“Strange Fruit: No Shelter From The Storm”
By Erica Zeitman
I wrote “Strange Fruit: No Shelter From the Storm” for my class UGS 302 Bob Dylan History and Imagination with Prof. Tom Palaima at UT Austin. His final writing assignment asked us to think, feel and write about how the songs and events of American history we covered affected us personally. Growing up, whenever I encountered historical accounts of atrocities like the Holocaust, I felt a familiar pit in my stomach, one made deeper by my own family history and the sense that I could trace a direct line to that pain. But when I learned about Reconstruction and the violence that followed it in the American South (and north) over the last 160 years, that same pit felt different, larger somehow, because I had no tangible thread connecting me to it. Listening to protest songs written during the Civil Rights Movement from the outside, I noticed something always felt slightly missing, emotionally and spiritually. This poem grew out of my attempt to understand that ever-present gap, to sit with the discomfort of bearing witness to a history that is not mine by blood but is undeniably mine by inheritance as an American.
In sixty three a man was shot and fell
Before his door, his children heard him well,
Rifle crack, silence, driveway—
They heard him from the floor:
Medgar Evers breathed, and breathed no more.
He’d crossed the sea to fight for liberty,
Stormed Normandy for men who would not see
That he, come home, could neither vote nor rest
Without a scope and crosshair on his chest.
His killer walked from court. Then walked again.
Thirty years would pass before the pen
Of justice scratched a verdict worthy of its name,
And Mississippi carried on the same.
These facts are not mere backdrop, frame, or scene:
They are the measure of what true songs mean.
When Ochs and Dylan took up pen and string
To mourn this man, what truth could either bring?
Two songs, two theories, two competing creeds
Of what protest music does and what it needs.
One lights a candle at the victim’s shrine.
One asks who handed De La Beckwith his design.
Both right. Both wrong. Both worthy of our care.
The gap between them is the truth laid bare.
Before we judge these men and the songs they wrote,
We ought to hear a prior, harder note.
In thirty nine, when Strange Fruit hung in the air,
Billie Holiday put something there
That neither Ochs nor Dylan could achieve:
The voice of one who could not but choose to grieve,
Who sang not from the outside looking in
But from the very marrow of the sin.
No argument, no narrative, no frame,
Just trees, and fruit, and bodies, and a name
Withheld, because the name was everyone,
And then the silence after it was done.
Then Simone in sixty four, enraged,
Sat down and in one hour she had staged
Mississippi Goddam, white hot and true,
The fury of a woman living through
The thing that Ochs and Dylan sang about
From safer ground, where neither had to bleed.
And context matters when we read what white
And earnest folksingers attempted here:
The sharpest songs were sung from fury or from fear
That was not borrowed, secondhand, or read,
But lived, and breathed, and waiting to be dead,
By brave souls.
Now Ochs. Good Ochs. Well meaning, plainly sung.
He was, like Whitman, bardic, open, young
In spirit if not years, and like that Walt
He found in one man’s death the nation’s fault.
When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d, we know,
Made Lincoln into grief’s most public show,
And Ochs did this, too: Evers named, and placed
At center stage, his sacrifice embraced
By listeners who needed, in that hour,
To feel the loss and feel their own small power
To mourn alongside those who loved him most.
Ochs sings his song lest
Evers become a ghost
Or abstraction: he is here, he mattered, he
Was real and brave and killed, and we can see
His face if we allow the song to show it.
That is no trivial thing. Do not forgo it.
And yet. The martyr frame has its own tax.
To die for something is a kind of wax
That seals a man inside his final act,
And lets the years before recede, in fact.
The fieldwork, voter drives, the daily threat,
The courage of the living, we forget
When death becomes the point and not the man.
Grief resolves too cleanly in this plan:
The listener weeps, feels solidarity,
And rises, somewhat lighter, feeling free
Of further obligation. Mourning ends.
The song, in being kind, the conscience bends
Toward comfort rather than the long hard road.
Ochs lifts the spirit. Dylan drops the load.
Now Dylan, twenty two, already strange,
Already stepping outside Seeger’s range,
Already reading Auden, one suspects,
Or someone in that lineage who selects
Analysis where others choose a tear.
The Musee des Beaux Arts taught him clear:
That suffering occurs while others eat,
While someone scratches something, taps their feet,
And systems do not need a villain’s face,
They only need a pawn in the right place.
So Dylan turns his camera from the slain
And points it at De La Beckwith. His refrain,
Repeated like a gavel on a bench,
Cuts off the feeling every time the stench
Of righteous anger rises in the chest:
He’s only a pawn. The system did the rest.
And this is true. Lord knows the facts agree.
Two hung juries are no mystery,
It is the Mississippi apparatus
Performing its intended function,
Protecting those who serve its broader aim,
De La Beckwith served it well, and bore no blame
For thirty years, because the men above
Required his kind of hate, required his love
Of hierarchy, required him to feel
That he was better, so he would not steal
A glance upward at those who held the strings.
Dylan saw this. Dylan, bless him, brings
The structural critique before the crowd
On the mall in DC, sixty three, he sings aloud
What most preferred to leave politely dim.
That we owe him and yet must fault him.
For in the argument, the man grows faint.
Evers, who was more than martyr, more than saint,
More than a case study in white class rage,
Who crossed an ocean at a tender age
To fight for freedoms not yet his to claim,
Who came back home and kept on in the same
Direction, organized, and held the line,
Who was shot in the back by design,
In his own driveway, ten steps from his door,
While his children huddled on the floor:
This man deserves to stay inside the song.
But Dylan’s argument, however strong,
Requires Evers mostly as a cause,
A body that reveals the system’s claws,
And not a person with a name and face
Who loved his children, knew his time and place,
And chose each day to stay and fight and be
The thing that cost him everything. You see,
The pawn is named. The system is explained.
But Medgar Evers, somewhere, is unchained
From his own elegy, and floats away
Into the argument. And there I’d say
Is where the song, for all its brilliant cold,
Leaves something true and human, full untold.
So what is protest music finally for?
If Ochs resolves too soon, and Dylan’s score
abstracts the very man he means to mourn,
If Holiday and Simone, who were born
Inside the terror, came the closest to
The truth of it, then what are we to do
With songs by men who tried and nearly made it?
We take them both. We hear them. And we trade it,
The feeling Ochs provides, the thought of Dylan,
Back and forth, until the space between them
Opens up and shows us what no song
Can hold alone: that Evers was too strong,
Too full, too real, too much a living man
To fit in any single artist’s plan.
The gap between what Ochs feels and Dylan thinks
Is where the actual weight of all this sinks.
No couplet closes it. No rhyme resolves.
On June the twelfth, a man died, and it involves
More than any song can say, however true,
However well intentioned, me or you.
The music points. The man remains beyond.
Of all the things to say, I am most fond
Of this: the limit of the art we love
Is also how we know what stays above it.
