Source of
book: I own this.
This was my
selection for Banned Books Week. It took longer than a week, but I did
start it during Banned Books Week.
Just as a
reminder, I use the week to read books which have been banned, which means that
a government has outlawed sale, publication, or possession of the book. I do
not count challenged books - those which citizens or parents have sought to
keep out of school curricula or libraries. This isn’t because I think
challenges are uninteresting, but because I wanted to focus my once-a-year
project on those where the power of the state was employed in censorship. I
believe that is a different level from a challenge. After all, any library has
limited space and budget, and decisions must be made. (Personally, I would have
preferred an extra - and local - copy of The Rest is Noise rather than
one of the 20ish copies of Eat, Pray, Love.) Likewise, students can only
study so many books, and the choice of which to study is a judgment call.
Here are my
past selections, plus the introduction to Banned Books Week.
Catch-22 by
Joseph Heller
***
“BANNED IN
BOSTON!” is now a bit of a badge of honor, and it has a long history. Strange
Fruit may not have been the first work that the overzealous Boston city
officials (influenced by Anthony Comstock and his eponymous law), but it was
the first number one bestseller to be banned in Boston.
Strange
Fruit was ostensibly banned due to references to sex - which are both
crucial to the meaning of the book and handled in a tame manner by today’s
standards - but everyone knew the real reason it was banned: the book is about
a forbidden sexual and romantic relationship between a white man and black
woman. In the Jim Crow South, this was literally illegal at the time the book
was written - and was considered immoral and scandalous even in the
North.
It took me a
while to get into the book, mostly because the first 50 or so pages jump around
in time a lot. We know very early in the book what has happened: Tracy Deen has
gotten Nonnie Anderson pregnant, and she is happy about it. Smith then fills in
the backstory of both families. Nonnie Anderson is an elegant and educated
young African American woman. Her family is well respected (after a certain
fashion), and Nonnie turns everyone’s head. Her sister, the stolid and
responsible Bess, can’t understand why Nonnie still works as a maid, rather
than go north with their brother Ed, who has gotten a white-collar job. Nonnie
claims to just not be ambitious, but the real reason is that she loves Tracy
Deen.
Tracy is the
feckless son of the local white doctor (the black doctor, Sam, figures
prominently in the book as well - he is the best and most complex character in
the book, in my opinion.) As we learn, when Nonnie was age 6, she was saved
from a sexual assault by a group of white boys by Tracy. This is a moving incident,
because the boys assume that Tracy “owns” Nonnie, and that is why they leave
her alone. The idea that raping a black child was wrong never occurs to
them.
In fact, as
the story unfolds, it becomes clear that many - maybe most - of the white men
in town have had sex with black girls and women. Some of them openly keep a
black woman as a concubine. (“That’s the bible word for it,” Tracy says.)
Tracy is,
despite his inability to figure out what he wants to do with his life (other
than that he hates his dominant and controlling mother), isn’t a bad guy. He
and Nonnie do eventually become sexual, coming together occasionally in their
teens and then after she returns from college, and he from World War One. It is
in their 20s that she gets pregnant - to his surprise - he figured that a
college educated woman would somehow just know how not to get pregnant. (He’s
not the sharpest tool, but, to be fair, men didn’t really learn about female
bodies at that time. Information on contraception was still illegal to
distribute in Georgia.)
This
pregnancy, naturally, causes no end of trouble.
In a perfect
world, Tracy and Nonnie would marry, and probably have a happy life together.
Tracy actually considers taking her to France, where interracial marriage was
accepted. But he has no nerve, no career other than his parents’ attempt to get
him to take over the family store or the old farm. Nonnie doesn’t seem to know
exactly what she wants. It is implied that she would accept being his
concubine, but we never really know her thoughts on this. She is too smart to
think he will marry her, and she never asks him to.
Tracy is
pressured by his family to finally “go straight,” which means joining the
church, getting married, and settling down. The preacher (a complex character
who combines some good traits with the wrong kind of pragmatism) tells Tracy
that most men have had “nigger girls,” but that God wants him to repent of that
and marry a virginal white girl. Tracy’s mom has the perfect one picked out.
Tracy isn’t attracted to her, but he can’t tell his mother no.
In an
attempt to both “go straight” and settle things for Nonnie, he borrows a large
sum of money from his mother (no questions asked), and tries to bribe Nonnie to
marry the Deen family cook, Henry (who was Tracy’s childhood companion), and
Henry to marry her. Henry doesn’t want to - he is in love with Dessie - but he
can’t talk back to a white man in public.
The meeting
with Nonnie goes even worse: Tracy ends up hitting and raping her as a
thoroughly unconstructive way of attempting to compartmentalize his
relationship with her as “she’s only a nigger - they manage.” Meanwhile, Ed
overheard the conversation with Henry, and when he sees that Nonnie is
traumatized, he shoots and kills Tracy in the dark.
