Abstract
In her final speech before the Passage of Resolution 39, the U.S. Senate’s 2005 apology for lynching, Senator Mary Landrieu asserted: “Jazz legend Billie Holiday provided real texture in her story and song ‘Strange Fruit.’” In a review of various historical moments of lynching and antilynching efforts on the state and national level, Senator Landrieu introduced the lyrics of the song and further observed that “[s]omething in the way she [Holiday] sang this song … must have touched the heart of Americans because they began to mobilize, and men and women, White and Black, people from different backgrounds, came to stand up and begin to speak.”2 Attributing in an anecdotal way the formation of public actions against lynching to the power of Holiday’s singing, Landrieu seemed to agree with most former studies of the song that have focused on the racial and gender politics in Holiday’s rendition. This essay sheds new light on the politics of sexuality embedded in Holiday’s early nightclub performance of “Strange Fruit.” By examining her rendition outside of the conventional discussions of the song as a protest narrative, I complement and complicate the existing interpretations of Holiday’s “Strange Fruit.”
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Notes
Lewis Allan, Strange Fruit (New York: New Theatre League, 1939), Abel Meeropol Collection, Box 14, Folder 14, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University.
David Stowe, “The Politics of Café Society,” Journal of American History (March 1998): 1391.
The latest book on Café Society has corrected the notation of the club name as the original “Cafe Society” while I use the former in this essay. Barney Josephson with Terry Trilling-Josephson, Cafe Society: The Wrong Place for the Right People (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2009).
Michael Denning, Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1997), 324–361
Stowe, “The Politics of Café Society,” 1384–1406; Angela Y. Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (New York: Pantheon, 1998), 181–198
David Margolick, Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday, Café Society, and an Early Cry for Civil Rights (Philadelphia, PA: Running Press, 2000).
David Margolick, Strange Fruit: The Biography of a Song (New York: The Ecco Press, 2001).
Dawn-Wisteria Bates, “Race Woman: The Political Consciousness of Billie Holiday” (Master Thesis, Sarah Lawrence College, 2001).
Joel Katz, directed, Strange Fruit (California Newsreel, 2002).
See also Kathy A. Perkins and Judith L. Stephens, eds., Strange Fruit: Plays on Lynching by American Women (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998), 15–20
Darlene Clark Hine and Kathleen Thompson, A Shining Thread of Hope: The History of Black Women in America (New York: Broadway, 1998), 259–260.
Adrian Lyne, directed, 9 ½Weeks (MGM, 1986). In this scene, when John asks Elizabeth “Do you like music?,” the camera briefly captures him smiling at her and zooms into her perplexed look while the song plays “Southern trees bear a strange fruit.” John says, “It’s Billie Holiday,” showing her the record jacket with a seductive look (and the song goes: “blood on the leaves and blood at the root”). Elizabeth tries to change the topic to break the sexual tension by asking him what he does for a living while the song plays: “black body swinging in the Southern breeze/Strange Fruit hanging from the popular trees,” and the song fades away as their conversation continues. John’s blatant seduction scares Elizabeth and she leaves the boathouse, but this critical scene predicts their subsequent sexual relationship.
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Revolt against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Womens Campaign against Lynching (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979, 1993), 150.
Bell Hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1992), 2.
hooks, Black Looks, 4. Stuart Hall explains of this strategy that it “positively takes the body as the principal site of its representational strategies” and “deliberately contests the dominant gendered and sexual definitions of racial difference by working on black sexuality.” Stuart Hall, ed., Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (London: Sage Publications, 1997), 274.
Sharon Block, “Rape without Women: Print Culture and the Politicization of Rape, 1765–1815,” Journal of American History (December 2002): 849–868. Diane Miller Sommerville emphasizes that the rape myth was constructed after Reconstruction, warning that historians have sometimes confused the postbellum stereotype of Black rapists and the antebellum image of libidinous slave men.
Diane Miller Sommerville, “The Rape Myth in the Old South Reconsidered,” in Darlene Clark Hine and Earnestine Jenkins, eds., A Question of Manhood: A Reader in U. S. Black Men’s History and Masculinity, Vol. 1 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999), 438–472.
Hall, Revolt against Chivalry, 145–149; Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black-White Race Relations in the American South Since Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 116–118, 183–185, 306–309
Martha Hodes, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the 19th-Century South (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 198–207
Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 301–307
Jonathan Markovitz, Legacies of Lynching: Racial Violence and Memory (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 8–11
William D. Carrigan, The Making of a Lynching Culture: Violence and Vigilantism in Central Texas, 1836–1916 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 149–154.
The film was repeatedly released in 1924, 1931, and 1938. John Hope Franklin, Race and History: Selected Essays 1938–1988 (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 14–17, 22. On the Black rapist image in The Clansman
see Sandra Gunning, Race, Rape, and Lynching: The Red Record of American Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 28–43.
For the themes of lynching and rape in literature, see Trudier Harris, Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984).
Gunning, Race, Rape, and Lynching; Robyn Wiegman, “The Anatomy of Lynching,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 3.3 (1993): 445–467
Crystal N. Feimster, Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).
