History is told by the heroes, the ones who lived to tell their stories. That’s why textbooks can’t capture slavery or Jim Crow. To get the full story – the side of the victor and the victim – you need a first hand account by someone who heard the crack of the whip, saw the skin separate or inhaled the singe of burning flesh. Or you need a master storyteller, an artist capable of taking in the victim’s pain, embodying it until their voice and the victim’s voice are one. Billie Holiday was that kind of surrogate, but I didn’t realize it until last week.
I first met Billie Holiday as a character in Lady Sings the Blues. My teenage mind didn’t take much away from the movie except that Diana Ross and Billy Dee Williams were really good looking Black people living a glamorous life interrupted by the pains of stardom. Soon after I chose Billie Holiday as the subject of a school paper during Black history month. As I researched and wrote, I became so disappointed when my history book told me she was a drug addict. I verbalized my disappointment when I ended my class presentation and told my teacher that I had written a second paper, about a Black person I could be proud of.
My teacher gave me an A. I was sure I deserved it because I put in all of the necessary effort; going to the library, opening up a World Book Encyclopedia and collecting a few facts. Last week, I listened to a story by Throughline titled, The United States versus Billie Holiday, and found out my facts were so incomplete that they were false. Billie Holiday did struggle with drug addiction, she did record with Bennie Goodman, she did work with Count Basie and she did perform at Carnegie Hall. And then she risked her career, her reputation and her freedom by singing one powerful song.
The song Strange Fruit was based on a poem about lynching. And the meaning of the song is not hidden in symbolism or buried under a baseline. Billie Holiday sung Strange Fruit low and slow, emoting and enunciating so you felt that “Southern trees bear a strange fruit, blood on the leaves and blood on the root, Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze“. And when she was warned by our government, repeatedly, to stop singing it she continued, making it her signature song and using it to close out her shows.
In 1947, Billie Holiday was arrested and tried in a case brought by Harry Anslinger, Commissioner of the Treasury Department’s Federal Bureau of Narcotics. He can be summed up with one of his quotes . “There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the U.S., and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers.” No wonder Anslinger is famous for, among other things, chasing both Billie Holiday and Charlie “Byrd” Parker in an attempt to end their careers or lives, whichever came first.
The music world mourned the death of a troubled jazz singer in 1959 and in 1962 the government honored the service of its top narcotics officer. Anslinger retired a hero and the history books have preached this truth for the seven decades leading up to 2020. So, while America has cried over opiods, awakened to the health crisis that is drug addiction and turned away from Anslinger’s ill-conceived war on drugs, I think there is an important milestone yet to cross.
America needs to apologize for 70 years of calling Billie Holiday just a great singer that got hooked on drugs. And I need to apologize for repeating a lie to a middle school classroom who relied on incomplete textbooks written by the heroes.
“I’m Sorry, Billie Holiday. I didn’t know, or care enough to find, the truth”. I’m sorry I didn’t know that the singing of Strange Fruit was such a life-changing and career-ending move. I didn’t know that, like Colin Kaepernick or Muhammad Ali, you risked it all to speak out for those who couldn’t speak for themselves. You sung for burned Black men who couldn’t tell their own stories, for raped Black women who were too young to have found their own voice. You told the victim’s account of history through song and, now, I hope there is some consolation in knowing that a new generation is finally listening.