Strange Fruit: Some comments

Lillian Smith. Image found here; Wikipedia entry here.

I've just finished rereading Lillian Smith's 1944 novel, Strange Fruit, a novel that, though still in print, I suspect not many people read today. That's a shame, really. Given its title's origin (the Billie Holiday song), its setting (early Depression-era rural southern Georgia), its chief subject (an interracial relationship between a white man and a black woman) and the time of its publication--not to mention the fact that it was banned in some places when published--Strange Fruit is brave in ways that better-known Southern novels whose big subject is racism finally aren't (To Kill a Mockingbird, good as it is (and happy 50th anniversary, by the way), comes to mind here). Which, after all, is braver for a Southern novelist in the pre-Civil Rights Act South to do: to show us as we'd like to think of ourselves as being, or to show us as most of us in fact are--and why we are the way we are?

Some lengthy comments below the fold.

The novel's central story is an affair between Tracy Deen, the ne'er-do-well son of a respectable and well-off white family, and Nonnie Anderson, a college-educated black woman working as a maid for another white family. If you know the Billie Holiday song, you already know, more or less, where this story is headed: Nonnie becomes pregnant by Tracy; Tracy, who seems to love Nonnie yet already seems to know that a future with her will remain at best a clandestine one, and already under immense passive-aggressive pressure to marry the nice white girl across the street, breaks off his relationship with Nonnie and seeks to find a black man to marry her so the baby will have a father; that man, named Henry, a black boyhood friend of Tracy's who is now the Deens' house servant, brags on his upcoming marriage in earshot of Nonnie's older brother, Ed; Ed puts two and two together, lies in wait for Tracy along the path he (Tracy) takes that runs from the colored to the white side of town, and shoots Tracy, killing him; his family and a family friend help him leave town; a few hours later, Henry and his girlfriend will come across Tracy's body and attempt to hide it, but other people in Colored Town see this; once Tracy's body is found, word gets out about Henry's having been seen moving the body; despite the strong suspicion among the more-respectable white members of the community that Henry isn't guilty, and their attempts to stop it, Henry is lynched and then burned.

However, though the above is the novel's central narrative, it'd not be inaccurate to say that the novel's main character is Maxwell, Georgia, the town it's set in. We learn about its industries (agriculture and lumber) and their accompanying labor problems (farmers are having troubles finding (black) workers to work the fields because up North are better (and better-paying) opportunities; at the mills, there's rumbling about unionizing the workers); about how religion is regarded by various cross-sections of the town (a revival happens to be in town during the "now" of the novel); and about how blacks who served during the first world war and/or have gone to college are (in the minds of whites) quietly but firmly insisting--through the mere fact of their presence in town--on an opening-up of economic opportunity for blacks.

We also learn that Jim Crow is Maxwell's de facto mayor and, in the wake of Tracy's murder and Henry's lynching, varying degrees of complicity (ranging from participating in the lynching to disapproving but staying out of the way) work to keep that mayor in power. As Tom Harris, the owner of the town's lumber mill and thus one of its most prominent citizens, puts it, "Maxwell's a good town, a quiet town, good place to bring your children up in--and he had brought up nine. Except for Saturday nights, a few razor fights, a dead nigger now and then, nothing violent ever happened in Maxwell. Things still went on in the southwest of the county that had no business going on. Niggers disappeared out on Bill Talley's place too often--dropped plumb out of sight--but you didn't have proof, and there was seldom much talk about it" (300). The part about Bill Talley is especially telling: it's not that black people are disappearing--it's that they're disappearing too often that disturbs Harris. And yet the novel is at pains to show that Harris is among the most sympathetic to the plight of black people in the town: he attempts to hide Henry from the mob searching for him; and when the mob finds Henry, Harris tries to stop the lynching.