Hortense Powdermaker, After Freedom: A Cultural Study in the Deep South (1939, New York: Russel & Russel, 1968), 54–55, 389
George H. Gallup, The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion, 1935–1971 (New York: Random House, 1972), 48.
On Wells’ antilynching campaign, see Hazel V. Carby, “‘On the Threshold of Woman’s Era’: Lynching, Empire, and Sexuality in Black Feminist Theory,” Critical Inquiry 12 (Autumn 1985): 262–277
Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995): 45–76
Patricia A. Schechter, “Unsettled Business: Ida B. Wells against Lynching, or, How Antilynching Got Its Gender,” in W. Fitzhugh Brundage, ed., Under Sentence of Death: Lynching in the New South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 292–317
Jacqueline Goldsby, Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 43–104.
Erskine Caldwell, “A Note,” An Art Commentary on Lynching (1935), Papers of the NAACP, Group I, Box C-206, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
Jessie Daniel Ames, “Can Newspapers Harmonize Their Editorial Policy on Lynching and Their News Stories on Lynching?,” speech delivered at the Southern Newspaper Publishers’ Association Convention, May 18, 1936
Ames, The Changing Character of Lynching: Review of Lynching, 1931–1941 (1942, New York: AMS, 1973), 58
ASWPL, “Southern Women Look at Lynching” (Atlanta, 1937), 4–5
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “‘The Mind That Burns in Each Body’: Women, Rape, and Racial Violence,” in Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson, eds., Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), 338.
W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 66.
NAACP distributed and sold over 15,000 copies of Lynching of Claude Neal. James R. McGovern, Anatomy of Lynching: The Killing of Claude Neal (Chapel Hill: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 126–131
Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York: Pantheon, 1998), 222–227.
Amy Louise Wood, “Lynching Photography and the ‘Black Beast Rapist’ in the Southern White Masculine Imagination,” in Peter Lehman, ed., Masculinity: Bodies, Movies, Culture (New York: Routledge, 2001), 204.
Hazel V. Carby, Race Men (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 46–47; Williamson, Crucible of Race, 306–310.
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Mask, translated by Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove, 1967), 165.
Kobena Mercer, Welcome to Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1994), 174.
TAC, n.d. but after March 1940, Abel Meeropol Collection, Box 15, Folder 27. For the Gavagan bill, see Robert L. Zangrando, The NAACP Crusade against Lynching, 1909–1950 (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1980), 161–162.
Davis, Blues Legacies, 184–187. In her intriguing exploration of the myths that surround Holiday, Farah Jasmine Griffin praises Davis’ discussion for its contribution to rescuing Holiday from those white critics and biographers. Farah Jasmine Griffin, In Search of Billie Holiday: If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery (New York: Ballantine Books, 2001), 130–131.
On the images of Mammy and Jezebel, see Deborah Gray White, “Jezebel and Mammy: The Mythology of Female Slavery,” in Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W.W. Norton, 1985, 1999), 27–61.
In the United States, the usage of “hump” in the sexual sense dates from the 1910s. Jonathon Green, Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang (London: Cassell, 1998), 624.
In her 1937 performance at the Fox Theatre in Detroit, for example, Holiday had to “black up” her face because her skin color was too light. Donald Clarke, Wishing on the Moon: The Life and Times of Billie Holiday (New York: Penguin, 1994), 130.
Billie Holiday with William Dufty, Lady Sings the Blues (1956, New York: Penguin, 1992), 84.
“Of ‘Strange Fruit’ (the song),” an unidentified article clip, n.d. but after 1944, Abel Meeropol Collection, Box 15, Folder 27. Although journalist David Margolick speculates that Allan was possibly inspired to write the song by a widely-publicized photograph of the 1930 lynching in Marion, Indiana, this photograph of two lynched men is less likely the one Allan referred to, given that Allan described what he came across as “a lynching of a human being.” Margolick, Strange Fruit: The Biography, 21. Emphasis is added. It is possible, however, that Allan saw the same photograph in different framing showing only one lynching victim, just as writer Jacquie Jones did. Jacquie Jones, “How Come Nobody Told Me about the Lynching?” in Deborah Willis, ed., Picturing Us: African American Identity in Photography (New York: The New Press, 1994), 153.
W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1941, 1962), 115–116. Mary Jane Brown argues that it was a crucial aspect of southern legend “that the delicate flower of southern womanhood needed protection from rapacious black males.…”
Brown, Eradicating this Evil: Women in the American Anti-Lynching Movement 1892–1940 (New York: Garland, 2000), 27. Emphasis is added.
Hale, Making Whiteness, 200–239; Amy Louise Wood, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 2–15.
On lynching photographs, see Dora Apel, Imagery of Lynching: Black Men, White Women, and the Mob (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 7–45
Wood, Lynching and Spectacle, 103–109; Goldsby, Spectacular Secret, 214–281; and Dora Apel and Shawn Michelle Smith, Lynching Photographs (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007).
