Strange Fruit

views updated

Strange Fruit

Written first as a poem by Jewish schoolteacher Abel Meeropol (1903–1986) in the late 1930s, "Strange Fruit" captures the haunting and violent history of lynching in America. Meeropol was said to have written the poem after viewing a disturbing photograph of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, two young black males lynched in Marion, Indiana, in 1930. First published as "Bitter Fruit" under the pseudonym Lewis Allen, Meeropol's poem, a mix of idyllic language and images of death and decay, became an anthem for the antilynching movement:

    Southern trees bear strange fruit,
    Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
    Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,
    Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

    Pastoral scene of the gallant south,
    The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
    Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,
    Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.

    Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,
    For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
    For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,
    Here is a strange and bitter crop.
                                        (Allen 1969, p. 15)

Meeropol created a dreary, melancholy melody to accompany his poem and it was first performed at New York teachers' union meetings before reaching famous jazz nightclubs. At Meeropol's request, Barney Josephson (1902–1988), manager of the popular Greenwich Village nightclub Café Society, introduced the foreboding song to celebrated jazz vocalist Billie Holiday (1915–1959). Holiday's recording label, Columbia Records, declined to produce her rendition, claiming that the lyrics were too inflammatory. Looking elsewhere for a label willing to produce the protest song, Holiday found Commodore Records, a smaller studio that recorded "Strange Fruit" in April of 1939. Although "Strange Fruit" was rarely played on radio stations, it became a signature of Holiday's nightclub act. At the close of her performance, the crowd would settle into an eerie silence, lights would dim, and a spotlight would shine on Holiday's solemn face as she sung Meeropol's tune. As a protest against the horrors of lynching, Holiday's performance could not be ignored, and many credit "Strange Fruit" and its popularity both in the United States and Europe as paving the way for the Civil Rights Movement.

Although many Southerners during Reconstruction claimed that lynching was a necessary evil, one that deterred the population of newly freed black males from raping innocent white virgins, statistics tell a different story. Less than 25 percent of documented lynchings were carried out because of rape accusations, a figure not consistent with the supposed outbreak of black male ravishers. The lynching of black men and women for crimes like theft, murder, assault, or insulting a white person were not as sensationalized or broadly publicized as rape cases that resulted in lynching. In many instances, black males accused of rape would be stripped naked and castrated, obvious revenge for their supposed crimes. Rarely, if ever, was a rape accusation proven in a court of law; mobs of angry whites took it upon themselves to be judge and jury, resulting in spectacles of extreme violence against innocent black males. Northern opposition to lynching was typically countered with tales of countless rapes, the figures inflated to feed the anxiety of whites across the nation. From this disturbing history emerges a body of African American art and literature that exposes fear, anxiety, rage, and sadness over the period of American history also know as the Negro Holocaust.

As a trope in African American literature, "Strange Fruit" and the history of lynching surfaces in countless narratives, artwork, and music. In the story "Going to Meet the Man" (1965), James Baldwin tells the graphic tale of a young black male who is tortured, castrated, and burned to death for supposedly abusing an older white woman. The lynching scene, described in gruesome detail, portrays a frenzied mob with an obsessive blood-lust. The Jacob Lawrence's (1917–2000) series on the Great Migration includes an evocative portrayal of a lone black figure, stooped over, and barely visible as a noose hangs in the distance from a spindly tree branch. Gwendolyn Brooks's (1917–2000) poem "Ballad of Pearl May Lee" (1945) tells the story of a brokenhearted woman whose black lover was lynched for having an affair with a white woman. The speaker laments that her departed lover paid with his life for a taste of "pink and white honey." Wanda Coleman's (b. 1946) poem "Emmett Till" (1990) evokes the memory of a young boy lynched in Mississippi in 1955 for whistling at a white woman.

The Strange Fruit Project, a group of hip-hop artists from Waco, Texas, gives credit to Holiday's song, acknowledging the history of violence in their own town, which purportedly carried out more lynchings in the early 1900s than any other Southern city. Both Richard Wright's (1908–1960) Native Son (1940) and Amiri Baraka's (b. 1934) The Dutchman (1964) explore symbolic lynchings, with their black male characters executed for engaging in social activities with white women. "Strange Fruit" and the collective memory of lynching shaped a cultural and literary history, one that exposes extreme aversion to interracial sexual relationships and the resulting violence against black male bodies.

see also Baldwin, James; Blues; Masculinity: I. Overview; Violence.