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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 [93], Line —— -0.0 —— Norm PgEn [93], daniel j. martin Lynching Sites Where Trauma and Pastoral Collide I stumbled upon a column in the Kansas City Star a while ago about a restaurateur, Myra Harper, who decided to name her new place Strange Fruit Restaurant and Smoothie Bar after the signature song of her favorite singer, Billie Holiday. Appropriately, the restaurant would be setting up shop in the 18th and Vine District, legendary hotbed of jazz in Kansas City, redeveloping around the American Jazz Museum and the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. But the name Harper chose stirred up a mild hubbub in Kansas City, with a number of people disturbed at her naming a restaurant after a graphic song about lynching. “Granted,” one letter said, “lynchings are a horrible and repulsive historical fact, which can’t be ignored but it’s hardly an appropriate name for an eatery. I hope the owner will consider a name change.” Some supported the choice and others said they would not personally choose the name but acknowledged Harper’s reasons. Harper felt that the name Strange Fruit not only honors Holiday but is “indelibly linked to American history as the voice of protest and hope. I want to capture people’s interest and provide them with access to eating healthier food” (qtd. in Penn). On the one hand we have fruit and its associations, from health to fecundity , but on the other hand those associations are strained by the brutal historical facts of lynching. The Kansas City story is rich with a very instructive irony, an irony that exists in the two words of the song’s title “Strange Fruit,” and in the song’s lyrics, which contrast a “pastoral” South with gruesome images of mob murder. And it is the same irony that permeates any picture or image of a rural lynching and makes that image, if this is possible, all the more horrifying. It is in these images from remote lynching sites—whether they are in photographs or in words—that the traumatic and the pastoral collide. The term pastoral, of course, has a range of meanings, from the specialized to the general. At its narrowest, pastoral refers to that class of poems, 93 94 daniel j. martin 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 [94], Line —— 6.5p —— Norm PgEn [94], based on the Idylls of Theocritus, in which rustic shepherds speak to one another about love and death. At its broadest, pastoral, especially as an adjective , is commonly applied in flexible ways to texts or images that idealize nature, simplicity, or withdrawal from complexity of city life. Leo Marx’s term pastoral ideal is one such enlarged use that refines our understanding of the psychological and intellectual impulses behind not only pastoral verse but all kinds of texts and cultural expressions. More recently, Terry Gifford, in his fine book Pastoral, describes the broad use of pastoral as “an area of content” in a way that I find helpful. “In this sense,” he says, “pastoral refers to any literature that describes the country with an explicit contrast to the urban.” For Gifford “delight in the natural” also figures into the pastoral, but that delight, when it is viewed skeptically, engenders a third kind of pastoral in his scheme, the “pejorative” use of pastoral, which sees the “pastoral vision” as “too simplified” or too idealized (2). I wish to use pastoral mainly in its broadest sense as an idealization of the natural, the rural, and the withdrawal from the busy life, yet most of the texts I am exploring here carry with them a pejorative understanding of pastoral, an understanding that is informed by an unsettling irony, the sharp contrast between the pastoral ideal and the violent reality of lynching. Occasionally, I employ the narrower sense of pastoral by examining how some of the classic tropes of pastoral verse have curious parallels in texts about lynching. The first time I really took note of the clash between the beauty of nature and the trauma of lynching was in Toni...

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