♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Southern trees ♪ ♪ Bear strange fruit ♪ ♪ Blood on the leaves ♪ ♪ And blood at the root ♪ ♪ ♪ EVIE SHOCKLEY: The poem uses the first two lines of Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit."

I wanted to draw on the way that we emotionally attach to certain songs.

♪ ♪ And so I sing those lines because the poem speaks back to the song.

♪ Southern trees ♪ ♪ Bear a strange fruit ♪ ♪ Blood on the leaves ♪ ♪ And blood at the root ♪ "You can say that again, Billie."

Southern women serve strife, keep lines of pride open.

Trees are not taller than these broad vessels, femmes who bear fully armored knights clinking from the womb.

But a night in whining ardor means Black woman compelled.

It's the story of white supremacy and it's the story of slavery.

It's the story of the South, really.

The poem really exposes a deep cut, a wound, almost an original pain from which we all have yet to heal.

How strange.

Brown vassal on a bed of green needles ingests the fruit of Georgia, let that gestate, but be-gets no child of the South.

I look at a poem like this, and I think the, all the assonance and humor and puns in it.

Ingests, gestate.

She is forcing you to think, right?

But she's also showing her humor, and she's also showing the sarcasm of it all.

SHOCKLEY: Blood tells the story.

Do you salute old gory?

Were you born on a white horse or a black ass?

Everything depends upon the way your rusty lifeflow writes... WILSON: It's very complex and it cannot be reduced to stories about Black people and stories about white people.

You know, you're scratching your head and putting your hand on your heart at the same time.

SHOCKLEY: ...Sutpenmanship.

If it leaves blond scribbled across your scalp, hurray, and blue inscribed in your eyes, praise the cause-- your literary blood wins the gene pool: it's a prize.

"It's a prize" is a Nobel Prize.

She brings in William Faulkner's novel Absalom, Absalom!

It's about Faulkner getting the Nobel Prize for this novel.

It is the bestseller.

Hide your mama, baby.

At worst, you're a breast-seller, compelling octorune, but the best cellars are dark and earthy, humid places where fears take root and grow up to be cowboys.

Yee-haw!

♪ ♪ ELISA NEW: A writer skilled in the uses of doubleness, Evie Shockley writes poems full of puns, complex emotional tones, and double entendre.

Her poems discover echoes and unearth relationships often unacknowledged or denied.

To read this poem, I asked Evie and several others to share their thoughts: a celebrated jazz singer, a folklorist and host of a radio show on American music, an actor, an historian, and a novelist and biographer.

♪ ♪ ♪ No one to love in this beautiful world ♪ ♪ Full of romance and bright beaming eyes ♪ Southern women serve strife, keep lines of pride open.

"Southern women serve strife."

She just really is setting up the poem so nicely there, with those Ss.

We might want to just sink in to those three words.

Who's Southern?

Southern women, in many ways, is very explicitly white women, and elite white women.

♪ ♪ LOWRY: Where I come from, white women of a certain class served tea, you know, and it didn't mean they were the servants.

It's just the word that was used.

"We're serving tea."

♪ ♪ SPITZER: There is a tendency when you hear "Southern women," initially, to think of white women and fictive daughters of the Confederacy, if not really daughters of the Confederacy.

But, I mean, Southern women are quite diverse.

Black women are Southern women.

I've known Korean Americans who speak with Southern accents.

♪ ♪ WILSON: "Southern women serve strife."

There's a lot in that first phrase.

What does it mean to serve strife on a daily basis?

It can't be reduced to Black and white.

It's womanhood.

The strife is a part of what you've had to endure for the past several thousands of years.

But serving strife can mean giving succor and helping.

NEW: Southern women, they are servants, too, they minister to strife, but also, they serve it up.

SHOCKLEY: I really wanted the duality of that word to come through, that they're in service to this idea of a particular racialized patriarchy.

♪ ♪ LOWRY: The Southern white woman was trained to play into it and to gain from it-- to be taken care of.

♪ ♪ KELLEY: "Lines of pride" are bloodlines, racial lines.

Pride in the supremacy of the white race.

Bloodlines are... NEW: Yes.

- And it's introducing that idea of bloodlines.

Because we have trees, right?

- Yes.

- The trees, you get family... - Family trees.

- Family trees.

"Trees are not taller than these broad vessels."

HAMILTON: Trees are not taller than these broad vessels.

WILSON: The woman is a vessel.

You know, because we give birth.

So we are the universal vessels.

SHOCKLEY: Trees are not taller than these broad vessels, femmes who bear fully armored knights clinking from the womb.

SPITZER: It's sort of scary to think of a baby in armor clinking around in the womb.

And it suggests that there's a destiny that the baby will have.

(horses galloping, men calling) LOWRY: Chivalry, honor.

Somehow I feel that we go back all the way to the late 17th century and the settling of Virginia and Georgia, and the cavalier.

♪ ♪ SHOCKLEY: That undergirded the society that people were trying to put in place in the Southern states, to create something that has these medieval overtones, even.

