Strange Fruit of the Black Pacific. Vince Schleitwiler
“Going to Meet the Man,” in which a white deputy sheriff’s childhood memory of a lynching bee remedies an episode of impotence, summoning figures of racist fantasy to mediate intercourse with his wife. Or consider Kara Walker’s shameless exhumations of the imaginative domains of power, violence, and sexual desire bequeathed by the history of slavery, loosed demons fluttering free from the profound moralism of Baldwin’s redemptive vision. You might take such work as extrapolations of the knowledge implicit in Holiday’s performance, in her auditory and kinesthetic shaping of the words and again in the way she inhabited the iconicity the song helped define for her. These extrapolations extend the knowledge’s reach by diminishing its ineffable force. Where Baldwin names white interracial desire as the motive force formalized in lynching, exposing the racializing and sexualizing violence on which white reproduction depends, Holiday’s performance refrains from such naming, as it refrains from putting its most powerful message into words, even as it enacts the exposure of the history of sexuality that the song and all it reenacts has got to do with.
In the words of the song, lynching’s bitter crop disrupts the pastoral scene of trees and flowers and birds and weather, its reversion to nature leaving a perverse remainder: these bodies are not persons, but fruit, and what makes them strange is what makes them black. There must have been persons here, once, in the bodies dehumanized in their blackening, and as the agents of that blackening—absented, monstrous, horrific, one feels obliged to say, inhuman. Although there must have been persons here once, the song cannot imagine them in words. Blackness as death is what the words can picture as presence; blackness as life-giving essence has been absconded with by whiteness. In this way the words of the song enact the same perceptual protocols that render the perpetrators of lynching invisible before the eyes of the law, passing unmarked into the community of whiteness after enacting its social reproduction, with the same effortless slide of a movie camera away from the conjugal act.
The words were written by the leftist writer, lyricist, and composer Abel Meeropol, published as a poem under his given name, and later set to music under his professional name, Lewis Allan.12 By his own account, they were written in response to a lynching photograph (N. Baker 45), commonly taken to be the notorious image of the 1930 lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Marion, Indiana, which prominently features a festive crowd of onlookers. Meeropol’s Jewishness surely modulates the lyrics’ critical restaging of the lynching rite’s aesthetic training—elsewhere, he put it quite succinctly: “I am a Jew, / How may I tell? / The Negro lynched / Reminds me well / I am a Jew” (qtd. in N. Baker 45). Yet even if this ethnoracial shading passes unremarked, at least two varieties of whiteness already appear in the space evacuated by the lyrics, each constituted against the other. One gathers to celebrate the violence, its communal rejuvenation in defiant defense against the threat of decadence manifested in the other, which is constituted by the horrified desire to read the participants in the lynching bee out of history. That the latter form of whiteness has become hegemonic may be registered by the quicksand fascination experienced by present-day viewers of lynching photographs for their figures of white onlookers.13 In the aftermath of the civil rights era, that latter form still shares in the national commemoration of lynching’s death through the ritual consumption of the sacrificed black body, but the presence of the former as an audience within the photographs exposes, for better or for worse, lynching’s function to reproduce whiteness.
As written, the words respond to the photograph, to the experience of its observation at a remove, within an alternate gathering of racial community, completing the process of the perpetrators’ disappearance. As sung, Kevin Young proposes, the words constitute “a symbolic lynching photograph” that, “confronted with the crime of looking, … resorts … to the abandoning of a self altogether” (219). That is, Young’s reading attributes to Holiday’s voice the agency of a withholding of both “I” and “you,”14 whose result he glosses precisely in an ambiguous riffing quotation, “Look away, Dixieland” (220). “Lady Day embodies a strategy of silence,” he argues, that in the performance of the words “talk[s] back to the silence of lynching, which you can almost see in a lynching photograph” (220). Her performance, he concludes, “shelters and smuggles meaning beyond the borders of what is acceptable—or even seen” (224). Because the violence itself establishes these enabling borders, perceptual before epistemological or ideological or moral, its agency lies outside what can be seen or shown or said. Holiday’s performance moves outside to confront it.
Simply put, it does so through a contrast between the words of the song and the conditions of its performance—the milieu from which it emanates and the genius of its embodied voice—that improvises an aesthetic countertraining within the very observation of ritualized racial terror. “I wondered then whether it made sense to sing a song in such a milieu,” comments a listener quoted by David Margolick. “I thought it belonged instead in a concert setting, without beer and whiskey and cigarette smoke” (52). Presumably meant as a compliment—for jazz music, it was prophecy—the attitude has many precedents. Before his encounter with lynching, James Weldon Johnson’s ex-colored man, for one, hoped to uplift the music from nightclub to concert hall. But it is the music’s association with less respectable environments, of good times and ill repute, that gives the performance its force. The association of racial transgression, political radicalism, and the nightlife that defined Café Society, the Greenwich Village nightclub where Holiday made the song famous, was a recipe that set Harlem in vogue over a decade earlier. To ask whether the amplification of sexual desire served transgressive politics or political sentiment merely licensed sexual transgression is only to attempt to impose narrative order on what was, for good or ill, an undeniably transformative historical dynamic.
For its part, jazz, like other forms of popular music and dance, has historically flourished in spaces organized to profit on its aphrodisiac qualities, often involving fixation on the singer. The nightclub, rather than the concert hall, is the privileged setting for Holiday’s music, and if this space sanctions alternative arrangements of social life experienced, in all their ephemerality, as liberatory, it is only because the space itself is dedicated to celebrating, conjuring, evoking, and enhancing erotic feeling. While the music cannot be reduced to its aphrodisiac qualities or their instrumentalization in courting or seduction, these qualities are irreducible from its conditions of production and reception, even in the devotions of a solitary fan.15
More than other singers, Holiday attracted such devotion, whose most disturbing product is the condescending, often bizarre equation of her artistry with the most salacious and tragic details of her biography—physical and sexual abuse, child prostitution, drug addiction. It places her in the front rank of a long tradition of singing black women, icons shaped between the violently hypersexualizing attention of white desire and the impossible resources of a longer tradition of black women’s vocality.16 The racialized, gendered, sexualized dimensions of this attention are structural, preceding the intentions or identifications of any listener, but Holiday’s genius, as a prerequisite to its expression, involves the reflection, redirection, and reappropriation of this attention, working and reworking it for other purposes, turning and transforming its force.
It is here that the impact of her performance becomes unavoidable. The song’s lyrics observe the lynching form, evoking the racist fantasies of black male sexual violence toward white women accompanying and justifying it, against which any respectable antilynching politics, white or black, needed to reaffirm the boundaries of racial and sexual propriety. Yet the song’s performance—the embodied voice issuing from the nightlife milieu—exposes another history of sexual violence and interracial desire, culminating in the fetish of a hypersexualized black girl whose gift of singing beautifully is equated with her vulnerability to sexual exploitation and sexual violence. By setting these two contradictory histories in unbearable proximity, Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” renders each radically unstable. On the one hand, she bends the most violently sexist and racist desires conditioning her consumption as a performer into a profound affective identification with opposition to lynching. On the other, she wrenches open a politics of respectability that stifled and suppressed poor black women in the name of uplift, schooling the ideology that would deny her the moral standing and personal dignity to bear witness against lynching’s violence. In both cases, the work of Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” turns on an insight left unspoken, that refrains from entering speech or sight: the violent, sexualizing,