by Leila Taylor
If houses have ghosts, if walls can absorb the echoes of human pain and anger, objects like Till’s casket must be haunted: the white wood absorbing the rage and heartbreak, not only from the mother, but from the thousands of others who touched it that day, and the millions more that would see the photo. In houses, the original inhabitants of that space depart, leaving the next residents to deal with the phantom trauma. The casket without the corpse is fetishized, becoming the body, becoming the object of loss representative of the death of all, not just the one.
I have countless photos of headstones and tombs that I’ve taken at cemeteries everywhere. When I visit a new place, along with recommended restaurants, bars, and museums I usually check out the local cemetery. I recently realized that I have been to more parties in cemeteries than funerals. I once went to a fancy affair inside an exceptionally large mausoleum at Green-Wood, where people dressed in gowns and suits, drinking cocktails and dancing to a swinging Twenties jazz band, as couples kissed in the nooks of the crypts lit by candlelight. As I rubbed my fingers over the names on the wall, sipping champagne, I wondered if ghosts ever haunt their resting place, and if so, what would they think of all this? Would they be cool with it or just think it was strange? The dates below the names were mostly from the 1800s, which seemed safely long enough ago to not be disrespectful, and I wondered how much time would need to pass until strangers may confidently drape an arm over the curve of my headstone for a selfie and dance on my grave.
SCREAMING IT TO DEATH
Blues could not exist if the African captives had not become American captives.
— LeRoi Jones, Blues People: Negro Music in White America
Rhythm is both the song’s manacle and its demonic charge. It is the original breath, it is the whisper of unremitting demand. “What do you still want from me?”, says the singer. “What do you think you can still draw from my lips?”
— Grace Jones, “Jones to the Rhythm”
I grew up not too far from Hitsville USA, the little house that gave birth to The Supremes, Smokey Robinson, the Four Tops, Stevie Wonder, and Marvin Gaye, among others. The father of one of my classmates worked for Motown Records and she bragged about meeting Prince and The Revolution backstage at his concert. The first show I ever went to was the Jackson Five Reunion Tour, a group event organized by someone’s parents. But the first concert I paid for with my own hard earned allowance was A-Ha, the tickets purchased at the corner store with a few packs of Now & Later candy. In those days, our parents would drop my friends and I off in Royal Oak to buy posters and pins at Noir Leather, where they sold band t-shirts in the front and sex toys in the back. We flipped through racks of albums at Sam’s Jams negotiating who would own what to share with the other. Sarah got Bauhaus, but she made me a tape, filling up the first side with, “Bela Lugosi’s Dead,” on repeat over and over and over again. We would spend hours after school listening to records, dying our clothes black, cooing over vampires, and asking the Ouija board about our fate and the fate of boys we liked.
Party Flier, 1985, by L. Taylor
Our house on Boston Boulevard, was on the same street (albeit on the other side of the Lodge freeway) as Barry Gordy’s, founder of Motown Records. I have a crystal clear memory of the dubious veracity of trick or treating at the Gordy mansion and getting a full-size Snickers candy bar, not the little fun-size. Legendary. When I aged out of trick or treating, in seventh grade, my best friend Sarah and I, co-hosted a Halloween party in the vacant half of her parents’ two semi-detached houses on Hancock Street. Given full rein over an entire (nearly empty house), we draped the walls with black trash bags evoking giant bat wings and lit the living room by candle light (which in the hindsight seems incredibly irresponsible). We obtained, through great trials and tribulations involving a journey to a remote strip mall video store in the suburbs, a VHS tape of The Hunger which we played on repeat on a tiny television in one of the bedrooms, watching Peter Murphy back-lit with blue light behind chain-link fencing. The record player was set up below an antique candelabra and the next morning, to my dismay, I found my Head on the Door album by the Cure speckled with big solid white blobs. Heartbroken, I spent hours attempting to meticulously dig the wax out of the grooves with a sewing needle.
