Table Talk: Strange Fruit
We’re halfway through and 2020 has been both emotional and vapid. Both a rollercoaster of cyclical monotony and a robust and Earth shaking time. I can't be the only one. One thing remains, more than anything, God is still good. Ok, now can we talk? I don't want to offend nor to come off abrasive but something is reoccurring and no one is talking about it. Please go on this journey with me. Imagine you plan an evening (pre, post or during Corona). Insert the appropriate adjective (clean, fun, naughty or lit) to describe the evening you have. Now imagine your plan is fulfilled but you never make it home.
Instead, your body is found hanging like fruit from a vine. Weeks into the investigation it is lazily ruled off as an apparent suicide. Imagine that. Within the last few weeks there have been a Washington Heights lynching, two California lynchings, and one Houston lynching. For all cases no suspects have been apprehended. Call me a skeptic but coincidental suicidal hangings in 2020 is dubious. Might be rain. Or may be pee on my leg but are people really going out like that? Between the national unrest unfolding, Republican US Senator Rand Paul still stands firm in his refusal to pass a bill that would make lynching a federal hate crime. What do you think? Why wouldn’t someone who has the power to change a thing not vote to suspend the historically hateful atrocity?
4 alleged suicides later and history still shows us that those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it. 4,075 African Americans were lynched in 12 southern states between 1877 and 1950, according to a 2015 report by the Equal Justice Initiative. “Some were watched by crowds, as if attending a form of public entertainment.” Our deaths are worthy of thorough investigation. Our bodies, black bodies, are vessels for life; vessels for fruit. Not only in death but in life we are worthy. We are not only worthy of mention when we become strange fruit.
Visual artist Nadine Hall’s Heirlooms 2: Cycles of Genocide is found at The National Gallery of Jamaica.
