Within the first few pages of her autobiography Lady Sings the Blues, Billie Holiday (with William Dufty) recounts an entrepreneurial enterprise she undertakes at the age of sixteen. The enterprise brings Holiday quickly to the point of a confrontation, one in which she learns to negotiate the complexities and ritual importance of boundaries and borders to her advantage. Sixteen-year-old Holiday, rather than scrub neighborhood steps for a nickel, buys her own supplies and demands an exorbitant fifteen cents for each set of steps she would scrub. Her demands are met with incredulity, but Holiday is fortified with the understanding that

Holiday, big for her age, “with big breasts, big bones, a big fat healthy broad, that's all” (9), keenly understands and exploits the paramount significance given to markers setting off inside from outside, as well as her position in relation to such markers. Across the boundary – the set of steps – that she will scrub and maintain “white,” Holiday faces her adversarial benefactor and plays upon her own intuitive knowledge of both the significance attributed to the boundary and the relative positions she and her adversary occupy in relation to the boundary, one inside and one outside.