A Night in West Village: Cafe Society
There’s only one language that makes injustice look like Pandora’s box: all that’s good and beautiful cruelly flickered away, but there’s a faint sense of hope that survives against all odds. It’s the language of music, preserving scars of the past as amber hugging a fly. African Americans are all too familiar with this in their historical experience with racism. It gave birth to blues as the the ultimate spiritual remedy to pain they endured on a daily basis. Even when racism became a front page issue, it was music to which the rest of us turned in order to understand the absurd logic of the immense suffering we were protected from just because our skin color warranted us privileges that many still take for granted. The George Floyd story is a reminder that the work is far from over.
Racism doesn’t go to sleep when you do and no amount of wishful thinking can extinguish its bloody flame. However, there are trailblazers who can lead the way in the right direction. Instead of speaking they sing, and their words soothe your cynicism when you’re almost about to succumb to it. One of those is Billie Holiday, the African American singer known for her incredible voice and white gardenias in her shiny black hair. Many praises have been sung to her extraordinary gift, yet the most remarkable, if not the most disturbing of all her songs is Strange Fruit, written by Abel Meeropol and published in 1939. Coincidentally, even the timing turned out to be prophetic, since at the same time, dark clouds of Antisemitism were increasingly gathering above Europe before they grew into a hurricane.
Strange Fruit takes its title from lynching, a method of torture exercised on Black people. It left a long, bloody trail throughout American history that happens again each time you dare to talk about it in past tense. Most recently, it was brought up after the death of Caroline Bryant Dunham who falsely accused Emmett Till of flirting with her, which led to lynching and murder of the 14-year old boy in 1955. Dunham died in 2023 without ever being convicted for her responsibility in the tragedy, and her husband, who committed the killing, was acquitted by an all-White jury in spite of declaring himself guilty of the crime, along with his accomplice. The case culminated at the funeral where Till’s mother kept the casket open for everyone to see his face so destroyed you could barely recognize him.
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This sickness that makes you respond so violently to the slightest tease should be enough for a permanent stay behind bars, but it’s not. In 1955, the judge dismissed accusations against her due to the fact that she has children that “need to be taken care of”. Well, guess what, that’s nothing but an excuse for complacency in a tragedy that’s still haunting America. She may have went on to lead a fulfilling family life afterwards but in some sort of poetic justice, her name will forever be linked to Till. Try as they might, her children will have a hard time leaving her guilt behind them. The saddest part is that there was no reasonable trigger for this in the first place: he didn’t steal anything nor physically assaulted the woman. Still, it was enough to get shot before his body was dumped in the Tallahatchee river. Today the spot is marked with a commemorative plate.
Lynching was a public spectacle with hundreds of people in attendance, not unlike those during the French Revolution. In some of the photos, there are white women with children. I guess anything is good for a laugh if they’re not on the receiving end, you might be compelled to think when you look at these disgusting displays of hatred. That’s exactly what they were doing: staring at lifeless bodies dangling from trees, their broken necks stuck in tight nooses. This is conveyed by Billie Holiday’s song, originally written and composed by Abel Meeropol as a protest against discrimination and torture. It was inspired by Lawrence Beitler’s famous photo of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith’s execution. After a conviction for rape and murder, they were punished in a way so severe it looked like a page from the infamous Malleus Maleficarum. Meeropol published the poem in The New York Teacher magazine in 1937 under the title Bitter Fruit.
The Jewish composer was so devoted to his political beliefs that he adopted the children of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg after the couple was executed on charges of Communist espionage at the Sing Sing prison in 1953. Though personal values sometimes come with a pricetag, he did walk the walk and Rosenberg’s sons still fight for posthumous exoneration of their mother. Maybe his devotion to the antiracism and the song came from the same place. It was a success and he soon performed it with his wife and the Black vocalist Laura Duncan at the Madison Square Garden. Billie Holiday, who was already a star at the time, recorded her own cover taking it to a new level between notoriety and fame. There was a certain hot potato feeling, fear of possible backlash because it was more than music, rather an accusation with a glaring question mark. Each verse is a soul-crushing image that reminds me of Hieronymus Bosch’s surreal hellscapes.
She performed it at Barney Josephson’s Cafe Society club, usually at the end of the show in an almost sepulchral setting where only her face protruded from the darkness while she sang, seemingly struggling to push each word through her lips and her eyes closed in a trance. The ingenious concept was almost a spiritual experience as the room stood still during the act. Even the waiters were supposed to keep quiet. Despite all of this, she did have to fight for its release. Both Columbia Records and CBS declined for fear of backlash, so she recorded it at Commodore Records after the producer Milton Gabler jumped at the opportunity. The unlikely hit went so far overboard that it sold a million copies in 1939, becoming not just an important evergreen, but also a cultural milestone of human rights.
Cafe Society was a New York establishment opened in 1938, as a space for celebrating African American music and modeled after European cabarets. It was the first club in America open to people of all colors. The interiors were decorated with murals by the Russian artist Anton Refregier. A safe space for people who couldn’t always freely express their identity in a society still plagued by segregation, so they would let it off the leash on the dance floor when the night falls. Josephson had a passion for jazz and you could see it from his guest list. Many would go on to build prominent careers, like Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan and Big Joe Turner. The club closed in 1948 and remains as a rare, precious oasis of freedom immersed in remarkable music. Strange Fruit is the ultimate summary of everything their guests were running from. Unfortunately, some still have to.
Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh
