Single Awareness: Billie Holiday – “Strange Fruit” (1939)

When I was a Freshman in high school, I had this English teacher who had a clever way of helping students understand the significance of language. For me, it was a revolutionary concept since English always felt like it was discussed from an academic standpoint, solely as a way of how to construct sentences for essays. It was important to understand punctuation and different participles. Basically, the whole idea of a class was to understand the components on such an impersonal level that you forget that English is the language with which you communicated with each other, that it was the tool by which all ideas come across in the printed form. 

When you’re a teenager, it’s very difficult to understand English as more than something that is studied. It’s like Math or Science: so impersonal that you can’t break from a structure. You see Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird”? THAT is what the English language is all about. As for the collected works of Dav Pilkey? That was just masquerading as literature.

There was little to suggest that the English language was accessible to anyone besides scholars. That is what attracted me to this particular teacher, who for the first time helped me understand the versatility of the written word. It wasn’t just in a book. It was in those stanzas written in poetry, the songs we hear on the radio. Even something as inane as William Carlos Williams qualified as some form of the English language.

Maybe it was just my personal experience, but people need to sometimes be told the obvious with the hope that they can learn and grow from it.

Among our assignments was breaking down songs in order to get a better understanding of how metaphors, allegories, alliteration, etc. were used in material that we consumed on an everyday basis. He had a real gift for finding these songs ranging from 2Pac to The Subhumans that got his points across in accessible ways. If nothing else, he was fun and inspiring – the perfect English teacher you hope to get in high school if just to better your understanding of the world around you.

Among the songs he pulled from was Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit.” You can say that it blindsided me, a teenager who hadn’t really thought much about American history or all of the different ramifications that came from the previous century. I was younger, less aware of the world when he handed out sheets of paper with the lyrics, asking us to interpret what this song meant. I personally don’t know that any of us were fully aware of what we were looking at, preparing to learn how imagery could be used in more provocative ways:

Southern trees bear a 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 magnolia, sweet and fresh

Then 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 the tree to drop

Here is a strange and bitter crop

To be honest, you can’t unsee it once you know what’s going on, but for me, I was sure that I was more caught up in something more innocent. It was the idea of writing this song about fruit that was “strange.” Was it a metaphor for a rotten fruit whose contents were pouring out onto the ground? I took in the descriptors and thought that this was some monster fruit. 

As we went down the lines, the picture became clearer.

It was in the “southern trees” and “blood on the leaves” that a more adept analysis will easily figure out what it’s about. When paired with “blood in the root,” it brings in a tree of life metaphor that suggests that this is deeply rooted in society. This blood-fruit that grows in the south pretty much has lived there for centuries. If you haven’t figured it out by “black bodies,” then you’re a teenager in high school, mistaking the literal for a metaphor. 

Add in the images of “bulging eyes,” “twisted mouth,” and “burning flesh,” and it becomes an image so horrific that it will eat at you once you realize what’s going on. 

At the end of 1999, Time Magazine named Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” as the best song of the century. There has to be a good reason why, even if it wasn’t one that revolutionized a genre, nor is it necessarily the most pleasant song to play at gatherings. Line for line, it is maybe the most expertly designed song, using every moment to create this vivid morose picture that is tragic but indicative of American culture, especially in the aforementioned south. In the 20 years since Time Magazine bestowed this honor, it remains the most renowned protest song in history.

So, what is it about?

I have purposely kept from stating the obvious so that you’d understand what my reading comprehension skills were like at that time. We went through every line, and it was amazing to reach the conclusion, pale-faced, that what we had read wasn’t some whimsical song about monster fruit, but one that dealt with the subject of lynchings.

I remember the idea of seeing that image in my head. I’m not sure if it was my first memory discovering what lynching was, but it stuck with me. I became disheartened that humanity could ever think to take an innocent bystander and run them up the tree like they do the American flag on a pole. 

As I grew older and took more adult American history courses, I saw those pictures of white people gathered around like it was a box social, just smiling and looking at this Black man hanging from a tree. By then I had a decade to process the idea of this type of hatred, but it’s still painful to think that this ever happened in this great country. Then again, I had yet to process real-world equivalences, which have become more apparent in recent years as the president endorses hate crimes. Still, there is this piece of empathy in me that is torn apart by disagreements going that south. It’s why my feel-good movies aren’t ones where people end the story happy, but where a community comes together and solves problems. 

I am aware that the Billie Holiday song was recorded in 1939 from a poem written by Jewish-American Abel Meeropol. I am aware that it is highly influential and has been covered by hundreds of artists, reflecting the significance of its meaning. I am aware that its context is much richer than what I’m about to say, but it’s a thought that remains reminiscent in light of recent news.

Over this past weekend, most people were aware of the death of Rayshard Brooks who died after being found asleep in a Wendy’s drive-thru. While that is deserving of just as much conversation, I found something more upsetting happening in my home state of California. As a Long Beach, CA resident, I have generally taken pride in the culture that this city has produced. I like that the protests a few weeks back were able to be less chaotic than the Los Angeles, CA counterpart. Sure it had all of the other hallmarks, but it felt like there weren’t as many awful stories coming out of it. 

Robert Fuller

Then I read about Robert Fuller, a 24-year-old man who was lynched outside city hall in Palmdale, CA. The idea was more upsetting than any police brutality because it means that there are other forces starting to emerge, taking out their grievances on innocent bystanders. Videos of racist white people™ threatening to be worse to Black people if they defund the police only make this situation more depressing. I don’t think they were spoken in relation to Fuller, but the timing feels painfully relevant.

Fuller’s death was ruled a suicide, which makes little sense given that these are the tropes of a lynching. What’s insane is not only that it happened, but that it was in California. While the coroner has walked back his comments on Fuller’s death being a suicide, it feels indicative of how we see these situations and hide behind the guilt. We’re too good to just lynch people, so it HAD to be a suicide. I don’t believe it. You shouldn’t until there’s evidence to prove it. 

Malcolm Harsch

Given that 38-year-old Malcolm Harsch’s death wasn’t reported until Fuller’s is just as disconcerting. Harsch was also found in a nearby city of Victorville, CA. Along with reports that hate groups had been advertising around the area in the weeks leading up to Harsch’s death, and it all begins to become clear. I am horrified at the idea that there could be more. There shouldn’t even have been one. 

If I’m being honest, it’s difficult to keep up with every significant death of the past month in relation to Black Lives Matter, which only makes me understand how much more overwhelmed they probably are. From what I’ve heard, two Black trans women were also murdered at some point. There’s just so much and I have to pace my discovery of these if just for my sanity. Still, the reason that Harsch and Fuller’s deaths sting is not only because it happened in my area of the world, but that it was a lynching.

Maybe I’m foolish for believing that this was outlawed and never done again after The Jim Crow South, but it still feels strange given that it’s not even in the context of “Strange Fruit” anymore. California is not a “southern” state. In general, it’s been one of the more progressive states when it comes to human rights. And yet Harsch and Fuller were so easily murdered in a rudimentary fashion. 

It’s disturbing that hate crimes have been on the rise once again in a time when most people are out there peacefully protesting for change. They have gotten some measures. I am excited to know that you can no longer discriminate at work based on sexual orientation, but that’s one minor achievement in the bigger picture. 

I suppose if there’s any big takeaway from this, it’s that I think some of us need to be told the obvious every now and then, to understand the power of words and actions. While I understood the context of Billie Holiday’s song as a teenager, it’s only really now that I see that it wasn’t a song written in the past tense. So long as there is a need for Black Lives Matter, “Strange Fruit” will continue to be a song worthy of study, to understand how horrific things can get, how far into the root the blood can go.