Strange Fruit

I have the war time edition of this book. The cover is green and it's aged. I bought it for forty-five cents at a thrift store in North Florida. This is the first time I've searched for this book title on the internet because I was curious about reviews and the history of the book. I already knew after reading it that it was a great book. It's sad and it's wonderfully written, and I cried... Remember what you read because there are a few secrets, but they're indirectly revealed.

Lilian Smith took on the Jim Crow racial system of the American Deep South and the hypocrisy of white southern Christians head on in her seminal 1950 memoir Killers of the Dream, making the subject of her 1944 novel "Strange Fruit" in a sense no surprise to current day readers. In 1944, a different reaction met the book as it was widely criticized and even banned and confiscated - the book's blurb says for profanity (that I didn't even notice) and its incendiary depiction of a small Georgia town during a life and death crisis. Its power undiluted, "Strange Fruit" still became the best-selling novel in America in 1944. Again, religion plays a big role in Smith's book - this time a weeklong series of revival meetings during the early 1920s serves as the backdrop for the story. In front is a years-before-it-became-acceptable romance between Tracy, son of the town's white physician, and Nonnie, the youngest daughter in the town's leading black family. Born of a chilvarous act during the girl's childhood, and surviving absences from the town by both lovers - she to go to college and he to serve in World War I, the love affair goes along very quietly behind the scenes until Nonnie reveals to Tracy that she is pregnant with his child and happy to be so. As with most dramatic star-crossed romances, this one spirals toward a tragedy that the people in both White Town and Colored Town of Maxwell, Georgia struggle to deal with. Along with depicting the tender interracial love affair, Smith deftly handles a myriad of relationships - parent/child, husband/wife, sister/brother, doctor/patient, business/labor, master/servant, and preacher/parishioner both within and across the racial divide, when such interaction is allowed. Again the hyprocrisy of religion in the form the revival and events in the town is palpable, and even reaches the consciousness of the preacher, who, after the central tragedy, guesses that adult attendance will be down, and therefore schedules an extended youth worship. On a side note, the dialect of the "kuntry" blacks becomes a bit thick at time, but can be understood with careful reading. White Southerners rationalized the system based on their prejudices about black people, fears about the consequences of a equalized social system, and the strange notion that blacks were somehow better off under white domination than in lives where they could enjoy all the fruits of life. Blacks were faced with a Hobson's choice - relative physical comfort gained by submission vs. likely punishment or worse for resistance. Reading "Strange Fruit" makes even more clear the necessity of leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the mass civil rights movement. Without it, individuals who chose to live a color-blind life, those who reacted to such "transgressions", and even innocent black bystanders, who ostensibly bought into the system and played by its rules, lived very perilous lives. Five stars and a very strong recommendation to all

Strange Fruit is an amazing, eye-opening, sometimes funny, sometimes sad, and often -- indeed, at nearly every page -- startlingly shocking book. It's a wonder that this book (and author) is not more well known. Strange Fruit is a Southern Peyton Place; it has that authenticity that makes us remember what many of us have would prefer to forget. It is a novel not to be missed.

It is ironic that 60 years following Lillian Smith's Strange Fruit, we have a Dr. Dean who says he is "talking to white people about race." This is the story of a lynching. An event that was as real as the morning paper in the 1920s and 1930s when the White Citizens' Council was the dominant political party in the South. Told from the perspective of white civil rights activist, Lillian Smith, Strange Fruit is as applicable today as it was when first published in 1944. One need only look to the daily media trappings of the Kobe Bryant v. Colorado case to see the makings of a public lynching in the global village not so unlike that of Maxwell, Georgia in the 1920s.

I don't think I've ever read a book as complete in so many different ways as this one. It had a lot of intelligent insight about people and society, it made my cry, it made me laugh, it made me swoon at the love story, the language was beautiful, and half way through the story, the suspense got really exciting. I can't think what more I could ever ask for in a book. This book is about race relations in the early 20th century South, but it's also about so much more than that. It's about the need we all have to find our place in this world and to be accepted and loved. This book is for anyone who's ever felt like an outcast in society. It's also for anyone who's ever really loved anyone, whether it was a family member or a romantic love, and whether they received love back in return or not.

Strange Fruit is an excellent portrayal of race relations inthe deep South of the 1920's. It is a deeply moving story of forbiddenlove, and the inability of both whites and blacks in the early South to shed the long standing racial bigotry and prejudice, so prevalent in that era.