THE POEM BOOK

LEWIS ALLAN /ABEL MEEROPOL "STRANGE FRUIT"

To hear the song Strange Fruit is to be haunted by Billie Holiday's voice, the history of Black America in the USA and, more than anything, devastating sound of the embodied suffering.

Is it the Billie Holiday haunting effect? Or the horrific facts of (American) history? Do the words of this little song stand on their own?

Abel Meeropol wrote STRANGE FRUIT under the pseudonym, Lewis Allan. The incredible thing about this song is, read aloud without Billie's voice or the weight of history (if either one is possible --and it is, even if for a split of a second) the element of the embodied suffering rings even so. How can this be? Who is Abel Meeropol, a white American, who wrote this heartbreaking words about American lynching of its Black tribe - about Black American suffering?

Abel Meeropol wrote his poems and songs under the pseudonym, Lewis Allan. What the world didn't know about this name is that they are together the first names of Meeropol own stillborn children, Lewis and Allan. Meeropol was also parent to two boys whose parents were executed by electric chair (burned to death) on accusation of being 'communists'. 

In a very real sense, death by being burned to death -- a method used in the lynched bodies of Black America -- was a known, horrific motif in the songwriter own lived experience, an experience conversant with the horror of being hated by the dominant order of things. Meeropol was not only a communist raising children whose parents were burned to death by the US government, he was as well a child of immigrant European Jews who fled the horrors of Europe.

The line .... and the sudden smell of burning flesh in a devastating way ties together Black American history, Jewish European history and a very personal, immediate horror.

Human history is a strange and bitter crop, a heartbreaking stillborn.

- TPB

 

Strange Fruit

By Lewis Allen (1939); sung by Billie Holiday

Southern trees bear a strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the roots
Black bodies swingin' in the southern breeze
Strange fruit hangin' from the poplar trees
Pastoral scene of the gallant south
The bulging eyes and twisted mouth
Scent of magnolias sweet and fresh
And the sudden smell of burning flesh
Here is the 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

_________

TPB's notes:  sources: http://www.npr.org/2012/09/05/158933012/the-strange-story-of-the-man-behind-strange-fruit; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Fruit;