Strange Fruit: Plays on Lynching by American Women

This carefully assembled collection of fifteen American plays by black and white women writers about the brutal legacy of lynching takes its title from the famous protest song recorded in 1939 by jazz vocalist Billie Holiday. In the foreword, critic and scholar, Sandra L. Richards writes:

The Billie Holiday song . . . speaks of the blood at the roots of a tree that is metonymically characteristic of the American landscape, blood that has seeped into the soil that nourishes us all—black and white especially, but finally all who claim the United States as home . . . . This anthology is a challenge to a collective, historical amnesia that would forget the late nineteenth and twentieth century social ritual wherein white men brutally maintained their power by terrorizing black communities . . . . We would will to forget, we would collectively struggle to remove from our consciousness the knowledge that this peculiarly American tree continues to bear strange fruit.

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Richards argues that even as we face the end of the twentieth century, Americans cannot deny the legacy of this barbaric cultural practice, which can be found in its contemporary forms in church burnings, internet postings, hate crimes, and a flourishing paramilitary that often serves as a macabre rite of passage for white American males. The lynching dramas presented in this anthology give us an opportunity to examine the phenomenon through the eyes of its victims as well as through the collective voices of American women who were witnesses and, in many instances, complicitous to the horror.

But this collection is not merely a litany of gruesome injustices. As an eighty-year retrospective of a dramatic genre, it is significant for its exposure and illumination of the catalytic work of African American women artists who have always been working in the American theatre, albeit from a marginalized space. Concomitantly, it recognizes the cooperating voices of white women playwrights who have challenged the monologism of the dominant discourse that was always prepared to shut them out and shut them up about this particular topic. In fact, one underlying theme that links these women’s performance texts and lives is the threat of silencing and erasure. Some significant voices, like Corrie Crandall Howell’s in her powerful one-act The Forfeit (1925), are rescued from obscurity by this anthology. In this respect, the collection challenges the borders of race and gender by providing a comprehensive “Table of Lynching Dramas,” as well as rich bibliographic resources that invite further investigation by scholars interested in how ideology can create a common aesthetic ground for diverse artists. Judith L. Stephens writes, “These plays are complementary and reciprocal, both womanist and feminist, in that they reflect commonalities and differences between and among black and white women” (11).

In her introductory essay, “The Impact of Lynching on the Art of African American Women,” Kathy A. Perkins reflects on the murder and mutilation of a pregnant black woman, Mary Turner, by a white mob in Brooks County, Georgia in 1918 and the “silence” it evoked in American society, except for the protest of African American artists and activists. In the early decades of this century, to speak publicly and truthfully of such lynching atrocities was indecorous in the eyes of the whites. Additionally, black artists and activists learned that speaking out could prevent their success, subject them to punishment, and have terrifying repercussions. This is why Billie Holiday’s performance and public success with “Strange Fruit” was extraordinary: “Holiday introduced the controversial song, written by white poet Lewis Allan, which she performed at Café Society, New York City’s first interracial club. Never before had a vocal artist been so direct with the issue of lynching” (17).

Each play in this anthology speaks unabashedly, using the theatrical devices of social realism that bring this brutality back to its roots—the homes, schools, kitchens and workplaces of everyday America. There are diverse offerings, from Angelina Weld Grimke’s Rachel (1916), which...