By FERN SHEN
The throng of people, police and television camera crews at the other end of Quiana Johnson’s west Baltimore street Friday morning meant only one thing to the 14-year-old: trouble.

“What’s the problem over there?” Johnson asked in a low voice, her head poking out of the front door of her family’s red brick row home, past the burned-out house next door and the other vacant, boarded-up homes on the 600 block of West Lafayette Street.

Actually, the crowd of about 80 people were dignitaries, media and community leaders gathered for the rededication of a statue of internationally-famous jazz singer Billie Holiday, who grew up in Baltimore and returned here to perform. To say the event was joyous, however, or somehow the opposite of what Quiana imagined, would not be quite right. Call it bittersweet.

The centerpiece of the gathering was not the statue (first dedicated in a 1985 ceremony with then-Mayor William Donald Schaefer), but the statue’s base, which now has all the brutal features the artist said were originally censored by city officials, including a graphic depiction in bronze of a lynched black man.

“Let’s not hide history,” said Mayor Sheila Dixon, speaking after the reconfigured statue was unveiled, at a plaza on the corner of West Lafayette and Pennsylvania avenues, near the site of the Royal Theatre, where the singer performed.

The city paid $280,000 to restore the plaza and make the statue’s new panels and base.

Along with the lynching depiction (a reference to Holiday’s blistering ballad “Strange Fruit”) there is now also a crow, on one corner of the monument’s base. The crow (representing the racist Jim Crow era) is shown ripping apart a gardenia, Holiday’s signature flower, which typically adorned her swept-back hair.

“The gardenia represents the spirit of black people and the spirit of  the artist being eaten by the injustices of racism,” sculptor James Earl Reid wrote, in the program notes for the event. The restored monument also includes a depiction of a black child at birth, the umbilical cord still attached, a thematic echo of the lyncher’s rope, Reid says. Carved next to that part of the monument is an inscription that reads, “God bless the child,” the title of another iconic Holiday song.

“My message and what I believe is the message of Billie Holiday’s songs,” Reid writes, “is that the black man is in trouble and at risk from the day he is born until the day he dies.”

The other harsh note for the event, held on the 50th anniversary of the singer’s death, was the wide knowledge of the singer’s hard life, right up until her last day. Born in Philadelphia as Eleanora Fagan, Holiday moved to a poor neighborhood in Fells Point as a girl. She died at 44 in a New York hospital bed, most of her savings depleted.

Speakers at the Baltimore event, though, dwelled on Holiday’s towering accomplishments in spite of the challenges that her life and her times threw at her. “The artist must serve suffering, as well as beauty,” Reid said, explaining that the fusion of the two, by Holiday, resulted in “the molasses pathos of her voice.”

Reid called Holiday “a socially relevant artist” and speakers urged the crowd to draw inspiration and energy from her raw, deeply personal expressions of suffering and injustice.

Meanwhile, down the street, Quiana Johnson said she’d never heard of Billie Holiday but offered some suggestions for how the public officials could help her family.

“Drug dealers are always right in that cut,” she said, pointing to a grassy place between the dilapidated rowhouses across the street she said have been vacant for years. “They should take those vacant homes down.”