Abel Meeropol's Strange Fruit

You’re walking down a beautiful southern country road on a lazy Sunday afternoon. The cool breeze lightly kisses your skin as it combats the heat from the blazing sun. You happen upon a tree that seems to be a perfect spot for an afternoon nap, or for a young couple to carve their initials into to mark their love forever. This tree has an enormous amount of positive potential, but instead of seeing these wondrously human sites you see an example of the darkest side of humanity. Green leaves now drip red with the life once held inside the dark skinned carcass which now hangs stretched and pale from a rope. You find yourself horrified that the breeze you were so thankful for moments ago is the only animus left to move him to and fro. These are the images conjured by Abel Meeropol’s “Strange Fruit”. It was made popular in 1939 by the hauntingly melodic woeful vocals of Billy Holiday. This poem is culturally relevant for it reflects an age in American history in which society was rampant with blatant racism. Sadly a lot of those sentiments have been perpetuated to modern day. This is why it is so

African Americans were often used as escape- goats for the communities they lived in and were often lynched as a result. “Strange fruit” combated those abdominal acts by shinning a light on the horrendous reality that is a lynching. Meeropol achieves this by equating fruit growing on a tree to a body being hung from one. By doing so he points out that lynching’s have become so common place that you would see a body in a tree just as much as an orange or an apple. The imagery used forces the reader into an painfully uncomfortable state as their thoughts are hijacked by visualizations of “bulging eyes” and “twisted mouths”. Olfactory senses are attacked by a juxtaposition of the “scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh” against the “sudden smell of burning