Strange Fruit

February 24, 1935

Maringouin, Louisiana

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The school bus engine clattered as it swung around the snaking road and in between great walls of oak trees. Children of all ages rolled the windows down and scrambled atop one another to look, the crisp winter air making their cheeks flush. The students were taken from Shady Grove High School by bus after being released early from class that afternoon. They carved their way down the narrow road and out to the main entrance to Maringouin village. As they turned the corner and approached the barren sugar cane fields, someone shouted in a shrill cry. "Look! Look! There it is!" All of the children clambered to windows to look. They pushed and shoved one another. They laughed crudely at the children who couldn't bear the sight. The buses slid to a halt in front of a single standing oak tree, its bark-clothed body standing solitary in a field of dead grasses. The smell was thick, even in the thin, cold air. A single shoe lay fallen on the ground, its polished black hide soaked in blood. Before the children was a single strange and mangled branch, it dangled, and it bled. Tethered only by a thread to the rest of the tree's body, it swung in the grey afternoon. 

As they filed from the bus to join the throng of their parents and relatives, they gawked and pointed, cackled, and spit at that broken branch. 

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Anderson Wall was 29 years old at the time of his murder. In the town of Maringouin, Louisiana, he was accused of attacking a white man by the name of Dennis Brudoe. Upon his arrest, Wall was released to a mob of townspeople who then hung him and desecrated his body with bullets.  The town's K-12 school, known as Shady Grove, then bussed the campus's students to the scene of the lynching. 

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There are trees in Maringouin whose trunks still hold the indentions of bullet holes. There are some that stand as burned skeletons of splintered wood, while others seem to bend over the road in despair from all they have witnessed. I grew up hearing stories similar to that of Anderson Wall, stories of bodily destruction and the horrors of what one person's hate can bring down upon the life of another.

To speak about the South, you must speak about the phenomenon of racial terror. 

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Of the many locations of disruption in the minds and hearts of Black Americans in their relationship to nature, the threat of racial violence is the primary force of severance. During the era of slavery, forests, and wooded landscapes represented an unknown and potentially more dangerous than the sadistic abuse of a plantation owner. Following the end of slavery and Reconstruction, the lynching epidemic grew from the year 1882 to 1968 to an estimated amount of 3,446.  The speculative use of this statistic is due to the prevalence of racial terror incidents that lack documentation. While the case of Anderson Wall is preserved through the efforts of Northeastern University Law School's Civil Rights Restorative Justice program, there are many more incidents of racial terror that live only through those who bore witness to them or were a participant in the acts themselves. As echoed through the narratives of my family, Stefanie K. Dunning cites the primary cause and driving force of the Great Migration of Black Americans from the South as being tied to the drastic increase of racial terror during the era.   While other historical sources, such as Stewart E. Tolnay's The Bottom Rung: African American Family Life on Southern Farms, argue that the promise of financial and economic prosperity was the primary driving force behind the Great Migration, I cannot dismiss the trauma associated with living in the South following the end of Reconstruction as outweighed by the flimsy promises of the industrial North, when the generational impact of racial trauma can still be felt through the behaviors and fears of current generations.  Of this lasting trauma, the fear of entering nature speaks to the weight of racial terror on the Black American psyche. Dunning also validates this phenomenon with the lines, "This well-founded fear continues to shape and determine Black interaction with nature(or lack thereof) in the contemporary moment," and further notes the pervasiveness of racial violence regardless of proximity to the South or urban versus rural settings. 

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While the rerooting to combat racial terror that has been enacted, and that which continues to be enacted against the Black body, requires careful awareness and sensitivity to the multifaceted situation of racial terror, I argue that only through combined efforts of community building within natural spaces such as community gardening. I also acknowledge that despite my family's continued occupation and nurturing of natural landscapes, is not without fear but rather an enactment of tradition. We must acknowledge that the perpetrators against the Black body have never been nature itself. 

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