With Sam’s
help, Ed is rushed back to New York before the body is discovered in the woods.
Henry is blamed for the death, and despite the efforts of Mr. Deen and the
local factory boss (another complex and semi-decent character), is taken from
jail and lynched.
Billie
Holiday claimed that Lillian Smith named the book after her song about lynching of the same
name. Smith never confirmed this, and said that she meant “strange fruit” to
mean the way humans, black and white, are twisted and damaged by America’s
racist culture, rather than a literal reference to lynched bodies hanging in
trees. It sure seems as if there was an intentional connection.
There is lot
to unpack from this book. The summary of the plot fails to capture all of the
different facets of Southern Jim Crow culture - Smith grew up in the South, and
portrays the culture with accuracy and detail. It is an unsparing portrait,
painting the many ways in which the underlying belief in the superiority of
white-skinned people warps and damages and destroys.
Smith does
not go easy on the role of religion. This part of the book was spookily
familiar in the Trump era, where the Ku Klux Klan is again in open
collaboration with white religion. It is no surprise that Smith deftly exposed
the hypocrisy of Southern religion. As a young adult, she rejected religion, in
part because of her experience with the double standards of the Southern
church. In addition, Smith was outspoken in favor of civil rights for
minorities - and also for women - both of which positions made her unwelcome in
church.
If that
weren’t enough, Smith was lesbian in an era when it was even more taboo than
racism. She lived with her partner, and the two of them published a magazine
together. As their letters (discovered after their deaths) made clear, however,
they were more than business partners. Lesbian themes make it into Smith’s
books, including this one. Tracy’s younger sister (the one who seems made to
succeed - and who is one of the very few truly progressive characters in the
book) has a naked female figure in her drawer, and a relationship with another
woman in town is hinted at, although not expressly stated.
Another
controversial theme in the book is abortion. Tracy and Bess and others wish
Nonnie would just make the issue go away by quietly aborting the pregnancy. The
local black herbal healer can get her some herbs, or she can go to the city and
see a doctor there. But it isn’t just Nonnie. A 14 year old white girl gets
pregnant from a young white boy, and her father goes to Dr. Deen to beg that he
perform an abortion. There is an extended internal monologue where Dr. Deen
wrestles with his conscience. What is most devastating about this is that he is
clear that he would do the abortion without question if she had been raped or
if the father was black. But, because it was consensual and the father is
white, he can’t bring himself to do it, although part of him wishes he could.
He ends up referring them to a city doctor.
I noted
above some of the more complex and conflicted characters. One of them is the
newspaper publisher, Prentiss Reid, who has to keep his progressive ideas to
himself or go out of business. It is an uncomfortable compromise - one made
necessary by the culture of racism. He is also one of the few openly
non-religious characters. He delivers this zinger to the daughter of the mill
boss (who is more genuinely progressive):
“You’ve got it wrong, haven’t you? What
they want you to do, my dear, is sponsor religion, not practice it. Don’t let
your conscience mix you up. If you practiced the teachings of that man Jesus
here in Maxwell, we’d think you were crazy - or communist. Don’t make any
mistake about it--be damned embarrassing.”
Not much has
changed, alas. Try to actually practice the teachings of Christ these days, and
you will, like me, be asked to leave the church. Know what else hasn’t changed?
Religious views of gender and race. As Preacher Dunwoodie tells Tracy:
“On this earth, there’s two worlds,
man’s and woman’s. Now, the woman’s has to do with the home and children and
love. God’s love and man’s. The man’s world is--different. It has to do with
work. Women teach us to love the Lord, and our children, and the we
build the churches, don’t we, and we keep them going….Now, when a man
gets over into a woman’s world, he gets into bad trouble. He don’t belong
there...Too much love makes you soft.”
He goes on
to explain that being a good Christian means very different things for men and
women. And yep, I feel like I have heard this sermon more than once.
Tracy is
susceptible to this sort of thing, of course, and finds himself trying to
justify abandoning Nonnie.
It’s like an obsession. Seems true to
you, but everybody says it isn’t. You can’t love and respect a colored girl.
No, you can’t. But you do. If you do--then there must be something bad wrong
with you. It’s like playing with your body when you were a kid. You had to
touch yourself. It felt good. It was good. But everyone told you it wasn’t
good. Said it would drive you crazy or kill you. Decent people didn’t do it.
Well...you did. You did it and liked it. And felt like hell afterward. You’d
outgrown that. Now the preacher said time to outgrow this other. Past
time.
It’s this
sort of gaslighting that characterizes so much of religious teaching about sex,
of course. But in the American version, the sexual puritanism and the racism
are one and the same. They are inseparable. Tracy never does get over Nonnie,
as much as he tries.