Growing up in Detroit gave me a musical advantage I didn’t fully appreciate until I left Michigan, so I am one of the few people I know who can say they saw The Smiths live. It was my eighth grade science teacher, Mr Holstein, who introduced me to 102.7 WLBS Detroit’s alternative radio station. They had a show that played new wave and post-punk music after midnight, well past my bedtime, and he taught me to set a tape recorder on my nightstand in front of the radio. I would be lulled to sleep by Tears for Fears and the faint mechanical hum of the tape recorder and in the morning, I would have a mix of Blondie, Talking Heads, Yaz, Soft Cell, Depeche Mode, Cocteau Twins, The Smiths, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and The Cure. To this day I consider “A Forest,” to be something of a lullaby.
I used to feel that my inability to latch on to R&B, my dislike of saccharine love songs, my general indifference to hip-hop and rap, and my utter disdain of gospel music somehow made me less Black. I thought perhaps I was missing some genetic predisposition to melisma and that not liking “Black” music was somehow a sign of self-loathing and betrayal of my race, not yet knowing that the nucleus of all the music that I loved from those British bands, was located at the other end of my street where I once went trick-or-treating.
The Blues
I will be the first to admit, I don’t know a lot about the Blues. It always seemed like music for white guys who wanted to seem cool, and as a youth I didn’t know a single Black kid who listened to Blues albums recreationally. Jazz seemed cool and grown-up to me. The Blues just seemed sad. Ours was a Miles Davis / Barbra Streisand household with some Donna Summer and Stevie Wonder thrown in when my older sister was home. I had a jazz dad and a mom who loved opera and Willie Nelson. I also remember the soundtrack to Victory at Sea on heavy rotation and if I hear “Song of the High Seas,” I get a pang of nostalgia.
One thing that was notably absent was gospel music. I was raised in the United Church of Christ, I was even in the church choir for a bit, but God wasn’t around much in my house and going to church was more of a social obligation than a spiritual calling. On my confirmation day, I stood in front of the congregation in my new white dress with all the other thirteen-year-old girls in white dresses and gave my speech on what the church meant to me. Even then I knew I was feeding them bullshit, just saying what I was expected to say. When they handed me my own personalized Bible, my name was spelled wrong. I never believed in a supreme being or the resurrection, and it doesn’t bother me in the slightest if we humans have no greater purpose. But I do believe that there is infinitely more out there than we know and will ever know, and I’m comforted by unknowing, I believe in doubt more than certainty. The UCC is a mild form of Protestantism with social justice as a main tenant, so there was never much need to rebel against it. The services are short and the sermons mostly amount to, don’t be a jerk and if you can help someone whose less fortunate you should. We sing a few songs, buy a cupcake at the bake sale and then have brunch at the International House of Pancakes. There was no fire and brimstone so I never feared damnation, but I imagined if Hell did exist I’d rather go there since that’s where all the fun people were.
Gospel music still doesn’t stir me, but I have grown to appreciate spirituals, less for their “spiritualness” and more for the voices — the sounds of the past reaching out from the cotton fields and wooden porches. Spirituals always feel as though someone is trying to talk to me, to get a message through, saying “Don’t forget me.” Isabella Van Elferen describes sonic gothic-ness as ‘the sounds of the uncanny,’ a kind of aural haunting evoking a return of the repressed. I think of spirituals less as songs and more like ghostly communiqués.1 The thinness of the voice, the degeneration and audio decay and these tinny, ghostly Black voice
s travel through time, whispering right into my ear through my headphones. I can see why Walter Benjamin uses the word “apparition” to describe this kind of temporal technological rift. An apparition is a ghostly vision, a phantasm, a disembodied spirit made present. Sound is a kind of touch and there is something a bit poltergeist-y about these warbling Southern voices creeping out of my speakers.
