Stanza III
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.
…for the crows to pluck
The fruit of anti-Black violence is cast here as unfit to nourish any – other than a murder of crows. In fact, it is specifically the crow (ghurāb) that plucks at this strange fruit (fākiha gharība) – the same bird that God sends to Cain after that first fratricide: Then God sent a crow, scratching the earth, to show him how he might conceal his brother’s corpse. He said, “Oh, woe unto me! Am I not able to be even as this crow and conceal my brother’s corpse?” And he came to be among the remorseful (Q. 5:31). It is the crow in the Qur’an that reveals to Cain how he ought to bury the brother that he has murdered while also awakening in him the enormity of his transgression. In like manner, the crow of “Strange Fruit” discloses, through its scavenging, the grotesquery that was committed against other unjustly slain souls. In both the Qur’an and the song, it is the crow - this creature of God’s creation known to gather around its dead en masse in a seemingly funerary manner - that is tasked with making the inhumanity of men plain.1
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck
For the sun to rot, for the tree to drop
The rain, the wind, the sun, and the tree – those aspects of nature seemingly without agency – are made to do the work that the transgressors fail to fulfill: to lower the remains of the slain so that it might return to nature under the cover of earth. That burden is foisted upon other aspects of creation. In both life and death, human supremacists deny dignity to those they deem lesser.
These lines also contrast how the fruit in question is not gathered like the fruits of other trees. This is not a fruit that is cared for and watered. No hand tends to it. No eyes patiently watches it. It is fruit designed to wither on the vine. There is no time of ripening, only decay. Battered and buffeted by the elements, it hangs lifelessly until it falls of its own failing accord. Indeed, the rain, wind, sun, and tree are all incidental to what is really at work. Rather, the song seeks to underscore the callousness and disdain of its human transgressors, those white men and women who birthed this terrible, biting fruit in season after season.
Here is a strange and bitter crop
Then, in the alchemy of the song’s end, a sense of scale is revealed. This is not some fruit stumbled upon in the wilds of the field. As the last word of the song announces, this strange fruit is a crop. The choice of word is not insignificant. As the Oxford English Dictionary explains, “crop” can mean: “The annual produce of plants cultivated or preserved for food… the produce of the land, either while growing or when gathered; harvest.”2 A multitude of both time and place are implied. This happens year after year – “annual” – and does so in abundance – “when gathered; harvest.” The tree and its fruit, then, is not some stray planting carried by wind, water, or beast to a chance hill or dale. It is not a feral growth, but the product of human domestication. It is part of a planned and costly harvest. The lynching tree (would we classify it as an arbor crucis?) is a “crop” carefully tended by human hands in designated places and at a scale intended to sustain for many (but not all) a particular way of life.
Even an earlier (and now obsolete) meaning of “crop” finds resonance with the disturbing imagery of the song. In Old English “crop” could mean: “The ‘head’ of a herb, flower, etc., esp. as gathered for culinary or medicinal purposes.”3 Likewise, the “heads” of the strange fruit of the lynching tree are presented to us as lolling and disfigured fodder fit only for crows and the sucking wind. Yet despite this, white America deemed the befouled flesh of this fruit so desirable that the lynching tree spread to the far corners of the land as a sought after “ornamental.” Indeed, this crop was never meant for consumption. Its purpose, rather, was to serve as a sign. But unlike the signs (ayāt) of God, intended to direct us and transport us to a higher order, the aim here is far more base. The strange fruit of the lynching tree was cultivated to convey to others the racial order of this country.
Lynching enters significantly into the historical record of the United States in the 1830s. It certainly occurred before, but it was not as needed for the work of white supremacy. The system of slavery was muscular enough to maintain the racialized social order of America.4 Only as that institution waned, did lynching begin to gain ground. As the EJI recounts “At the Civil War’s end, Black autonomy expanded but white supremacy remained deeply rooted. The failure to unearth those roots would leave Black Americans exposed to terrorism and racial subordination for more than a century.”5 Then, after the end of Reconstruction after 1877, the lynching tree came to be even more forthrightly embraced. The efforts to grow this bitter crop were so great it is better to imagine it as being cultivated at the scale of a plantation.
“Strange Fruit”
The song as a whole brings into sharp relief the agricultural hellscape that thousands upon thousands of Black Americans were made to endure. It discloses unapologetically some of what Black life was made to suffer at the hands of race.6 Reactions to the songs were mixed, even within the Black community. While some resented its framing of Black life as “victims” or feared its potential to incite racial violence, others described “Strange Fruit” more devotionally: “[It] was like sitting in church. It was like a hymn to us.”7 It could be both horrible and holy. This ascribed sacral quality is not insignificant. In one respect, the song works to overturn whatever moral rectitude whites tried to impart to lynching – as one such voice expressed, “Lynching is part of the religion of our people.”8 The lyrics of “Strange Fruit” challenged such bedeviling sentiments.
“Strange Fruit,” then, can be heard as a thunderous and holy rejoinder to the brutal taking of Black life. The song unsettles. It moves. For many, “Strange Fruit” was a song about conscientization. As Angela Davis describes “Strange Fruit” was “a song with urgent and far-reaching social implications – a song about hate, indignities, and eruptions of violence that threatened black people in the United States, a song that was able to awaken from their apolitical slumber vast numbers of people from diverse racial backgrounds.”9 This was a song crafted to induce change. Whereas lynchings could turn trees into monstrosities at the cost of Black life, the call of “Strange Fruit” sought to rouse and rally it audiences to ethical action.
