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Strange Fruit
Title: Strange Fruit
Artist: Billie Holiday and Her Orchestra
Year: 1939
Label: Commodore
Genre: Jazz
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 magnolias, 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
Billie Holiday is not mentioned in A Lesson Before Dying, but she would have been playing on Jefferson’s radio in 1948. It is easy to imagine Jefferson hearing Holiday’s beautiful voice singing about the strange crop in the southern trees.
The lyrics of "Strange Fruit" were written by Abel Meeropol as a poem in reaction to lynching in the United States. They dramatize a southern scene when lynching was at its height, when Black people were treated as non-citizens unprotected by the law. On the surface, the song's lynching narrative seems a little too far in the past to be of significance to the story of Jefferson. Lynching, however, has had an ever-changing role in the history of America, particularly the American South. What started as the policing of Black bodies during times of slavery continued as a form of lethal violence after Reconstruction. Traditionally, lynching is defined as the extrajudicial execution of individuals—that is, an execution without an arrest or a trial. Protest against lynching grew stronger in the twentieth century, especially from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the number of cases went down. As lynching became less common, however, legal lynching was born. Legal lynching is a form of lynching which employs the systemically racist justice system of the Jim Crow era to legally kill Black people. This was a commonplace practice and continues to have implications for capital punishment today.
Jefferson’s execution could be considered a legal lynching as it happens through the justice system. In chapter one, Grant conveys Jefferson's account of what happened the day Brother, Bear, and Mr. Gropé died. As his defense attorney argued, "Jefferson was innocent of all charges except being at the wrong place at the wrong time" (7). Everyone who knows Jefferson takes that as fact; his community understands legal lynching. The primary concern of the novel is not whether Jefferson committed murder, but rather how Jefferson sees himself. In the process of defending Jefferson, his attorney dehumanizes him as much as lynching dehumanized victims of mob violence. "Would you call this—this—this a man?" his attorney asked during closing remarks. "No, not I" (7). Although Jefferson got a trial, unlike victims of lynching, the opening chapter makes clear how an inadequate defense, an all-white jury, and a biased judge led to the inevitable outcome: "Death by electrocution" (9). The olfactory image Holiday sings in the second verse resonates with Jefferson's sentence. The scent of burning flesh figures as a tangible reminder that, although administered by the state, Jefferson's execution has much in common with a lynching.
