For the crows to pluck

The artifacts that persist in my memory are the photographs of lynchings. But it’s not the burned, mutilated bodies that stick with me. It’s the faces of the white men in the crowd. There’s the photo of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Indiana in 1930, in which a white man can be seen grinning at the camera as he tenderly holds the hand of his wife or girlfriend. ― Adam Serwer, The Cruelty is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump’s America

This is absurd perhaps, this insistence upon the trees when there were men there, men with hands and boots and voices and the women who tenderly held their hands, men who had names once, surely, names given to them by mothers who had held them before they could walk, names written somewhere in family Bibles, perhaps, beside births and marriages and deaths, names spoken over supper and in church and on porches in the long evenings when the air was thick with cicadas and the smell of jasmine, men who laughed, some of them, and some who did not laugh, men who came because others came, or because their fathers had come, or because no one had ever taught them that there are things a man must refuse even when every other man in the county is saying yes; and yet afterward, when the story has been told and retold until it has lost its beginning and its middle and even the shape of the truth inside it, what remains is not the men but the trees.

Always the trees. Why? Because the men went home. That is perhaps the first cruelty: they went home.

They went home to girlfriends and wives who asked whether it was done, or did not ask because they knew better than to ask, to children who slept in rooms smelling of Ivory soap and starch, to beds that creaked beneath familiar bodies, to kitchens where coffee would be made at dawn, and then the sun rose and there they were again, men, fathers, husbands, citizens, respectable perhaps, churchgoing perhaps, men who would remove their hats when the preacher spoke of sin and nod gravely at the word, while outside the windows the same trees stood in the morning light.

The men went home. The trees could not.

Southern trees bear a strange fruit

They said it was beautiful. This is how the story was supposed to begin: beautiful. The South, they said, was beautiful, and there were facts enough to prove it — the magnolias, the antebellum mansions and white plantation houses, green fields, the rivers lying broad beneath the afternoon sun, the cotton opening pale as little wounds in the earth, the white columns and the slow fans and the women in summer dresses and the men sitting on porches after supper, speaking softly because the evening was hot and because soft voices were considered civilized, and civilization, after all, was what they called themselves.

Beautiful. Gallant. Gracious. The words came easily. Words always come easily where truth is difficult. And beneath the words, beneath the lawns and the magnolias and the porches, beneath the white cloth and white gloves and white flowers, beneath the whole bright pageant of the thing they called civilization, there was the earth.

Black earth.

Red earth.

Wet earth that smelled of rain.

Earth that had been opened and closed so many times that perhaps it had ceased to distinguish between seed and bone, between root and finger, between the body of a man and the body of a tree. For the earth does not have our categories. It does not know innocent and guilty. It does not know justice. It knows weight. It knows pressure. It knows what falls. And what is put into it stays.

Blood on the leaves and blood at the root

Blood on the leaves. But perhaps it was not blood at first. Perhaps that is what memory does: it gives the eye another answer until the eye becomes willing to accept it.

Red leaves.

Autumn.

Sunset.

The slow glissando of running sap.

Anything but blood. Because to say blood is to say that someone bled. And to say that someone bled is to ask who made him bleed. And to ask who made him bleed is to discover that the question does not end with one man. It moves. It travels. It passes from hand to hand and father to son and house to house until eventually it reaches you, whoever you are, sitting in the cool room with the window open, listening to the rain that perfumes the earth, thinking this happened long ago, long before you, before your father, perhaps before your grandfather, in a place you have never seen. Long ago. As though time were water and the past merely something that could be washed downstream. But blood does not wash away. It thins. It darkens. It enters the soil. It becomes the tree. And the tree becomes the fruit. Strange fruit.

Black body swinging in the southern breeze

As though fruit were not the thing which ripens because it has been planted and tended and watered and allowed its season; as though the thing hanging from the branch had come there by accident, dropped from heaven, perhaps, instead of growing from the soil that men had cultivated with their own hands. And the bodies swung. The ropes creaked. The branches swayed. The sap ran.

Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees

And the eyes. The eyes are what remain. Not the rope. Not the branch. Not even the body. The eyes. Because the eyes should have closed. That is what the living expect of the dead: that they will stop looking. But these did not. These remained open, bulging, astonished, fixed upon nothing and therefore upon everything, upon the men who had done it, upon the men who watched, upon the men who heard and said nothing, upon the women who drew their curtains, upon the children who were told to forget, upon the future itself.