Given a novel like this, then, it isn't surprising that Strange Fruit lacks a figure analogous to To Kill a Mockingbird's Atticus Finch. Finch stands as our proxy in Harper Lee's novel; we can vicariously stand with him as he defends Tom Robinson, giving voice to what we know is right yet may be too afraid to say out loud.¹ Instead, what we get in Strange Fruit is, for the most part and at best, a resigned acceptance of the status quo. The two lovers at the novel's heart aren't especially sympathetic: much as Tracy Deen resists being defined by the town's definitions of Success and Respectability, he succumbs to them and in so doing rejects Nonnie; and as for Nonnie, her sister Bess characterizes her accurately as not being especially clear-eyed when it comes to seeing that there's no future worthy of her where Tracy is concerned--or Maxwell, either, for that matter. Sam, a black doctor who clearly has the respect of the African-American community there, commands our respect as well, but only up to a point--after all, after Ed shoots Tracy, it's Sam who drives him to Macon to hop a train back to New York and then to Washington, D.C., where Ed lives. Of the novel's white characters, Prentiss Reid, the newspaper editor, widely known to hold radical political and religious views, writes about the lynching but pulls his punches by writing that, yes, lynching is an unpleasant business but the North is not without its own race problems; Harris, as we see above, does not approve of lynching but, because his business employs some of the very men responsible for the lynching, feels he do no more than what he had done to try to stop this particular one. Harris's children, Charlie and Harriett, are much more vocal in their opposition to the town's endemic racism, but Charlie notes that in order to hang on to his ideas about how to fight against Maxwell's mindset, he would have to leave.

But leaving Maxwell, one gets the feeling, is difficult to do. A frequent motif in the novel is the evocations of roads and paths that connect otherwise discrete parts of the town to each other but which, it seems, never lead away from town. Those with the ability and/or inclination to leave are a definite minority; those who remain loathe or resent, with varying degrees of intensity, the members of those whose race they are not . . . in large measure because they recognize that without them, they could not survive--at least, not in the world as they had configured for themselves. It's a miscegenous relationship, but a mandated one: whites are just as trapped in it (though, to be sure, in different ways) as blacks are. So, even as we recognize and applaud Charlie's clear-headedness as he tells first his father and then his sister that he hates how blacks are treated in Maxwell, it's hard not to feel some despair for the town if Charlie either leaves town to preserve his current thinking or stays in town and gradually loses his convictions.

I've already gone on enough. Strange Fruit, I think, is well worth your time, especially when read against To Kill a Mockingbird--and just so no one misunderstands me, I do very much like and respect Mockingbird. But Smith's novel investigates racism's essential irrationality, something which, in the mid-century South, was an important task--especially since the prevailing argument in favor of Jim Crow at that time was that system's insistence on its rationality. More on that, by way of a discussion of Thomas Dixon's novel The Sins of the Father, in a future post.

(An aside on Strange Fruit's style: Smith is enamoured of letting her characters run on a bit in rather mechanical-feeling interior monologues in which her (educated) white and black characters end up sounding the same, despite the novel's otherwise pretty clear distinctions between them. It can grow tedious after a bit. On the other hand, there are a couple of moments when she will have characters interacting in the "now" of the novel and one of them will be simultaneously recollecting two separate past events. Also, there's a powerful scene where Nonnie, her lover now dead, goes through the motions of her duties as a maid and cook while through her mind passes a scrambled collage of bits and pieces of words that Tracy, Bess, Ed, and several other people have said to her over the past few days: Outer calm, inner emotional chaos. Pretty nifty, especially for a first novel.)

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¹During yesterday's Talk of the Nation segment devoted to Mockingbird's 50th anniversary, a caller from Georgia said as much.

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"This newly found book, the Community of New Orleans": The Grandissimes

Two illustrations by Albert Herter from an 1899 edition of The Grandissimes (found here). Top: a scene from the masked ball that opens the novel; bottom, the mysterious mulatta and practitioner of voodoo, Palmyre Philosophe.

The jacket copy for the Penguin Classics edition of George Washington Cable's The Grandissimes promises much: "With The Grandissimes, George Washington Cable broke literary traditions and opened the way for novelists such as Thomas Wolfe and William Faulkner." Hmph. But now that I'm approaching its end, I must say that I'm very impressed by it. It wears its (anti-segregation) racial politics on its sleeve, which can be a bit grating to modern ears not accustomed to or appreciative of blatant polemic in our fiction; as a closely-observed study of the dynamics of Creole society in turn-of-the-19th-century New Orleans, however, its wry, even sneaky subtlety requires close, thoughtful reading. Here's a particularly fine example of what I mean:

That same morning Clotilde had given a music-scholar her appointed lesson, and at its conclusion had borrowed of her patroness (how pleasant it must have been to have such things to lend!) a little yellow maid, in order that, with more propriety, she might make a business call. (205)

Here, Cable hopes we are less naïve than Clotilde (about whom more later), the better to muse to ourselves that one person's pleasantness may be another household's source (or incarnation) of just-barely-unspoken tension, if not anger or out-and-out violence. On its surface, then, The Grandissimes is a "local color" novel of the sort from the latter decades of the 19th century under whose considerable numbers and weight now groan the shelves of bookshelves in antique malls across our great land. But if you don't rush through it, you just may find that in places, those colors are pretty saturated. Cable is not the equal of either Jane Austen or Faulkner, but there are moments when he is something like a fusion of the two. Here and there, indeed, I found myself hearing not just echoes of Faulknerian scenes and plots but even little Faulknerian turns of phrase. I would not be at all surprised if I were to learn that Faulkner had read this; on the other hand, though, Cable is writing about a place Faulkner already knew well as both an amateur historian of the South and as a resident of the French Quarter during his bohemian days in the early to mid-'20s--when, by the way, Cable was still alive (he died in 1925). Cable's world was still very much in Faulkner's air.

