Strange Fruit by Lillian Smith (All Editions)

Strange Fruit is mainly an interracial love story set in a Georgia town. It also has a minor storyline involving an implied romantic attachment between two women. Laura Deen, Tracy Deen’s college-educated sister, is a young sculptor and writer who has formed an intense bond with Jane Hardy, an older, unmarried schoolteacher. Laura says she can confide in Jane in a way she can with no one else, and she loves her and wants to be with her. They write each other letters, and Jane has posed for Laura’s sculpture.

Laura’s mother, Alma, regards the friendship with suspicion. She warns Laura against “that type of woman” and calls such women “unnatural” and a danger to young girls. She also reads one of Jane’s letters and destroys Laura’s clay torso. Laura understands what her mother is implying and fears that if the feeling is named, it will be lost. The text never uses the word lesbian, and no physical intimacy is shown, so the content is implicit and coded. The thread is not resolved. The scene is in Chapter 17, with Alma’s destruction of the clay figure in Chapter 5, and Jane appears briefly in a few later chapters.

Genre: Black Interest, Fiction

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Comments

Lillian Smith lived for most of her life with a woman, Paula Snelling, her partner and co-editor of the literary magazine South Today. Smith never publicly identified as a lesbian, and the couple stayed closeted. Her published letters and several biographical sources describe the relationship. The sapphic content within this novel is thin, but the book deserves an entry. The book was banned in the US, based on the interracial relationship.

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