Strange Fruit
“Strange Fruit” was suggested by the song written in 1937 by Bronx School teacher Abel Meeropol in response to a photograph of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, August 7, 1930, in Marion, Indiana. Lynchings, which were often executed in a carnival-like atmosphere with the victims left to hang for all to see, were rampant in the South during reconstruction and beyond. He said , the image "haunted me for days." "I wrote Strange Fruit because I hate lynching, and I hate injustice, and I hate the people who perpetuate it." He published the poem under the pseudonym, Lewis Allan, in the New York Teacher and later, the Marxist journal, New Masses. He showed the poem to Billie Holiday who worked with Sonny White to create the song which she recorded. The song made it to No. 16 on the charts in July 1939. Time Magazine denounced the song as "a prime piece of musical propaganda" for the NAACP. I became aware of Strange Fruit through a recording by Josh White, who was also a witnessed to racial lynchings and beatings in his youth. Meeropol is perhaps best remembered today for raising the two orphaned sons of the executed atomic spies, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
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.
The little girls, seen on the side panels, have been a reoccurring symbol in my Guernica, Birmingham Sunday and Suicide Bombers Series, are here as audience and participants.
"Strange Fruit "15"x22' 2004
This is a paper collage and polymer clay relief with gold, silver and copper leaf.
(sold)