Southern Musings: Strange Fruit

I read Molly Haskell's Frankly, My Dear: "Gone With the Wind" Revisited. The book was fine, but the bibliography was fascinating for me. I decided to read some of the books that she had used to write her book. A socio-ethnio-fantasio-ography of a region that I had once lived in.

Just checking out your references, Miss Haskell.

First up, Strange Fruit by Lillian Smith.

Miss Haskell characterized it as a novel by a lesbian about an interracial love affair in the Deep South (Maxwell, Georgia). How could I resist? And by the way, I thought the title was about the product of that love affair and by product, I was thinking a baby. Well, there was an illegitimate, miscegenated "foetus" as it was called about half the time in the book, but there was also a lynching because of that baby to be. And the aftermath of that lynching is what is usually known as "strange fruit".

The plot is white, weak boy meets over-educated, black, nurse girl (only Nonnie, the black girl, is always described as white looking and is always standing in a "white" light). White Boy meets Black Girl and they go at it, but there is no real sex in the book. There is a lot of pawing and petting, but nothing sexy. Hetero-sex between any of the races is crude in this book.

After White Boy and Black Girl go at it---uh oh---there is a baby on the way. And this conversation takes place:

White Boy: "I've been a fool to get you in trouble like this. To tell you the honest truth I thought---you'd---know---how not to---having gone off to college---and everything---"

What? White Boy is in his mid-twenties at least, he went off to war (I thought it was WWII, but it was WWI, and you'll see why I thought this) and he doesn't know about Condoms? The army teaches its soldiers about Condoms. I've seen silent British Army WWI training films about the evils of sex with evil women and the US Army wasn't doing the same? What a douche! And with a douchebag is how I suppose White Boy thought Black Girl practiced birth control. That, or she called up Margaret Sanger, or wrote her, when Miss Sanger was in jail for passing out birth control manuals.

Black Girl looks in horror at White Boy, and why wouldn't she? This is what she fell in love with? Girl, you went to Spelman College, and this is what you sleep with and then you go home to Maxwell (haha) Georgia and nurse some little white boy with cerebral palsy? Go be a school teacher up north. And pass for white and get yourself a Real White Boy up there, if that is what you have to have.

So to get out of his predicament, White Boy gives Black Black Boyhood Friend with Gold Teeth $100 to marry his Black Girl (but she's not really all that black, especially when she is standing in that white light in front of the Swamp). White Boy gives Black Girl who stands in front of the Swamp (the Swamp just lurks in the background of this novel a lot---no action there) $200 for an abortion or baby clothes, I'm not sure which is which and White Boy isn't either. White Boy then joins the church and proposes to a White Girl (who doesn't have to stand in a White Light to be White).

Black Girl has a Brown Brother (and she has a Black Sister---we have all sorts of racial shadings and prejudices) who finds out about the White Boy and the Baby and he shoots the White Boy and puts him out of his stupidity. That should have happened sooner. Maybe Jesus in Heaven can teach White Boy some smarts.

Brown Brother takes off with White Boy's $200 to start a new life up north. Black Black Boyhood Friend with Gold Teeth gets hunted down and lynched for not killing his White Boy childhood friend. And besides Black Black Boyhood Friend with Gold Teeth was really, really black and I think that he lived in the Swamp so he was the best one to lynch, anyway. And Black Girl marries Black Doctor and has her sort of White baby.

The novel was slow going at first, but it became a sort of more understandable and more explained and expositioned sort of Faulkner novel. And I'm no Faulkner fan.

The book jacket said that the novel that I read was in its ninth printing (so it sold even without the sex), and it cost $2.75. The jacket and the copyright page had the following:

"IMPORTANT NOTICE

THIS Wartime edition is complete and unabridged. In order to keep this book in print as long as possible without exceeding their paper quota for 1944, the publishers have had it entirely reset and have made a new set of plates. The new type size is only one point smaller that that of the first edition, but it allows more words to the page and therefore fewer pages. All printings beginning with the seventh will be made from the new plates."

And that is why I thought this book occurred in WWII.