Strange Fruit by Lillian Smith

Strange Fruit

Lillian Smith

It’s August, it’s hot, it’s revival time in Maxwell, Georgia. Tracy Deen, the rebel child who always disappoints his self-sacrificing mother, returns home from World War I. It is clear as day, once he is able to put his feelings into words, that he loves Nonnie Anderson. But Tracy Deen is white and Nonnie Anderson isn’t. She’s from one of the best colored families in Maxwell, even college educated, but she isn’t white; and now she’s pregnant with Tracy’s child and she’s glad. Nonnie’s brother and sister try to make Nonnie see the problems they all now face. Maxwell is a town where, on the surface, people know their place. But after a white man is murdered in the black part of town, fear takes over and a vigilante group soon appears. A young man laments: ‘Right now, I have some ideas…If I stay here twenty years, I won’t have them. Now I see things without color getting in the way – I won’t be able to, then. It’ll get me. It gets us all. Like quicksand. The more you struggle, the deeper you sink in it – I’m damned scared to stay -.’ Strange Fruit, written fifty years ago, confronts problems that have yet to be resolved, that need to be read about and acted upon. — From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Holly Smith

When it was first published in 1944, this novel sparked immediate controversy and became a huge bestseller. It captured with devastating accuracy the deep-seated racial conflicts of a tightly knit southern town. The book is as engrossing and incendiary now as the day it was written.

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