Strange Fruit (Extra Blog)

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.

Strange Fruit is a song written by Abel Meeropol and was preformed by Billie Holiday as the closing song to a late-night set at Cafe Society, a newly integrated club. Little did they know, the rhymes of this haunting song would become an iconic symbol of race terrorism. Meeropopol, a Jewish American man, wrote Strange Fruit as a poem after seeing a horrifically graphic photograph of two black men being lynched (see under text). The poem showed racial injustice in a horribly truthful light, highlighting the gross injustice done to African Americans both during and after the times of slavery. Strange Fruit showed opened up the eyes of Americans, because even though everyone knew that acts such a lynching occurred, this piece effectively shoved it under their noses in a way that couldn't be ignored. The more people who read the poem, the more newspapers printed the photograph of the lynching, making more people actively aware of the injustice of attacking the blacks, most violently and most frequently in the South. The tone created by Meeropol's diction elicits sorrow from within the reader and effectively conveys the plight of the black race in the South during this time period: living in constant fear that's causing bitterness that, in turn, feeds the fear. Even reading it now, a time period where lynchings are a horror of the past, still makes me want to have been there to help these people and prevent their suffering; the author is very successful at using pathos to convey his point.

In a literary analysis of the poem, it is quite powerful. The author is clear to specify the trees that hold the fruits as Southern, and the wind that blows the bodies as a Southern breeze, as it is clearly aimed more at the South because most lynchings and racial terrorism occurred there during this time. The "strange fruits" that bleed onto the roots and swing from the poplar trees are the bodies of lynched African Americans. The imagery used in the second stanza creates an unfortunately vivid mental picture of the newspaper photograph, complete with sight and smell which pushes the reader to feel disgusted at the act. The author uses juxtaposition by placing a description of the scent of magnolias right above the description of the scent of burning flesh. This adds to the shock of the scene because one wouldn't expect burning bodies to be in the same place as lovely pink flowers. The juxtaposition also adds to the idea that this sort of happening is normal to some towns, so normal in fact that it's acceptable to break up the description of rotting human flesh with a comment on the smell of a flower while describing the lynching. The parallel structure of the last stanza, which tells us all of the ways the fruit will be ruined, suggests that these fruits are very disposable and don't deserve the same respect that a white fruit would; even in death they are inferior and can be left for the wildlife and environment to destroy. All in all, Strange Fruit is a very powerful poem; the author's successful use of many rhetorical devices allowed it to be a very influential piece, both in its own time period and in the future.