A collection of lynching photos and postcards is available in James Allen et al., eds., Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Santa Fe, NM: Twin Palm, 2000). Although I admit that a contemporary lynching photograph could best underscore the relationship of victim to spectators in comparison with the photo of Holiday at Café Society, it is my decision not to use/abuse any lynching photos in this essay. As a scholar of lynching, I would like to call our attention to the fact that we often include, too easily, images and depictions of lynching into works as historical documents without fully noticing the possibility of running a risk of triggering an exploitative and/or voyeuristic gaze, thus possibly reproducing the white supremacist ideology that was originally inscribed in those representations.
For discussions regarding the scholarly use of representations of lynching and other brutalization of the Black body, see Hale, Making Whiteness, 306; Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 3–4; and Wood, “Lynching Photography,” 207–208.
Robert G. O’Meally, Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday (NewYork: Da Capo Press, 1991), 130.
Ida B. Wells, A Red Record (1895), reprinted in Jacqueline Jones Royster, ed., Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892–1900 (Boston, MA: Bedford, 1997), 127.
NACW Convention Minutes (1914), 25. Records of the NACW, reel 1; Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998), 96.
Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, “African-American Women’s Networks in the Anti-Lynching Crusade,” in Noralee Frankel and Nancy S. Dye, eds., Gender, Class, Race and Reform in the Progressive Era (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1991), 157–158; and Brown, Eradicating this Evil, 115, 144–148. For other cases of Black women’s role in the antilynching movement, see Markovitz, Legacies of Lynching, 18–23.
White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?, 176–177; Nell Irvin Painter, “Who Was Lynched?” Nation (November 11, 1991): 577; and Weigman, “The Anatomy of Lynching,” 446 n. 1. Rosalyn Terborg-Penn points out that the history of antilynching movements also overshadowed Black women’s contributions to them. Terborg-Penn, “African-American Women’s Networks,” 159.
76 Black women were lynched between 1882 and 1927. Walter White, Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch (1929, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), 267.
For examples of Black female lynch victims, see Gerda Lerner, Black Women in White America: A Documentary History (New York: Vintage, 1972), 161–162; and Terborg-Penn, “African-American Women’s Networks,” 150–153.
For the sexual exploitation of female slaves, see Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 27–36, 51–52
Thelma Jennings, “‘Us Colored Women Had To Go through a Plenty’: Sexual Exploitation of African-American Slave Women,” Journal of Womens History (Winter 1990): 45–74
Melton A. McLaurin, Celia: A Slave (New York: Avons, 1991), 22–37
Nell Irvin Painter, Soul Murder and Slavery (Waco: Markham, 1995), 15–21
Daina Ramey Berry, Swing the Sickle for the Harvest Is Ripe: Gender and Slavery in Antebellum Georgia (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 77–88.
For rape of Black women after emancipation, see Lerner, Black Women, 149–161, 172–190; Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (Toronto, ON: Bantam Books, 1976), 133–140
Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race and Class (1981, New York: Vintage, 1983), 175–177
Litwack, Trouble in Mind, 342–349; and Nell Irvin Painter, Southern History across the Color Line (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 121.
Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 39.
I am referring to anthropologist James C. Scott’s concept of “hidden transcript” that represents “a critique of power behind the back of the dominant.” James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University, 1990), xii.
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 185–299. Another strategy often used to desexualize Black womanhood was the “culture of dissemblance,” the attitudes of Black women that created the appearance of public openness but actually, shielded reservedly the truth of their inner lives from their oppressors.
Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West: Preliminary Thoughts on the Culture of Dissemblance,” in Beverly Guy-Sheftall, ed., Words of Fire: An Anthology of African American Feminist Thoughts (New York: New Press, 1995), 380–387.
Billie Holiday, “Strange Fruit” (recorded on April 20, 1939), in Billie Holiday Strange Fruit 1937–1939 (Jazzterdays, 1996); “Strange Fruit” (recorded on February 12, 1945), in Billie Holiday Verve Story Vol. 1: Jazz at the Philharmonic (Polygram, 1994); and “Strange Fruit” (recorded on June 7, 1956), in Lady Sings the Blues (Polygram, 1995).
ASWPL did challenge the southern patriarchal system by refuting the rape myth, not necessarily because white women affirmed their sexual autonomy but rather because they attempted to emphasize their respectable womanhood. Their antilynching efforts mainly aimed at educating the southern white community about uncivilized and un-Christian acts of lynching because lynching, from their perspective, was a moral-threatening problem for the white community that respectable white women should solve; it was not a problem because of the victimization of African Americans. Thus, the ASWPL’s strategy of moral uplift did not entail such actions as organizational support for the federal antilynching legislation that would directly challenge state power. Sachiko Hishida, “Jinshu-kan Kyouryoku eno Kitai to Zasetsu: 1930 nendai no Han-rinchi Undou wo Jirei ni [The Hope and Failure in Interracial Cooperation: A Study of the Anti-lynching Movement in the 1930s],” The Journal of American and Canadian Studies 23 (2005): 78–92.
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© 2011 Evelyn M. Simien
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Sakashita, F. (2011). The Politics of Sexuality in Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit”. In: Gender and Lynching. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137001221_6
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