Of Strange Fruit and Ripening Offspring

Candy May ran. With each leap, she stretched her long, awkward legs miles over pavement, over dirty terrain and even the soft, fragile path of the forest. With each step, she felt her lungs expand and contract heavily as she fought to challenge their very endurance. The lashing of the wind against her face calmed her nerves, as frazzled as they already were. When Candy May ran, nothing else mattered.

She no longer cared about the ordeals of school, or the drama of her school friends, nor the dismal atmosphere she experienced at home. At one with nature and herself, Candy was free. Candy ran for as long as her heart contented her, for hours on end until all her problems evaporated into the crisp, fall air and it was time for her to return home for dinner and home lessons. She had been running for quite some time now and she could feel painfully, that her knees were about to give way.

Reaching the local wooden bridge, Candy slowed her pace into a steady walk and calmed herself. She circled the pathway leading up to the bridge to cool down, and then did brief stretches. As Candy walked across the bridge that would eventually lead her home, she took some time to glimpse into the fresh, ever clear waters. Her reflection mirrored a tall, slim, brown-skinned young woman with brown eyes and subtle features. Her hair was raven black and dribbled just slightly past her shoulders in a curly manner. If one were to observe Candy and her mannerisms for just one day, they would proclaim her as a smart, self-confident, headstrong, attractive young teenager. Yet her disguise was clever and her eyes told a different story of a woman who harboured feelings of despair and loneliness, while trying to create the demise of her worst enemy. Herself.

For how long Candy had been facing the daily agony of self-hatred, she could not tell. All she knew that it briefly revolved around a blurry and hazy memory of her as a young child, sobbing behind the skirts of an older woman and a glimpse of a strange object deliberately out of view, hanging from a silver rope in a tree. Candy knew it was her deceased father, but why or how he had ended up in the tree, was unbeknownst to her. She still remembered the main word that was being uttered around her delicate ears. ‘Lynched’, a word almost foreign to her, yet still known as if it were a part of herself and her very psyche. Also, all around her in her memory, there were little groups of women huddled sobbing or whispering surreptiously to each other ‘today white robes, tomorrow strange black fruit bearing ’. Her little brain managed to comprehend amidst all this chaos that the colour black, her skin colour, was associated with this strange fruit, her kin hanging from the grey branch.

Candy, at thirteen, was old and wise enough to know that there was no shame in being African-American. Her mother had continously tried to instill some sort of pride in Candy, pointing out to her the beauty of her skin colour, the versatility of her ‘nappy’ hair, and the strength and determination her oppressed ancestors had retained throughout their time as slaves. Yet, her white-dominated society felt differently towards ‘people of colour’. Some places where she walked in her small Southern Alabama town, the white folks mainly ignored her, but in other parts of town, she felt the heavy stares of the men, boring into her skin as if they were sharp daggers piercing and cutting into her inferior dark skin. She hated this feeling and ran fervently to her destination whenever this happened. School was no better.

It was not segregated like most other schools in the area, but the societal attitudes were no different. She was popular among some black students, mainly her friends, who used her intelligence and confidence as a beacon and wished to emulate her. But the rest along with some of the white kids despised her and used every one of her weaknesses to break her self-esteem. When it wasn’t the black girls from the other classes telling her to ‘stop acting so uppity like ‘em white folks, it was her prejudiced teachers throwing her in detention for having the slightest amount of dirt under her fingernails or claiming that her skirt was too short. Whatever she did was never good enough. The fact that she had managed to receive full marks on her history tests three times in a row, or the fact that she was the most prompt student in her math class never seemed to merit any attention. It always ended up that some evidently low-achieving white student received the praise and recognition that Candy knew belong to her some way or another. Many times, she had tried to assert herself against this injustice, but her cry fell to deaf ears. Candy May had just given up.

Complaining to her mother would be of no use. Her mother was a local cook who came home often, tired and exhausted, having faced years of hard work and discrimination throughout her daily life. Being a widow made life no easier, and Candy hated to burden her mother any further with her problems. Every day Candy would come home, change her clothes, fix dinner and have it waiting on the stove for her exhausted mother complete with a hug and a kiss. It was the least she could do. Candy loved her mother dearly, but she just could not face herself with that same type of emotion. Therefore, Candy ran. To escape herself, escape the never-ending cycle of defeat and hate she felt and to just for once, be free and not have to worry about nature rejecting her, simply because she was black.

Candy remained standing on the wooden bridge and continued to stare into the transparent water. However, this time she beginning to face something other than her reflection. Deep in her mind, something was stirring. The feeling of liberation was evaporating quickly and a torrent of hurt and pain was pushing itself forward. Candy May shook her head defiantly trying to push the pain away, desperately trying to latch onto the failing euphoria. Her reflection quickly morphed into two faces; a second face that Candy had long forgotten. ‘No’, she quickly corrected herself. It was a face she had always known but had pushed back into the deep abyss of her mind. It was her father.

For the first time in years, Candy was able to behold the gentle loving face of her father. Like Candy, his hair was raven black complete with milky brown skin and brown eyes, but his face was sharper and less rounded than Candy’s. His lips was a pale red which contrasted nicely with his smile…it was the smile that captivated Candy. She knew this smile. Quickly, nostalgia washed over her in waves and she was facing the man she had known before he had become one of the countless populations of strange fruit. She remembered running to a wooden door when she was a young child, running into the arms of a loving male entity. She remembered hugging him and burying herself into his chest. He smelled strongly of coal and other factory paraphernalia, but to Candy, he smelled like home. Home, she knew, was in this man and she never wanted to forget it. Sadly, Home was torn away from her the night she sat by the front entrance, waiting and waiting hours for her father to come and engulf her into his arms as he did every night. Home was torn away from her when she heard the distant screams, saw the white figures marching down the cobblestone in the streets like ghosts with only round slits for eyeholes. Home was torn away from her the morning after the bright fires in the horizon stopped burning and the townsfolk rushed to the fields to see what tragedy had occurred. Home was torn away from her when she saw her father for the first time hanging lifelessly from the grey oak tree, many summers ago.

She had to learn to let go of home. She needed to learn to let go of pain. She needed to learn how to let go of hurt. Candy needed to release everything. The forest around her was eerily quiet. It was as if the spirits all around her were waiting to receive her pent-up junk and release her from her spiritual bounds. All she had to do was surrender. And she did. Candy surrendered that evening right there on the bridge. She surrended herself within her tears and let them flow into the water below, letting the water cleanse everything. She let go of every injustice she ever felt, let go of every insult she ever received, let go of all the hate she had been harbouring inside her for so long. In that final release, Candy was truly free. She would never forget her father and that familiar smell of home. But she was healed from that sickening image that seemed to linger with all her memories of her father.

From that day forward, Candy never ran home only temporarily liberated until her next run.She always ran home a freedwoman. Her spirit was soaring and continued to soar as everyone witnessed a new and improved Candy. Finally unrestrained by the words and actions of others, Candy was fulfilled.

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Author's Note:
The metaphor strange fruit is a reference to the song “Strange Fruit” by Billy Holiday whose lyrics accurately describe the black men in the old South who were forcibly hung, becoming statistics of hate crimes. Strange fruit, they were because among the delicious bountiful oranges and other fruit that grew in the south, the rotting bodies of black men were hanging among them. Sorry, my first story here has to be so descriptive :(