strange fruit uncelebrated narratives from black history

Heroes are everywhere, especially when mere survival requires a level of personal heroism most of us never approach. But it’s the one that shows us, all of us, for who we are. Because this, though denied for centuries, this is the Great American Novel. Yet their lives have been preserved and celebrated, and now, Gill recelebrates them with all the nuance and significance of a Great American Novel. They lived before television, certainly, but they also lived before anyone in the mainstream thought ordinary people, let alone ordinary black people, could possibly live lives worth celebrating. That’s what I love about this book: these aren’t people anyone’s likely to know. In How To Be Black, one of Baratunde Thurston’s riffs starts with the notion that Black History Month recycles the same five or six historical biographies of African Americans, and that’s about the extent of it. So when I saw a post on Brain Pickings for Gill’s collection of nine lesser-known black history biographies presented in comic-style, I had to check it out. I’ve just recently gotten over the major stick-up-my-butt about graphic novels thanks to Matt Madden’s One Story #182 selection, “Drawn Onward”, a wonderful piece that introduced me to the heretofore unknown (to me) grammar of comix. I wanted to tell stories that people had not heard. I looked for stories of people who were not in mainstream history books.

What does this have to do with black history, you might ask?… I wanted to tell stories – sometimes great and sometimes tragic – of other people who were also able to “cut the rope.” So, I began to research and draw comics about obscure black history. However, I also wanted to convey that because the rope was still there, we still had a ways to go. I was trying to say that I was in some ways freed from the fear that had plagued my father and grandfather. I listened to the song “Strange Fruit” by Billie Holiday, based on the poem by Abel Meeropol, and I decided to call my paintings “Strange Fruit Harvested: He Cut the Rope,” showing me with a noose around my neck, holding the frayed end. Now, I felt was the time to follow through. As an undergrad, I had researched some ideas for paintings based on lynching photographs.

Strange fruit uncelebrated narratives from black history