Pastoral scene of the gallant South

That is the question which comes back, though there were so many questions before it and so many afterward, why the eyes remained bulging and astonished, why the mouth was twisted as though it had tried to speak one final word and found that the world had no word left in it that could be spoken safely, why the body must be displayed beneath the tree, why the tree must be made to bear what the men themselves would not bear, why the morning afterward should arrive with its birds singing and its sunlight touching everything equally, the guilty and the innocent, as if there were still such things as innocence.

The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth

First the magnolias, sweet and almost unbearably fresh, the whole warm air filled with that white sweetness so that you could breathe it and believe for one moment — only one — that the world was what they said it was, gracious, ordered, beautiful. That thick white sweetness rising from the dark gardens, almost indecent in its freshness, filling the warm air until one could breathe it and believe, if only for the space of a breath, that the world was orderly; that the houses were good houses; that the men sitting upon the porches were good men; that the old words — honour, decency, tradition — still possessed some meaning beyond their usefulness.

Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh

And then the other smell. Not sudden because it came suddenly, but because the mind refuses to know it until it must, and then there it is, the smell of burning flesh, and the magnolias are still there, blooming beside it, which is somehow worse than if they had withered, because flowers should not bloom beside such things, trees should not leaf out, birds should not sing, children should not sleep peacefully in houses while outside the world has become something that no child should ever have to learn the name of. And the magnolias still blooming.

And the sudden smell of burning flesh

Rain falls. It falls upon the leaves and branches, upon the rope and the earth beneath the rope, and gathers what can be gathered and carries it downward, downward, into the black mouths of the roots. The wind takes what the rain cannot. It carries the smell across the fields, through the magnolias, beneath doors and through screens and into bedrooms where children sleep and women wake and someone says, It is only the weather. Yesterday’s weather.

But is it yesterday if the stench remains? Is it 50 years if the tree still stands? Is it 100 years if a child hears the story from a father who heard it from his father and grows up believing that silence is the same thing as innocence? Where does yesterday end? Where does the dead man’s life end and the living man’s life begin, if the living man walks beneath the same tree and breathes the same air and calls the same earth his own?

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck

They come because they are hungry, because that is what crows do, and perhaps it is the only mercy in the whole terrible arrangement that the crows do not pretend otherwise. They do not call themselves gallant. They do not speak of honour. They do not stand afterward beneath the tree and say that it was necessary, that it was regrettable, that it was the way things were. They come because there is flesh, and the flesh is there, and the world has made no promise that flesh will be spared.

For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck

The sun comes too. The sun, indifferent and immense, bears down upon the body until the skin changes and the flies come and the smell deepens, and still the magnolias bloom, and still the leaves move, and still the river goes somewhere beyond the trees, carrying its burden toward the sea. Somewhere beyond the trees the river continues toward the sea, carrying mud and branches and fish and whatever else the land has surrendered to it, and perhaps that is where we have always sent the things we could not bear to keep: downriver, downstream, out of sight, toward a place where we might pretend that distance is the same thing as disappearance.

For the sun to rot, for a tree to drop

But the trees do not forget. The trees remain. That is the thing we cannot escape, though we have tried, though there are rooms in which we have sat, you and I, with the shutters closed and the curtains drawn and the lamps burning in daylight, because if one cannot see the trees then perhaps one can believe they are not there, perhaps one can believe that what happened beneath them happened somewhere else, to someone else, in some other country, under some other sky. But there is always the tree. There is always the root. And beneath the root, the earth. And beneath the earth, whatever we have put there. Not gone. Never gone. Only covered. Only waiting.

And perhaps the bitterest thing is not that the fruit was strange. Perhaps the bitterest thing is that it was ours. That it grew from our soil. That it hung from our trees. That the wind which moved it was the same wind that moved the magnolias when morning came and the birds sang and the church bells rang and the men removed their hats with the same solemn brusquerie when the preacher spoke of sin and nodded gravely at the word, while outside the windows the same trees stood in the morning light.

Here is a strange and bitter crop