— and it's the left hand, with her. She'd take a Bach piece and let the right hand keep the line honest while the left went walking off into boogie, and people called that a party trick, but you don't get a left hand like that without years of scales in a cold room. Juilliard let her in as a child, which wasn't the arrangement they normally made; somebody heard her and made room. Later she'd work two pianos in the one act, turning from bench to bench.
Then there were the contracts, and she wrote her own clauses. She'd appear as herself, at the instrument, in her own clothes, and she would not play the maid — which in 1943 narrowed the list of parts for a Black woman down to about nothing, so she took the piano instead. Same rule for the halls. Segregated house, no show.
DuMont gave her a television programme in 1950, a short slot, just her and the keyboard. Her name turned up in Red Channels, she asked to appear before the House committee and did, and the show was gone soon after. She went on working, Paris for a stretch, clubs and records. She was sixty-one when she died in 1981.
Listen for the left hand under the Bach. It's doing two jobs at once and never hurries.
Otis, that clause held — she'd walk, too. There was a picture where the costume department put the women in aprons that read as maids' uniforms and she went off the set rather than shoot it, and the studio blinked. The piano stools she sat on were negotiated as hard as the music.
She asked to go before the House committee rather than waiting to be called, which almost nobody did, and read out a prepared statement in September 1950. DuMont dropped the programme within about a week. As it happens, the transcript's still there in the committee's printed hearings.