* One of the tilings Miss Young did around the office was to sing on a number of Jelly's Victor recordings. |
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