The Artistry
Billie Holiday, affectionately called “Lady Day” by those close to her, became deeply invested in the performance and recorded release of “Strange Fruit.” With respect to the former, she lent the song an experiential interpretive power. As the years passed, “She increasingly brought [her] personal pain to her performances of ‘Strange Fruit.’”10 Its reception was equally deep. In Cone’s assessment, “No white person could listen to Billie’s ‘Strange Fruit’ without feeling indicted and exposed by the sound of truth and contempt in her voice.”11 Holiday sought to bring the song to life anew with every performance always attentive to the dynamics of the moment: artist, audience, time, and place. And in each case the artist’s aim was clear: to rouse the conscience of those repulsed by the vivid scene conveyed. This was part of Holiday’s craft. As Angela Davis relates, “…each time Holiday performed it she implicitly asked her audiences to imagine a dreadful lynching scene, and to endorse and identify with the song’s antilynching sentiments.”12 It often achieved this aim. As one listener described it, “When Billie sings it, you feel as if you’re at the foot of the tree.”13
“Strange Fruit” may seem like an unconventional subject for a theological discussion of race, but I have done so for several reasons. First, like the dynamism of scripture, the creativity of poetry and its performance can often convey truths in ways that plain prose and philosophical theorizing cannot. When crafted well, human artistry can take hold of us, even transport us. I wanted us to stand at the foot of the lynching tree, to behold its fruit, and experience “race” in this viscerally sensorial way. Second, the song remains relevant today. Even though the period of history that “Strange Fruit” confronts may seem past, Black life continues to be subject to inhumanity and undignified death. The terrible work of race has simply shapeshifted into new modes and forms and other sites. Those with “authority” still kill. Those who are Black are still made to die prematurely. To dwell on “Strange Fruit,” then, is to uncover a past that continues to inform our present and haunts the formation of our future.
Finally, “Strange Fruit” allows us to appreciate the interpretive power at Billie Holiday’s command. As Malcolm X recollected years later, “Lady Day sang with the soul of Negroes from the centuries of sorrow and oppression.”14 Through the weighty words of “Strange Fruit” she was able to lead her enrapt audiences through a racial hellscape. As another appreciative critic remarked, “Where others fear to tread, she reached out and touched, where others mask their eyes, she defiantly kept hers open.”15 It is, I believe, with similar unyielding boldness that we must proceed for questions remain to be asked of this thing called race. Two in particular emerge from in-between the lines of “Strange Fruit”: From whence did this strange fruit emerge? And how did this bitter crop come to be so widely cultivated? These are words that offer a window into that dark world remade by race so that we might be moved to unmake it.
Notably, the authors of the second cited scientific article use Q. 5:31 as the epigraph to their study. They suggest that the seeming funerary practice of crows gathering around their dead is related to a kind of threat assessment. They write, “crows and some other corvids recognize dead conspecifics as cues of danger and use such information to inform future actions and learn novel threats.” Kaeli N. Swift and John M. Marzluff, “Wild American crows gather around their dead to learn about danger,” Animal Behaviour 109 (November 2015), 187-197, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2015.08.021; Kaeli Swift and John M. Marzluff, “Occurrence and variability of tactile interactions between wild American crows and dead conspecifics,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 373, no. 1754 (2018), https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2017.0259. See also T.L. Iglesias, R. McElreath, and G.L. Patricelli, “Western scrub-jay funerals: cacophonous aggregations in response to dead conspecifics,” Animal Behaviour 84, no. 5 (November 2012), 1103-1111, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2012.08.007.
Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “crop (n.), sense III.8.a,” February 2024, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/1344429042.
Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “crop (n.), sense II.3.a,” February 2024, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/7423555597.
Equal Justice Initiative, Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror, Third Edition (Montgomery, AL: Equal Justice Initiative, 2017), 27.
Equal Justice Initiative, Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror, Third Edition (Montgomery, AL: Equal Justice Initiative, 2017), 7.
Those first haunted by Billie Holiday’s performance of it were the New Yorkers gathered quietly together in Café Society, the country’s first interracial nightclub that had only opened the year prior. Abel Meeropol, a Jewish American schoolteacher, who published under the penname Lewis Allan, originally composed the song as a poem. Meeropol introduced the piece to Holliday at the Café Society in hopes she would perform it. Angela Y. Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998), 181-182; David Margolick, Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday, Café Society, and an Early Cry for Civil Rights (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Running Press, 2000), 25-26; James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 2011), 134.
David Margolick, Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday, Café Society, and an Early Cry for Civil Rights (Philadelphia: Running Press, 2000), 96-97; John M. Carvalho, “‘Strange Fruit’: Music Between Violence and Death,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (2013), 115.
James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2011), 135; Donald G. Mathews, “Lynching is Part of the Religion of Our People: Faith in the Christian South,” in Religion in the American South: Protestants and Others in History and Culture, edited by Beth Barton Schweiger & Donald G. Mathews (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 168, 182 (153-194).
Angela Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998), 182.
John M. Carvalho, “‘Strange Fruit’: Music Between Violence and Death,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (2013), 115.
James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2011), 136.
Angela Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998), 183-184.
The listener in question was writer Elijah Wald. The same line is quoted by James Cone incorrectly as Elijah Wood. David Margolick, Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday, Café Society, and an Early Cry for Civil Rights (Philadelphia: Running Press, 2000), 101; James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 2011), 63.
Malcolm X & Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1965), 130.
Jazz musician and music critic Burt Korall provides this quote in the liner notes to The Billie Holiday Story album. Quoted in Angela Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998), 194.