♪ ♪ LOWRY: You're born white, you're born ready to take your place and keep other people in their place.

♪ ♪ Femmes who bear fully armored knights clinking from the womb.

But a night in whining ardor means Black woman compelled.

You have "a night in whining ardor," which is a play on "a knight in shining armor."

SPITZER: It's whining ardor, and it's a compelled ardor, and so, you know, it sort of busts the image of wonderful guys on high horses.

♪ ♪ KELLEY: "A night in whining ardor," it speaks to rape.

So the tone to me, I would say some of it's playful, some of it's terrifying.

In other words, it takes you on this journey up and down, and up and down.

What Evie did was write a blues, because blues always has embedded in it humor in the face of adversity.

SPITZER: More than the sound of blues is the ability to take pain and turn it into pleasure, because you can dance to it.

(man singing blues tune, banjo playing) SHOCKLEY: I want to give readers a way to bear it, not to ignore it or laugh and brush it off, but it's the kind of humor that, um, is balancing tears.

♪ ♪ WILSON: How strange.

Brown vassal on a bed of green needles.

She's using "vessel" earlier, and then she speaks about the brown vassal.

A vassal is a servant inside of feudalism.

HAMILTON: How strange.

Brown vassal on a bed of green needles ingests the fruit of Georgia.

LOWRY: I wondered about the use of the word "strange."

The colloquial term for having sex outside of your marriage or anything is called "getting some strange."

"I'm gonna get me some strange!"

♪ ♪ WILSON: "On a bed of green needles."

That sounds painful to me.

The bed of green needles locates the encounter outside the house, outside the big house, in particular.

WILSON: If you're lying down on a bed of green needles or you're being pushed into the ground so hard, the blade of grass becomes a needle.

I notice all those words: the "green," "ingests," "gestate," and "be-gets," and "Georgia" thrown in there, too, those hard and soft G sounds are really well done.

SHOCKLEY: "Ingest" not only allows me to get that kind of sonic reverberation that I love, but it's a way of indicating what ultimately is rape, without using that word.

♪ ♪ NEW: And he is the fruit of Georgia, the proud fruit of Georgia.

KELLEY: Brown vassal on a bed of green needles ingests the fruit of Georgia, let that gestate, but be-gets no child of the South.

NEW: Shockley makes use throughout the poem of the midline pause known as the caesura, a term derived from the Latin "to cut."

But whether that fat space after "fruit of Georgia" indicates a pause, smoothes over a rupture, or suggests something unsaid, is left to the reader.

The pregnant pause, so to speak.

(laughs) Any time somebody is using puns, they're looking at you, like, "Did you get that?"

You know, "Are you with me?"

♪ ♪ NEW: Despite rigid categories of Black and white, the sexual exploitation of Black women and the systematic breeding of progeny for profit yielded a population whose actual skin color varied widely.

Whatever their color, children followed their mothers into slavery.

SHOCKLEY: Though this child that comes from the union is the son of this white male patriarch... - Scion!

- The scion, exactly the word.

- He's the fruit.

- She cannot be a child of the South, nor will her child be considered a child of the South.

I and many other African Americans bear the mark of that in lighter skin than people came from Africa having.

This is a bedroom story, right?

This is a hidden story.

This is a story that's not in the public domain.

And it's the truth.

♪ ♪ SHOCKLEY: One of the concerns of the poem was to draw a line from the Antebellum period through the Jim Crow period, and right up to the turn of the century.

SPITZER: Blood tells the story.

Do you salute old gory?

"Old gory" is pretty slapstick, I'll have to say.

So, "Do you salute," now you're thinking of Old Glory, but it's "gory."

- Right.

- So she's taking and twisting and presenting.

- And "old gory," also a reference to Old Glory, which is not the Confederate flag, but the Union flag.

HAMILTON: Mm-hmm.

NEW: So we are implicating the North, as well.

This isn't just a Southern story.

♪ Southern trees ♪ ♪ Bear strange... ♪ KELLEY: Billie Holiday recorded "Strange Fruit" in 1939.

SPITZER: The writer of the words was a Jewish man who called himself Lewis Allan, real name Abel Meeropol.

KELLEY: Part of what Meeropol wanted to do was really highlight the problem of lynching in a period when the federal government refused to pass anti-lynching legislation.

NEW: As the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Abel Meeropol had ample exposure to his own people's history of discrimination, including the Leo Frank case, in which a Jewish factory supervisor in Georgia was dragged from his cell and lynched when his sentence for the murder of a white girl was commuted.

WILSON: Meeropol is from an era where he would have had direct experience of discrimination.

He would have felt the same kind of anger that Billie Holiday experienced.

♪ Southern trees ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Bear a strange... ♪ So when I sing that song, it's such a powerful song, it has to be done in such a way that's very respectful of both Meeropol and Billie Holiday, because they come together to create this great piece of art.

♪ ♪ NEW: Though never mentioned except in the poem's title, Billie Holiday's voice resonates from the literal margin of the poem, along with Meeropol's words.

The power of that collaboration is only amplified by being hidden in plain sight.

