of being overwhelmed, which any attempt to speak the violence struggles to restrain but cannot fully deny. When I sing it, it affects me so much I get sick, Holiday writes.10 It takes all the strength out of me (95). Earnestness or anger, a politics of righteousness, may disavow its insufficiency only by substituting the work of exorcism for the appeal to justice. For the dead have not been saved, and justice has not come. It reminds me of how Pop died. To say otherwise, to proclaim justice’s establishment in a haunted land, on behalf of those living who would claim the name of the dead—as a nation, race, or species; as rightful heirs—is to willfully misperceive your privilege as freedom. To be open to the radical force of the appeal to justice demands the vulnerability of understanding the violence as ongoing. But I have to keep singing it, not only because people ask for it but because twenty years after Pop died the things that killed him are still happening in the South (95). In short, to speak of lynching is to render your own ethical failure, whether you admit it or not—not only to acknowledge justice’s failure to redress a harm but to bear forward the work of the violence out into the world.
Coming after the first is a second danger, weaving leisurely in its course, but swiftly registered by a certain attentive presence within Holiday’s audience. For example, the civil rights journalist and community leader Evelyn Cunningham recalled: “Many times in nightclubs when I heard her sing the song it was not a sadness I sensed as much as there was something else; it’s got to do with sexuality. Men and women would hold hands, they would look at each other, and they would pretend there was love going on, or something sexual. They would get closer together and yet there was a veneer—and just a veneer—of anger and concern” (qtd. in Margolick 81). The hesitance in Cunningham’s guarded testimony pauses over what seems to be an actual confusion, another presence in the crowd, something else that is not but has got to do with sexuality. Righteousness, a thin skin of affect as the badge of a politics, fails to conceal what is nonetheless only pretense: as if “there was love going on, or something sexual.” Looking at the stage and at each other, holding hands, the men and women perform for Cunningham’s gaze, in the dark, as if they do not know they are being watched, as if they do not know what possesses them.
In her characteristically blunt memoirs, Holiday remarks on this strange presence:
Over the years I’ve had a lot of weird experiences as a result of that song. It has a way of separating the straight people from the squares and cripples. One night in Los Angeles a bitch stood right up in the club where I was singing and said, “Billie, why don’t you sing that sexy song you’re so famous for? You know, the one about the naked bodies swinging in the trees.”
Needless to say, I didn’t. (95)
It is tempting to imagine the woman as merely unknowing, deficient in awareness or ability, what Holiday refers to as a square or cripple or both. But her request, as Holiday reports it, suggests a more deliberate cruelty.11 Unlike the cautious Cunningham or the unwitting couples she observes, the figure called bitch bears knowledge but lacks care, setting loose a force she cannot really control. Meeting her affront with greater knowledge and equal fearlessness, Holiday’s account enacts a curt dismissal whose brevity contains volumes—outstripping speech not because there is nothing to say but because there is too much, an excess of meaning. Yet it is needless to say because Holiday works the song to elude the domain of what is said. How so?
Consider, for contrast, James Baldwin’s “Going to Meet the Man,” in which a white deputy sheriff’s childhood memory of a lynching bee remedies an episode of impotence, summoning figures of racist fantasy to mediate intercourse with his wife. Or consider Kara Walker’s shameless exhumations of the imaginative domains of power, violence, and sexual desire bequeathed by the history of slavery, loosed demons fluttering free from the profound moralism of Baldwin’s redemptive vision. You might take such work as extrapolations of the knowledge implicit in Holiday’s performance, in her auditory and kinesthetic shaping of the words and again in the way she inhabited the iconicity the song helped define for her. These extrapolations extend the knowledge’s reach by diminishing its ineffable force. Where Baldwin names white interracial desire as the motive force formalized in lynching, exposing the racializing and sexualizing violence on which white reproduction depends, Holiday’s performance refrains from such naming, as it refrains from putting its most powerful message into words, even as it enacts the exposure of the history of sexuality that the song and all it reenacts has got to do with.
In the words of the song, lynching’s bitter crop disrupts the pastoral scene of trees and flowers and birds and weather, its reversion to nature leaving a perverse remainder: these bodies are not persons, but fruit, and what makes them strange is what makes them black. There must have been persons here, once, in the bodies dehumanized in their blackening, and as the agents of that blackening—absented, monstrous, horrific, one feels obliged to say, inhuman. Although there must have been persons here once, the song cannot imagine them in words. Blackness as death is what the words can picture as presence; blackness as life-giving essence has been absconded with by whiteness. In this way the words of the song enact the same perceptual protocols that render the perpetrators of lynching invisible before the eyes of the law, passing unmarked into the community of whiteness after enacting its social reproduction, with the same effortless slide of a movie camera away from the conjugal act.
The words were written by the leftist writer, lyricist, and composer Abel Meeropol, published as a poem under his given name, and later set to music under his professional name, Lewis Allan.12 By his own account, they were written in response to a lynching photograph (N. Baker 45), commonly taken to be the notorious image of the 1930 lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Marion, Indiana, which prominently features a festive crowd of onlookers. Meeropol’s Jewishness surely modulates the lyrics’ critical restaging of the lynching rite’s aesthetic training—elsewhere, he put it quite succinctly: “I am a Jew, / How may I tell? / The Negro lynched / Reminds me well / I am a Jew” (qtd. in N. Baker 45). Yet even if this ethnoracial shading passes unremarked, at least two varieties of whiteness already appear in the space evacuated by the lyrics, each constituted against the other. One gathers to celebrate the violence, its communal rejuvenation in defiant defense against the threat of decadence manifested in the other, which is constituted by the horrified desire to read the participants in the lynching bee out of history. That the latter form of whiteness has become hegemonic may be registered by the quicksand fascination experienced by present-day viewers of lynching photographs for their figures of white onlookers.13 In the aftermath of the civil rights era, that latter form still shares in the national commemoration of lynching’s death through the ritual consumption of the sacrificed black body, but the presence of the former as an audience within the photographs exposes, for better or for worse, lynching’s function to reproduce whiteness.
As written, the words respond to the photograph, to the experience of its observation at a remove, within an alternate gathering of racial community, completing the process of the perpetrators’ disappearance. As sung, Kevin Young proposes, the words constitute “a symbolic lynching photograph” that, “confronted with the crime of looking, … resorts … to the abandoning of a self altogether” (219). That is, Young’s reading attributes to Holiday’s voice the agency of a withholding of both “I” and “you,”14 whose result he glosses precisely in an ambiguous riffing quotation, “Look away, Dixieland” (220). “Lady Day embodies a strategy of silence,” he argues, that in the performance of the words “talk[s] back to the silence of lynching, which you can almost see in a lynching photograph” (220). Her performance, he concludes, “shelters and smuggles meaning beyond the borders of what is acceptable—or even seen” (224). Because the violence itself establishes these enabling borders, perceptual before epistemological or ideological or moral, its agency lies outside what can be seen or shown or said. Holiday’s performance moves outside to confront it.
Simply put, it does so through a contrast between the words of the song and the conditions of its performance—the milieu from which it emanates and the genius of its embodied voice—that improvises an aesthetic countertraining within the very observation of ritualized racial terror. “I wondered then whether
