instead in a concert setting, without beer and whiskey and cigarette smoke” (52). Presumably meant as a compliment—for jazz music, it was prophecy—the attitude has many precedents. Before his encounter with lynching, James Weldon Johnson’s ex-colored man, for one, hoped to uplift the music from nightclub to concert hall. But it is the music’s association with less respectable environments, of good times and ill repute, that gives the performance its force. The association of racial transgression, political radicalism, and the nightlife that defined Café Society, the Greenwich Village nightclub where Holiday made the song famous, was a recipe that set Harlem in vogue over a decade earlier. To ask whether the amplification of sexual desire served transgressive politics or political sentiment merely licensed sexual transgression is only to attempt to impose narrative order on what was, for good or ill, an undeniably transformative historical dynamic.
For its part, jazz, like other forms of popular music and dance, has historically flourished in spaces organized to profit on its aphrodisiac qualities, often involving fixation on the singer. The nightclub, rather than the concert hall, is the privileged setting for Holiday’s music, and if this space sanctions alternative arrangements of social life experienced, in all their ephemerality, as liberatory, it is only because the space itself is dedicated to celebrating, conjuring, evoking, and enhancing erotic feeling. While the music cannot be reduced to its aphrodisiac qualities or their instrumentalization in courting or seduction, these qualities are irreducible from its conditions of production and reception, even in the devotions of a solitary fan.15
More than other singers, Holiday attracted such devotion, whose most disturbing product is the condescending, often bizarre equation of her artistry with the most salacious and tragic details of her biography—physical and sexual abuse, child prostitution, drug addiction. It places her in the front rank of a long tradition of singing black women, icons shaped between the violently hypersexualizing attention of white desire and the impossible resources of a longer tradition of black women’s vocality.16 The racialized, gendered, sexualized dimensions of this attention are structural, preceding the intentions or identifications of any listener, but Holiday’s genius, as a prerequisite to its expression, involves the reflection, redirection, and reappropriation of this attention, working and reworking it for other purposes, turning and transforming its force.
It is here that the impact of her performance becomes unavoidable. The song’s lyrics observe the lynching form, evoking the racist fantasies of black male sexual violence toward white women accompanying and justifying it, against which any respectable antilynching politics, white or black, needed to reaffirm the boundaries of racial and sexual propriety. Yet the song’s performance—the embodied voice issuing from the nightlife milieu—exposes another history of sexual violence and interracial desire, culminating in the fetish of a hypersexualized black girl whose gift of singing beautifully is equated with her vulnerability to sexual exploitation and sexual violence. By setting these two contradictory histories in unbearable proximity, Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” renders each radically unstable. On the one hand, she bends the most violently sexist and racist desires conditioning her consumption as a performer into a profound affective identification with opposition to lynching. On the other, she wrenches open a politics of respectability that stifled and suppressed poor black women in the name of uplift, schooling the ideology that would deny her the moral standing and personal dignity to bear witness against lynching’s violence. In both cases, the work of Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” turns on an insight left unspoken, that refrains from entering speech or sight: the violent, sexualizing, and racializing desire that drives the formalization of lynching is the same mysterious presence structuring the audience’s relation to the singer, incarnating her as a singing body laid open to violence.
What works this presence, turning on an insight that may remain unavailable to the audience, is a genius extending back, insistently previous, before the incarnation of the singing body. The figure of the hypersexualized, broken, helpless girl is revealed as a mere veil, flung like a net over the Lady. In claiming her title, Lady Day did not wait on recognition; she did not seek inclusion or acceptance within respectability so much as she rebuked it, put it to shame. Neither does the work of her song depend on the audience’s conscious recognition of what’s happening, the effect of the words dissociating from the dynamics of the performance, even as both at once demand the audience’s engagement. That space where the lynchers are, the same perceptual nowhere inhabited by persons unknown, is where the work of Holiday’s song takes place, even as sight and speech remain trained on the lynched body, that bitter crop.
* * *
For twenty years she carried it with her, a gift and a curse, filial duty and liberating burden, this song that helped make her a star and a target for the law. She died young with a wrecked voice, everyone says, and if you listen to recordings of the song over the course of her career it’s easy to imagine you can feel the weight of it, borne across that time, all those miles, all that way from poverty and scorn to international fame. This is, of course, only an element of her artistry, to evoke a feeling that, sad or happy, joyful or melancholy, is so full of longing it seems like intimacy, like the most ecstatic identification. Rather than art.
Perhaps this is why so many of Lady’s ardent devotees want to believe that the music killed her—made her suffer, rode her down, burned her up, ruined her, leaving her a defiant shell of herself, far older than the forty-four years given to her. To believe the music killed her is to imagine she died for love, for a love she shared with you. But she was just poor, and black, and a woman, which is explanation sufficient to a life of struggle and an early death, and there ought to be tragedy enough in that statement if you would just leave the music out of it. For if there is any freedom beyond mystery in her art, it is freedom from this love: the music itself as her freedom from the engulfing love it conjured up in her audience.
But the dead have not been saved, her song continues to tell you. To marshal all of her artistry to sustain this perception, this condition of being overwhelmed and unbearable longing for response, must have been a perilous act. Dwelling in peril, in preparation and performance, in her long commitment to the song, brought her fame and criticism, celebration and condescension, often in the same breath. The song was too serious, or not serious enough; it was ponderous or pandering; it was beneath her, bad art, or it ruined her for the lighter and faster material to which she was better suited. What frightens critics of the song most of all, it seems, is its relation to that ambivalent yet terrifyingly intense love it engendered, and perhaps this has as much to do as racism and sexism and snobbery in explaining the bizarrely persistent notion that the song’s full meaning was somehow beyond her ken.17
The controversial white promoter John Hammond famously dismissed the song. “The beginning of the end for Billie was ‘Strange Fruit,’ when she had become the darling of the left-wing intellectuals,” he asserted, leading her to begin “taking herself very seriously, and thinking of herself as very important.” Opposing her to his icon of primitive authenticity, Bessie Smith, he bemoaned her contamination by this love, by her “success with white people,” and, worst of all, by “homosexuals,” who “just fell for Billie” (qtd. in Margolick 78–79). By contrast, Cunningham, whose courageous reporting for the Pittsburgh Courier won her the ironic title “lynching editor,” earned the right not to listen: “There comes a time in a black person’s life where you’re up to your damned ears in lynching and discrimination, when sometimes you were just so sick of it, but it was heresy to express it. She was a great artist and she did great things with that song, but you would not admit you did not want to hear it.” Yet Cunningham calls the song “an attention grabber,” “a marketing device,” suggesting that Holiday never “really understood or anticipated the serious attention” it brought. Against the evidence of her own comments about the presence of something to do with sexuality in the interracial audience, she insists, “The song did not disturb me because I never had the feeling that this was something she was very, very serious about” (qtd. in Margolick 81).
Earnest and self-flattering yet prurient and titillating, condescending in its benevolence and insatiable in its desire for violence—such contradictions