Spirituals and the Blues represent opposite ends of the Black experience: the spectral and the physical, the far away and the here and now. It makes sense that American music was born from these two sides of the veil, the pre-freedom longing for escape and the post-freedom realities of day-to-day life. The spiritual was an infusion of Christian music with African elements, music that was, as W.E.B Du Bois says, “adapted, changed, and intensified by the tragic soul-life of the slave, until, under the stress of law and whip, it became the one true expression of a people’s sorrow, despair, and hope.” Lyrics were both codes for emancipation in the real world and relief in the next. Spirituals were not entirely secular nor completely spiritual but both simultaneously. Eyes were lifted both toward Heaven and to Ohio, both on the River Jordan and the Underground Railroad. Living in bodies that did not belong to them, slave songs focused on the spirit, but once free, Black songs became very much about the body and the myriad of pleasures and problems that come with having one.2
At the end of the nineteenth century, Black gospel music was secularized into the Blues with themes of wandering women and cheating men, of being broke and broken down. The Blues luxuriates in feeling and the unabashed ability to emote. The misery and the sexuality of the Blues represents an affective freedom denied in slavery and dismissed in freedom. If a Black woman’s heart can be broken, it means she had a heart to begin with and one can’t help but luxuriate in the ability to wallow. The Blues was an expression of humanity and subjectivity and its performance was an act of sedition.
Strange Fruit
In the 1995 horror anthology Tales from the Hood directed by Rusty Cundieff, Martin Moorehouse (Tom Wright), a prominent Black activist is beaten to unconsciousness by police, and after realizing the trouble they’ll get for brutalizing such a prominent and powerful person in the Black community, they kill him by injecting him with heroin to feign a drug overdose. Moorehouse rises from the dead to avenge his death by decapitating one and impaling the other with hypodermic needles. The soundtrack to the violence and revenge is Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit.”
I couldn’t tell you how old I was when I first heard “Strange Fruit,” but I must have been pretty little because I assumed it was a song about actual fruit and I thought Billie Holiday’s voice was weird. She sang in a way that sounded too complicated or grown-up for me, like an R-rated movie whose references I didn’t get and whose complexities were too mature for me to understand. She sounded like something was wrong with her. Of course, there was a lot that was wrong: she was an eleven-year-old girl abandoned by her mother, running errands in a whore house and pimped out by the age of fourteen. She grew up to die of alcohol and heroin abuse a decade before the Civil Rights movement. But in between those bookends she grew into an American icon without compare, giving the world some of the best music ever known.
I probably had a vague notion of who she was. I knew that she was important in some way for some reason that had to do with “my culture,” but she was a fuzzy historical fact, a black and white photo of a smooth face with painted eyebrows. She was someone I should know, like Stokely Carmichael or Shirley Chisholm, but until I got a bit older she remained a frozen face on an album cover tucked away on my parent’s shelf. I had a pretty advanced musical palette for a kid and I listened to and could appreciate music made before my time. I was able to form a narrative, however childish, around the artists that made the music and what it might have meant to them, if not to me. With Janis Joplin I could visualize a harsh and hardened life materialized from that gravelly Southern voice or the East Village artist’s life from Nico’s dreamy, drowsy German drawl. I couldn’t see what created Billie’s voice. I couldn’t locate the source of a sound that seemed so unfathomable. It was probably years before I heard it again. It took a second pass to get the metaphor and more time still before I would feel it, and see behind my eyes the grainy photos of ragged and bloody Black bodies suspended above a smiling white crowd. It was a while before the lyrics became material for me, the words so thick you could smell them. I also couldn’t tell you the first time I saw an image of a lynching. It seems one of those things that I was just born knowing — something I’ve never not seen.