More below the fold.

The novel's narrator makes clear again and again that the New Orleans he is describing has now (that is, in the 1870s-1880s) all but disappeared. That New Orleans is the Crescent City of the first decade of the 19th century--a city literally, as well as figuratively, another country. In those uncertain years when, having just been returned to the French by the Spanish, the city, and all of the land drained by the Mississippi River, have just been sold to that upstart foreign nation, the United States. But though Cable's Creoles most often speak either French or a patois among themselves, neither do they think of themselves as French. One character speaks in passing of another person's having been "ruined" as a result of having been educated in Paris. The old Creole families, long used to running their own political and economic affairs pretty much as they had seen fit, realize that to keep any of their power they will have to acquiesce to with this new order and even ally themselves with it--and yet, to save face among their fellow citizens, they will have to create the illusion that they have done no such thing.

What causes even more consternation among the Creoles, however, is the anxiety surrounding what the "Americains" will do about the practice of slavery in Louisiana. That anxiety, the deeper knowledge, not to mention guilt, among the more thoughtful Creoles that slavery is profoundly unjust (not just for obvious reasons but for the further complication that many of these white men have blood relatives forbidden by law to inherit family property because they are of mixed race), combined with a profound resistance to criticism from outsiders, all combine to form the thematic gumbo at this novel's core. The family from whom the novel takes its name, as the most prominent of the Creole families, are Exhibit A for all these tensions: two of its members, in fact, share the name Honoré . . . but one cannot share in the family's wealth. Oh, the tangled roots of those plantation-family trees.

Helping to stir up this gumbo for the reader's benefit is Joseph Frowenfeld, the one surviving member of his family, the rest of whom died from yellow fever shortly after their arrival in New Orleans when he was a boy. Joseph stays on and trains as an apothecary, but he is still seen as an outsider: the Creoles think of him as an American but respect his learning; the mulattoes and slaves think he is a voodoo priest (this serves to make Frowenfeld something of a counterweight to Palmyre); you get the idea. He is something like a re-writing of James Fenimore Cooper's Natty Bumppo, a man with feet firmly planted in two worlds, sympathetic and even loyal toward both, yet able to see the faults of each, not afraid to point out those faults. It is his "perusal of this newly found book, the Community of New Orleans" that forms The Grandissimes' central plot:

True, he knew he should find [that perusal] a difficult task--not only that much of it was in a strange tongue, but that it was a volume whose displaced leaves would have to be lifted tenderly, blown free of much dust, re-arranged, some torn fragments laid together again with much painstaking, and even the purport of some pages guessed out. Obviously, the place to commence at was that brightly illuminated title-page, the ladies Nancanou. (103)

Those ladies are Aurora and Clotilde, a well-born mother and her young daughter who no longer have a financial means of support and, when the novel opens, are about to lose their house for non-payment of the rent. Clotilde and Joseph will become rather awkwardly attracted to each other, and that story forms the novel's marriage plot. It gives nothing away to tell you All's well that ends well; this genre doesn't lend itself well to tragic endings.

Fans of American literature as a field of study will like this novel: not initially knowing what to expect as I began reading, I enjoyed spotting the Faulknerian portents. Those of you with a soft spot for N'awlins will enjoy its sepia-toned treatment of the city. But this novel is no mere nostalgia trip. What is most impressive about The Grandissimes is Cable's clear-eyed portrayal of Creole New Orleans. He is clearly fond of its people and the land they inhabit, but he also makes sure that we admire their stubborn adherence to tradition even as we see that that same stubbornness will doom them to a genteel irrelevance as the world around them changes whether or not they like it. Even though the Creoles of the novel would not think of themselves as Americans in a political or cultural sense, they certainly will strike contemporary readers as a people and culture this continent produced. It is probably for that reason that the novel still feels fairly contemporary. Its characters' preoccupations are still our own, for better or for worse.

If you're interested, I have some further, wonkier comments on Cable's novel over at Domestic Issue.

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