Monday, June 30, 2008

Strange Fruit

For the past couple weeks I've been watching and listening to Ken Burns' ten part film series called Jazz. This is a remarkable piece of work. I have enjoyed jazz since introduced to various artists through friends in college, from John Coltrane to Chick Corea, and Miles Davis to Charles Mingus and Pharaoh Sanders. More recently I listened to an eight part lecture series on the history of jazz, which was insightful and informative. But Burns' live footage from the earliest days of twentieth century jazz to the present is an amazing retrospective of the contribution of blacks to Americana.

From the raucous Twenties to the depression era Thirties, jazz was evolving, and reflecting all facets of the culture. Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, Benny Goodman... all of their stories are here.

Purportedly a film series about music, this is really a series about race relations. Some amazing footage of musicians, dancers, and singers has been captured here including the remarkable Billie Holiday. Every once in a while a song cuts through you though, and tears something in your heart. That's what happened to me when Burns gave us raw footage of Billie Holiday singing Strange Fruit. What a daring song for 1939. What heart wrenching lyrics by Lewis Allen.

Strange Fruit
Southern trees bear 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 magnolias, sweet and fresh,
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.

The tragedy is not simply that a man lost his life unjustly. The tragedy is the signal such events would send to every black man in this cultural situation... that he dare not challenge "the Man," dare not himself be a man, raise his head and look into a white man's eyes with defiance, raise the fist. It is difficult to impossible to understand the black power movement of the late Sixties, early Seventies, without understanding the context of Strange Fruit.

The photo at the top of this entry is from a memorial here in Duluth, MN, a photo I took this evening in our City by the Lake. Most people associate racial violence as a Southern phenomenon. The memorial here is a remembrance that it can, and did, happen here. In 1920, three black circus workers were lynched downtown by an irate, irrational mob. Hepped up by hearsay, they broke into the jail and brought these men's lives to a sudden end. Historians believe they were almost certainly innocent, but the tragic affair demonstrated that "it can happen here."

Race relations in America are a complicated affair and, like Lewis Allen's evocative lament, so very sad.

May we never forget.

1 comment:

LEWagner said...

>>>>>>>>>>Most people associate racial violence as a Southern phenomenon. The memorial here is a remembrance that it can, and did, happen here. In 1920, three black circus workers were lynched downtown by an irate, irrational mob. Hepped up by hearsay, they broke into the jail and brought these men's lives to a sudden end. Historians believe they were almost certainly innocent, but the tragic affair demonstrated that "it can happen here."

Much more recently, there's the murder of Tina Langenbrunner (a native American), and the official coverup of same.
Oh, yes, it CAN happen in the Duluth area.
I've heard through more than one Anishinabe friend of mine that since the first whites began settling in Northen Minnesota, Anishinabe tribe members have privately kept a running set of records of every tribal member who has been murdered by whites, by whom, and details of the murder and how it was covered up.
Tina Langenbrunner is by no means the most recent of these murders. As one friend pointed out concerning a "suicide" that took place in the Carlton Country jail five or six years ago, "When a teenage kid commits suicide, he doesn't do it by beating his own face black and blue to the point that his eyes are swollen shut and his face is unrecognizable by his own family."
However, the official cause of the death in jail was suicide. (Nothing to see, here. Move along.)
Though the records being kept are not public information, and neither is the record keeper's name, someone once asked me if I would like an introduction to the record keeper. I felt honored, and said so, but I declined, saying that I was just as powerless as anyone else to do anything about it. The woman who had made the offer nodded her head in agreement.
Caution: Having a lot of associations and friendships with non-approved non-whites causes a person to be considered "non-white" himself.
Fun fact: I was amazed (outraged, actually) to find out in 2002 that the "tribal police" on the Fondulac Reservation are white guys, and they wear white cowboy hats. When I mentioned that to a friend who lives on the reservation, he laughed and asked me indulgingly, "Why in the world should that surprise you? Haven't you ever watched the movies?"

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