Well, the first day of my African aesthetics class the teacher, Deborah Jack played a bunch of music for us and one of the songs was Strange Fruit by Billie Holiday. So I looked up information on the song and here is what I found.
Abel Meeropol wrote the poem strange fruit, in 1937 after seeing the enclosed photograph. He was a Jewish schoolteacher who adopted the Rosenberg boys after their parents were executed by our government.
Billie Holiday made the poem famous through song.
Strange Fruit
Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black body 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 magnolia sweet and fresh,
And the sudden smell of burning flesh!
Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for a tree to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.
so what does this have to do with my granny? Well, last night at about 4 or 5 in the morning I was trying to sleep but I had a terrible headache and just kept thinking about the development or my personal construct of race. This starts out within the family and then later on school and other social environments.
I remembered how my dad once told me that he remembers being on a school bus chanting "2, 4, 6, 8, we don't want to integrate." He was a teenager. Then I started thinking about what a poor and miserable mill town my dad grew up in. He definitely had issues about class. He went to school in the neighboring town and all the kids from his part of town (or side of the river) were looked down upon as poor trashy "river rats." I think that my dad as a child learned to displace his personal feelings of inadequacy onto Afro-Americans. That rationalization does little to explain the historical racism of rich whites.
Thinking of my dad though made me think of my granny. She worked in this tiny mill in Bynum NC from the age of 12 to 76. A mill town is a pretty miserable environment. The community consisted of a group of houses all close together, similar to a subdivision with outhouses, I guess. The people who worked in the textile mill were also dependent on the mill owners for their housing. Granny was born in 1909. So she would have been our age at the start of the great depression and 28 when Strange Fruit was written.
My granny died when I was 16 so I was trying to remember things that she told me when she was growing up. Then I remembered this story. I'll try to tell it as I remember her telling it to me but it was a long time ago so its probably not totally accurate.
Granny's story
Everybody was gathered around because they were going to hang this man. The man was up in from of the crowd about to be hung when he said "Lord, if I am innocent, let the wind shake this tree" and right then and there the wind came and shook up the tree. I went home after that, they still hung the man but I didn't want to see it because I knew it wasn't right. They should have let him go.
Well, that's a story or history that troubles me. I was a little girl when my granny told me that. I remember when Granny said she left after the wind shook the tree I asked her why. This is sick but I think that a hanging seemed like something exciting to me when I was little. I didn't know anything about lynching so I didn't make the connections that I can make today. When I was researching strange fruit I came across Lynching Statistics from A. Red Record. It's fucked up and sad that so many people were murdered in one year alone. I don't know if my granny was talking about a lynching. She never said that word and she never specified the race of the man they hung but still, I d
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ow. I'm sorry to bring all this heavy information down on you Joy but you asked so... I delivered. Are you sorry you asked? What do you think of Granny's story? It bothers me that she knew it wasn't right but didn't do anything about it.
Robin
Robin,
Hey I know that you are going to be shocked but I emailed a copy of this letter to artnews..Why? because your story hit me , and I feel that millions of other people have the same story ..It is sad to say that my great granny never told me stories like that instead she told me stories about how she had sex with a white man in the town while she was still married to her husband but in that town no one could do such a thing...She got pregnant with my grandma, and she wanted to keep the baby..I remember her mostly telling me that the white man was a doctor , and one day she told my grandma"do you want to know who your real dad is " so she took my grandma into town to his office..She wasn't allowed in even though that white blood ran through his body. He came out of the store gave her a lollipop and said ..You can't come back down here anymore.. I wondered how my granny felt ....I wonder does she think about her dad..I wonder what the town would have been like if she would have announced it....Race is not just about color..Well at least that is what I think it's this long threaded out history .....And even though some people think that it is over it is not....It shapes are existence.. I mean what if my great granny told the whole town.....Would I even be here today..So yeah it is a dechotamy of so many things......so many grey stories..... I mean I can remember hanging out with my friends and being the only black girl at a table of ten...Of course it made me aware....Also dating white guys and meeting there parents..I know in their eyes I raise old buried stories , of what they did , or said and didn't do....but the generation is changing ....I don't know to what..but I think we all are hanging in trees..haunted by an illusion of what we think is truth.
Joy
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