There are some other Billies in this poem.

There is Billy Faulkner.

Of course.

(both laughing) You're on a first-name basis.

(laughs) ♪ ♪ KELLEY: She brings in William Faulkner's novel Absalom, Absalom!

SHOCKLEY: I was reading Absalom, Absalom!

when I was writing this poem, and, you know, I just love that novel.

SPITZER: Everything depends upon the way your rusty lifeflow writes Sutpenmanship.

LOWRY: The "Sutpenmanship" is sort of my favorite little moment in the whole poem, you know?

(laughs) Anybody who's read Absalom, Absalom!

knows who Thomas Sutpen is.

♪ ♪ NEW: Faulkner's novel tells the story of Thomas Sutpen, whose quest to found a dynasty, a line of white inheritance, is foiled by the same mixed-race children he sires and exploits to achieve that ambition.

(flames crackling) It was around Faulkner and other white writers that the idea of a Southern literature worthy of college syllabuses and deluxe editions evolved.

But there, too, the Black Southern writer was left out of the story.

I guess one of the things that I appreciate about Faulkner, he opened doors for writing about race for people he may not have anticipated would follow him.

NEW: Is Richard Wright a Southern writer?

- Alice Walker?

- Is she a Southern writer?

Or are they kept out of that canon?

Your literary blood wins the gene pool: it's a prize.

KELLEY: She brings in William Faulkner's Nobel Prize.

But it is also about the imbalance between the value of Faulkner and his work and the value of Billie Holiday and her work.

NEW: Such imbalances run throughout Shockley's poem.

The obscuring of the Black artist's influence echoes the earlier denial of the Black mother's contribution.

Shockley then connects and synthesizes the two in the phrase "breast-seller."

HAMILTON: Hide your mama.

Baby, at worst you're a breast-seller.

NEW: There's a chain of imagery here that has to do with nursing.

WILSON: It would be, if you were actually being paid for it.

I'm sure most of the mammies who were wet nurses were not "breast-sellers."

Their breast milk was taken from them.

KELLEY: What she's referring to are forms of sexual violence that don't appear to be forms of sexual violence.

SPITZER: The idea of a breast-seller, obviously, is a joke on success in the marketplace.

But in this case, it's talk about the peddling of flesh.

SHOCKLEY: Prostitution, the octoroon tradition in New Orleans.

(singers singing on recording) HAMILTON: Baby, at worst you're a breast-seller, compelling octorune.

NEW: "Octorune" refers to the women, one-eighth Black by descent, who were bred for the sexual marketplace.

But a "rune" refers to a secret, subterranean language, predicting the play on "seller" and "cellar" to come.

But the best cellars are dark and earthy, humid places where fears take root.

WILSON: "The best cellars are dark and earthy."

The best place to keep your wines.

Or your roots.

NEW: Wine stands here as the kind of quintessential luxury good, and that cellar where we keep it is also that place where we bury the truths we don't acknowledge.

SHOCKLEY: Thomas Jefferson installed a dumbwaiter in his cellar at Monticello to bring wine up from the cellar for the consumption of his guests.

Wine from France, when he couldn't afford to free his children.

(laughing) HAMILTON: The best cellars are dark and earthy, humid places where fears take root and grow up to be cowboys.

Yee-haw!

♪ ♪ LOWRY: It's the knight from up at the top, it's the knight in clinking armor, but, you know, he's now being a cowboy, yee-haw!

(horse neighs) SHOCKLEY: The white horse and the black ass set us up for the cowboys to come in at the end of the poem.

(gun fires) Do you know the Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings song "Mama, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys"?

They grow up to be cowboys no matter what their mamas want them to be.

♪ ♪ NEW: I hear, though, too, I hear a little menace in that "yee-haw."

I mean, there's some rebel yells in this.

I, I feel like I sit in it both with that sort of undertone of menace that it can represent, but I also want to own it.

♪ ♪ SPITZER: Even people who have lived under oppression are proud of much of the life of the South-- its intimacy, its food, its festivals, its music.

SHOCKLEY: These connections are not just familial, they're cultural.

MAN: ♪ I'm a rovin' cowboy ♪ SHOCKLEY: My mother grew up not only in the South, but in a rural area, and she listened to country music.

♪ ♪ The relationship between the blues and bluegrass... NEW: Oh, right.

- It's all connected.

SPITZER: We want to leave racism behind.

But we don't want to lose the things that are genuinely good.

I do think this poem allows for people to open up to that possibility.

We all grow up to be cowboys, yee-haw!

(chuckles): If that's not empowering... MAN: Yee-haw!

SHOCKLEY: The cowboys are, of course, the sons of the scions, but they're also the Black sons that are also a part of cowboy culture.

I wanted both of those to be available, and the "yee-haw" is to, you know, first of all, because I love saying it.

(laughs) But, but also because I, I wanted the poem to end on a note of, you know, "And onward," "And here we go."

♪ ♪ The "yee-haw," I want that to be a thing that I can say.

It's a way of claiming that Southern heritage for myself.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