The Thing:

Please note that anything I say in this post are my opinions, my thoughts, my feelings and mine alone. They in no way represent the thoughts, etc… of anyone else involved in the production of “Strange Fruit” Memorial Hall at UNC, or Long Leaf Opera.

This is a bit of a ramble, but it is a very emotional topic.

I am sitting at my desk in my office still in a sleep deprived state and running on very faulty sugar levels and emotions. I spent a whole lot of time the last two days crying and thinking. I saw the final quintet for the first time on Monday and the lynching scene last night and the final quintet with the Thing. I cannot help but call it the Thing. Dummy depersonalizes it just too much, and it is a highly personal Thing.

The music and lyrics for the final quintet are so powerful. I started to cry when Erina went down on her knees and you can see the emotions in all of the faces. I sat in my seat in the audience with tears coming down my face. Listening to them apologize to Big Henry, and listening to John Cashwell, who is singing Tom Harris the mill owner and only Caucasian on the stage at this moment, say that this was not what was supposed to happen simply tore me apart. I went backstage right afterward and just hugged Rita and Erina. We were all crying because there is nothing you can say. Just nothing. I drove home Monday night getting home at midnight and sat up for two hours with my kitten and just processed.

Last night we added the Thing. I also saw more of the scene before the final quintet. Watching the townspeople put the bag and noose over Jason’s head has to be one of the most terrifying scenes I have ever seen. It cannot be all acting that Jason is doing up there. I cannot imagine what it feels like being up on that stage and having a bag put over your head and a noose wrapped around your neck. I do not watch horror movies, I have no interest in them. This is not a horror movie, horror movies are fiction (I hope, but with some of the people out there in this world, who knows). There was a piece on NPR a couple of days ago one the rise of horror movies like the “Saw” trilogy and the now popular “Hostel” series. The director of the “Hostel” series objected to the term now being used to describe these movies “gorenography.” I think it is rather fitting. But, like I said, “Strange Fruit” is NOT a horror movie. This is real life, these things happened, they are still happening in parts of the world today—call it necklacing (the practice of putting a car tyre around someone’s neck, dousing it with petrol, and lighting it), call it drive-by-shootings—call it what you bloody well want; but it is still happening now. When the Thing came down from the flies I thought I would, well, I do not know what I thought I would do. I just know that I went cold. It is like an accident, you cannot help but stare at it. And it goes down so slowly, and the music, since the quintet is starting is so powerful. And the Thing is realistic, in a red union suit with hands and shoes and the bag and rope, the costume that Henry is wearing when he is taken from the jail cell. It has to be realistic, it just HAS to be. Anything less would turn a powerful horrible statement into a cartoon, and that would be wrong, just wrong. I think that Laurie, our props queen, has done a fantastic job in creating it so that it is not a cartoon figure.

I am not sure if the people on the stage knew that the Thing was coming or not. I could see the shock on people’s faces. My student assistant asked me if I was ok.

Back stage we were all a mess. Erina hugging the baby doll, Rita and Denise and me crying. People standing and processing what has happened. Of course they have to go back out on that stage in a trice and finish up the show almost like nothing has happened since it is a year latter. How they do it I do not know, but I give them much positive energy and encouragement.

So, why the Thing? We discussed this last night, at length, after rehearsal ended. At first I really questioned the need for it. I thought it was in poor taste when I first heard about it. In the novel, much like in Joseph Conrad’s “Typhoon” you do not see the lynching just as you do not see the storm that you know is going to destroy the boat. There are all of the events leading up to it, and then the devastating aftermath and its effect on the town. One townswoman says she is going to let her children stay up late to watch the lynching. People did this, they really did—they brought picnics to make a day out of a lynching. Then, this happened in the days of yore, this grim fascination with watching the execution of another person. In England this happened at Tyburn, in the South, in plenty of places all over. Then in the book it is the next day. No actual description of Big Henry’s death. Sam Perry describes dragging Dessie away from the crowd, afraid they would lynch her as well. There is some reaction from people in the town. But there is no lynching in the book. How do you describe something so awful, so primal, so disgusting, and emotionally charged in words for a book? What words do you use to describe man at his basest? Many years ago, in graduate school, my class on museum studies was discussing the creation of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. There was talk about possibly putting sound in some of the exhibits like the barracks from Poland. Someone in the class asked why they did not pipe sound in the recreation of the gas chamber. I was sitting at the head of the table, and I looked up from the text for the class and said “Because there is no one who can tell you what it sounded like inside the gas chamber.” The whole class got quiet as the reality of what I said sunk in—because there is no one alive who can tell you what it sounded like inside a gas chamber in a concentration camp. I think that the Thing sends a powerful message to people. This, unlike the mess in a horror movie, actually happened. It happened here in North Carolina, it happened in Oklahoma, it happened in Texas. It is happening in Haiti, it happens in South Africa, in India, and it still happens in America.

When we moved to North Carolina we came at the dying tail end of Jim Crow. 1967 was the year of the of the Loving decision that made anti-miscegenation laws illegal. 66 years into the twentieth century and we needed a Supreme Court decision to strike down laws that made inter-racial marriage illegal. But our schools in Wake County were still pretty much segregated, and there were still places along Hillsborough Street in Raleigh that did not serve people of color at the counter. That still happened into the early 1970s in a few places across the street from where I now work. My first supervisor here at the Library, the charming, wonderful Doretha Blalock, was the first full time African American para-professional employed by the NCSU Libraries. And she could not get service at the lunch counters across the street from where she worked. In 1970. Makes you think, doesn’t it. Are the old Virginia Slims cigarettes ads wrong, have we really not come a long way baby? Now it is signs in some places about speaking English only. We are in the sixth year of the twenty-first century and we still need a Voting Rights Act, because there are people out there who will call African Americans and tell them that they do not vote on Tuesday, but that they vote on Wednesday, that they need a government issued ID in order to be able to vote, etc…

I once asked my Mother if we had moved to North Carolina earlier would she and my Father would have been involved in the Civil Rights movement. In the early 1960s my parents were in Israel, where they met—and in the 50s my Mother was not in the States, my father was in the Army overseas and in graduate school. Her answer was “Yes, I am sure we would have been involved.” We came to North Carolina because my Father got a job teaching Spanish at Shaw University, one of two Historically Black Colleges or Universities in Raleigh. We had as many strikes against us as you can guess: Jewish, foreign, Yankees, teaching at Shaw. And, to add insult to injury, we stayed, making us “Damn Yankees.” We could not join a swim and tennis club, the ones in Raleigh (most of the pools were still mentally segregated by people) that took whites did not take Jews. The first “country” club to take Jews opened in 1971. Our membership number was 97. I still remember the stares my interracial best friend, Nancy, got when we went to the pool that was sort of near us down Wade Avenue. It was private, I cannot remember how we got in, but it had to have been 1974, and people were staring at her. It closed in the early 1980s or late 1970s, still privately owned, and still “exclusive” in its membership. The land was too valuable to be a dying pool, and is now townhouses (which flood because the land was fill in the first place and they did not take into consideration that it was at the bottom of two hills).

Will the Thing shock people? Will it offend people? Well, yes, it will. Will people shake their heads and mutter that it was “not in good taste.” Yes. Will it make people think? Will it make people realize that this is a part of our not-too-distant past and our very active present? I sure as heck hope so.

Many thanks go to the cast and crew of this production. What an amazing group of people.

For more on the 1967 decision ‘Loving versus Virginia’ see the Wikipedia entry.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loving_v._Virginia