What works this presence, turning on an insight that may remain unavailable to the audience, is a genius extending back, insistently previous, before the incarnation of the singing body. The figure of the hypersexualized, broken, helpless girl is revealed as a mere veil, flung like a net over the Lady. In claiming her title, Lady Day did not wait on recognition; she did not seek inclusion or acceptance within respectability so much as she rebuked it, put it to shame. Neither does the work of her song depend on the audience’s conscious recognition of what’s happening, the effect of the words dissociating from the dynamics of the performance, even as both at once demand the audience’s engagement. That space where the lynchers are, the same perceptual nowhere inhabited by persons unknown, is where the work of Holiday’s song takes place, even as sight and speech remain trained on the lynched body, that bitter crop.
* * *
For twenty years she carried it with her, a gift and a curse, filial duty and liberating burden, this song that helped make her a star and a target for the law. She died young with a wrecked voice, everyone says, and if you listen to recordings of the song over the course of her career it’s easy to imagine you can feel the weight of it, borne across that time, all those miles, all that way from poverty and scorn to international fame. This is, of course, only an element of her artistry, to evoke a feeling that, sad or happy, joyful or melancholy, is so full of longing it seems like intimacy, like the most ecstatic identification. Rather than art.
Perhaps this is why so many of Lady’s ardent devotees want to believe that the music killed her—made her suffer, rode her down, burned her up, ruined her, leaving her a defiant shell of herself, far older than the forty-four years given to her. To believe the music killed her is to imagine she died for love, for a love she shared with you. But she was just poor, and black, and a woman, which is explanation sufficient to a life of struggle and an early death, and there ought to be tragedy enough in that statement if you would just leave the music out of it. For if there is any freedom beyond mystery in her art, it is freedom from this love: the music itself as her freedom from the engulfing love it conjured up in her audience.
But the dead have not been saved, her song continues to tell you. To marshal all of her artistry to sustain this perception, this condition of being overwhelmed and unbearable longing for response, must have been a perilous act. Dwelling in peril, in preparation and performance, in her long commitment to the song, brought her fame and criticism, celebration and condescension, often in the same breath. The song was too serious, or not serious enough; it was ponderous or pandering; it was beneath her, bad art, or it ruined her for the lighter and faster material to which she was better suited. What frightens critics of the song most of all, it seems, is its relation to that ambivalent yet terrifyingly intense love it engendered, and perhaps this has as much to do as racism and sexism and snobbery in explaining the bizarrely persistent notion that the song’s full meaning was somehow beyond her ken.17
The controversial white promoter John Hammond famously dismissed the song. “The beginning of the end for Billie was ‘Strange Fruit,’ when she had become the darling of the left-wing intellectuals,” he asserted, leading her to begin “taking herself very seriously, and thinking of herself as very important.” Opposing her to his icon of primitive authenticity, Bessie Smith, he bemoaned her contamination by this love, by her “success with white people,” and, worst of all, by “homosexuals,” who “just fell for Billie” (qtd. in Margolick 78–79). By contrast, Cunningham, whose courageous reporting for the Pittsburgh Courier won her the ironic title “lynching editor,” earned the right not to listen: “There comes a time in a black person’s life where you’re up to your damned ears in lynching and discrimination, when sometimes you were just so sick of it, but it was heresy to express it. She was a great artist and she did great things with that song, but you would not admit you did not want to hear it.” Yet Cunningham calls the song “an attention grabber,” “a marketing device,” suggesting that Holiday never “really understood or anticipated the serious attention” it brought. Against the evidence of her own comments about the presence of something to do with sexuality in the interracial audience, she insists, “The song did not disturb me because I never had the feeling that this was something she was very, very serious about” (qtd. in Margolick 81).
Earnest and self-flattering yet prurient and titillating, condescending in its benevolence and insatiable in its desire for violence—such contradictions only feed the intensity of this love. What boggles me is that would-be sympathetic auditors of Holiday so regularly turn away, in fear, to presume her ignorance—as if her performance, night after night and year after year, never prepared for such responses, as if there was no sophistication to Lady’s rigorous education in and of this love. But her artistry does not rely on the audience’s capacity to cognize its response, being concerned, instead, with training their perception and responsibility. The agency of her artistry may not be abated even as the audience falls short of what it asks of them, or reports to have closed their ears. And if sometimes Holiday refused to perform “Strange Fruit,” whether out of frustration with the crowd or mere exhaustion, at other times you might imagine her response to the desires of both critics and fans in the phrases of a love song just as difficult to hear: hush now, don’t explain.
Is this what is meant when it is said that her voice sounds wise? Even those convinced she didn’t understand the words she sang speak of her singing in this fashion, but what does it mean to attribute wisdom to the quality of her sound? (Lazy, they also call it, which may be easier to understand, if you can recognize preparation and skill in achieving the effect. “Lazy” sounds scornful, and often is, because laziness names the confrontation between fantasies of imperial privilege and everyday resistance, revolted and envious desire gazing down on a dream of freedom catching like a tune in the back of your head.) What kind of wisdom is this?
Formally speaking, schools would not teach it, though it might be learned there; what education Holiday received, in any case, is a matter of lore. Schools were part of a complex of uplifting institutions given to violent intervention in Holiday’s transient family life; eluding one’s embrace only brought on the attentions of another. Not yet ten, as Eleanora Gough, “cutting school on … a spectacular scale” got her hauled to juvenile court and sentenced to a year at Baltimore’s House of the Good Shepherd for Colored Girls, where, “for protection and confidentiality,” she was known as “Madge” (Nicholson 23). After nine months, she was returned to her mother, Sadie. The following year, on Christmas Eve, Sadie interrupted a neighbor in the act of raping her, and called the police, who arrested the rapist but took his victim back to the reformatory (25). It would take until February for Sadie to secure her daughter’s release, after borrowing money for a lawyer (27).
In Lady Sings the Blues, the stays at the House of the Good Shepherd are conflated, and the institution, run by Catholic nuns, is a place of nightmares. A girl, forced to wear a tattered red dress, is warned by the Mother Superior that God will punish her, before flying from a swing and breaking her neck. Later, Holiday is made to wear the same dress, locked overnight in a room with a dead girl, and beats her hands against the door until they bleed (17–18). In Stuart Nicholson’s biography, however, the reformatory is a positive influence, “a disciplined environment” offering “the guidance and security that were missing in her life”; the truancy bringing her there is a “cry for help” resulting from a lack of maternal attention (23). Her departure from the institution is reported with melancholy impassivity—“The House of [the] Good Shepherd marked her file, ‘Did not return to us’ ” (27)—as the poor girl follows her neglectful mother into an underworld of nightlife and prostitution. Alternately reported as benevolent and cruel, the reformatory, an explicitly gendered and racialized institution of education and incarceration, embodies all the contradictions of uplift from Baltimore to the Philippines.
In Julia Blackburn’s With Billie, the school is simply “an awful place, very bleak and grim” (23); one of Holiday’s contemporaries recalls the Mother Superior’s harsh discipline and systematic physical and sexual abuse by the older inmates (24–25). Another interviewee recalls Holiday’s visit to the institution a quarter-century later, seeking documentation for a passport. In this anecdote, the singer agrees to an impromptu performance for the girls, choosing “My Man,” a song now notorious