You’d think God wanted to play a fine
joke and had made Nonnie. Here, He said, is a woman any man would love and be
proud of. She has everything you could desire. But you can’t have her. No. You
can have sips and tastes, but you can’t have her. And you’ll be ashamed and
sneak around and feel nasty...That’s the price you have to pay--for the
sips.
Well...white men had paid it before.
And thought it cheap. Guess he could too.
This casual
disrespect for the humanity of non-whites permeates the culture in the book.
Even the “good guys” accept white supremacy at some level - nobody can escape
it. Ms. Sadie, who is horrified by the way white men treat blacks, still thinks
that “the entire Negro race was a mammoth trick which nature had played on the white
race.”
There is
another great line about Mrs. Stephenson, who is quietly a loving and gracious
person - but one who was strangely detached.
You had a queer feeling about it--as if
Mrs. Stephenson had died some time when nobody was noticing and now nothing was
left of her but good deeds blooming like little flowers on her grave.
I want to
return a bit to the role of religion as shown in this book. Preacher Dunwoodie
shares something with modern preachers: he wants to save the “respectable” sorts.
Meaning the wealthy, who will keep the church in business. All the Tracy Deen’s
of the world are nice and all, and it is a good thing to save the mill hands,
but what he really wants - and how he knows God is blessing his ministry - is
for the “prominent citizens” to return to the church. And my goodness is this
still true. I firmly believe one of the reasons my former pastor couldn’t do
the right thing - even a little thing like keeping hate groups out of the
church - is that certain prominent (and tithing) members were the driving force
behind it. Address the white supremacist beliefs, and he would have lost some
of his financial base. It’s that simple.
But white
supremacy goes deeper than money in religion, then and now. There is a chilling
scene when the lynching party sets out. Smith makes it clear that the point
isn’t justice - it is putting the “nigger in his place.” And lynching, just
like our current cruelties toward brown-skinned people, is driven by a weird
religious feeling. Smith describes it thus:
And sometimes there was laughter, or
drawled words of voices not unkind in sound and not without humor; but eyes
were hard and hating as they hunted a black victim to sacrifice to an unknown
god of whom they were sore afraid.
There is so
much fear in white religion in America. A desperate fear of outsiders, of
people who are different, whether racial minorities, immigrants, LGBTQ people,
atheists, and especially people who don’t vote for Trump. Lillian Smith is on
to something here - they seem eager to sacrifice other humans to an unknown god
who they cannot name, but who terrifies them. Every time you see a brutal and
cruel separation of immigrant families, children in cages, another African
American murdered by the cops, or another gay or transgender person denied
housing or a job - well, you are seeing a human sacrifice to a terrifying god
that Evangelicals cannot name, even to themselves.
Near the
end, even as he realizes he can’t really publish an anti-lynching
article, Reid thinks to himself of the core problem.
That’s the South’s trouble. Ignorant,
Doesn’t know anything. Doesn’t even know what’s happening outside in the world!
Shut itself up with its trouble and its ignorance until the two together have
gnawed the sense out of it. Believes world was created in six days. Believes
white man was created by God to rule the world. As soon believe a nigger was as
good as a white man as to believe in evolution. All tied up together.
Ignorance. Scared of everything about science, except its gadgets. Afraid not
to believe in hell, even. Afraid to be free.
You can
perhaps put “Evangelicalism” in for “South,” and “White Republican Americans”
for “white man.” It’s the same thing today. Walled up in its own bubble of fear
and ignorance and hate. It has been nearly three years since I left that
cesspit, and as time goes by, I am ever more thankful I got out.
This wasn’t
an easy book to read. There is so much darkness in the human heart, and so much
destruction caused by racism and hate. And religion, then and now, seems all
too eager to feed the hate. This book is well worth reading, though, and shines
an uncomfortable light on the dark realities of our culture.
***
My wife
found this book for me used. This hardback was the 13th printing (copyright 1944) Inside are a few notes by the previous owner, Kae
Bell, and an inscription from the person who gave the book to her, apparently in 1944.
Click to expand. The inscription appears to read "To Kae "44 from Bobby and Jan."
"Good comparison of life of a white & negro - so different? Afraid not. Damn these prejudices."
"Life goes on....... with or without the necessary corrections --"
***
Take it
away, Billie Holiday:
Southern trees bear a strange
fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at
the root
Black bodies swinging in the
southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the
poplar trees
Pastoral scene of the gallant
South
The bulging eyes and the twisted
mouth
Scent of magnolia, sweet and fresh
Then the sudden smell of burning
flesh
Here is a fruit for the crows to
pluck
For the rain to gather, for the
wind to suck
For the sun to rot, for the tree
to drop
Here is a strange and bitter crop
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