Abel Meeropol was a Jewish poet and card-carrying communist who wrote “Bitter Fruit” under the anglicized pseudonym Lewis Allen, after seeing a photograph of the lynching of J. Thomas Shipp and Abraham S. Smith. In the photo, taken on 7 August 1930 in Marion, Indiana, two Black bodies in ragged clothes hang from a tree above a crowd of white men, women, and children. Some are grinning directly into the camera, some are looking up at the hanging corpses and some aren’t paying attention at all, as if the scene wasn’t anything particularly interesting. Shipp and Smith were charged with the murder of Claude Deeter and rape of his girlfriend Mary Ball. The two were dragged from the courthouse by an angry mob, maimed, mutilated and hung in front of a crowd of five thousand people who came to watch the spectacle. By this time lynchings were decreasing in this county. Perhaps people thought of this as one last hurrah, a throwback to the old days.
From 1877 to 1950, about four thousand (that we know of) Black men, women, and children were lynched in the United States. In a kind of mob vigilantism, Black people were abducted and murdered for trivial infractions or false accusations. It became a macabre form of entertainment, the kind that humanity has seen before, but can’t seem to grow out of: the fascination with the destruction of the human body and the point in which a person stops being a person.
Photographer Lawrence Beitler sold thousands of copies of the photo in the following days. The lynching souvenir is a particularly disturbing artifact of an already disturbing practice. Like postcards of the Grand Canyon or snow globes of the Empire State Building, the photos prove that someone had been there. But what do you do with a photo of two dead men hanging from a tree? Are there thousands of scrapbooks in attics all over Indiana with that photo glued to the page? Did people put it on their ice box door with a magnet? Pieces of clothing and bits of rope were taken as keepsakes (no fingers, toes, or genitals were taken this time, but they often were.) I wonder about the granddaughter or great grandnephew decades later, home for Thanksgiving, finding an old stained bit of rope in the curio cabinet in between the Hummel figurines. Or maybe, like a novelty foam Statue of Liberty crown, it lasted a few days and was tossed in the trash after the thrill was gone. I can’t decide which is worse.
In 1939, Meeropol put “Bitter Fruit” to music and Billie Holiday debuted Strange Fruit at the Café Society nightclub in New York City. As the city’s only truly integrated club, it was an enclave for political radicals and progressive thinkers, but even in that environment, Holiday was hesitant to sing it, afraid that she’d never work again, or worse.
The story goes that when she finished singing, the crowd was dead silent, until one person began hesitant clapping. In my head, I see the classic slow clap… clap… clap as a single brave person rises slowly to their feet in ovation, then a few more join in and then more and the applause grow and grow… The song would become her signature and her performances were legendary. She always closed her set with “Strange Fruit,” it was the last song of the night. Waiters, cashiers, and busboys all stopped service, and the room would be completely dark except for a spotlight on Holiday’s face. At the Birdland nightclub in New York City, the maître d’ confiscated all cigarettes before she started singing so there wouldn’t be any extra light. When she was finished, the spotlight went out, she walked off the stage, and never went back to take a bow. Barney Josephson, the founder of Café Society said, “People had to remember Strange Fruit, get their in
sides burned with it.” 3
The effect of the song was devastating. Most of the audience at The Cafe Society never would have seen a lynching in person, but the Black folks in the audience were subject to all sorts of injustices, humiliations, and violence on a regular basis, and recognized the line between the rope hanging from the tree and the Whites Only sign on the door. They may have never seen it for themselves, but their parents might have. Their grandparents probably did. The white folks in the audience were never in one of those mobs, but their parents might have been, and their grandparents. People cried, then people got angry because Billie Holiday made them cry. It made people uncomfortable and the audience was made to sit and wallow in that discomfort. For the unaware it was a shocking awakening. For others it reopened old wounds. In later performances, it became customary to not applaud, denying that burst of relief signaling The End. It would have been disrespectful, like clapping at the end of a eulogy. The dramatic set up of the performance surely functioned as a kind of nascent trigger-warning, but I don’t think anyone could be prepared. Listening to it now, in my home, with my headphones still makes me shiver. I can’t imagine being at a table in one of the few nightclubs where I would have been allowed to sit at that table, a few feet away from Lady Day, witness to this euphonic indictment. In 2011, Time magazine named it the “song of the century.”