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.The tension often acquired very tangible qualities.Slaves were often left hungry,even when they were forced to accomplish most strenuous activities.This situationwas often the cause of tension between master and slaves, as literary critic AndrewWarnes argues.The narratives of former slaves refer repeatedly to slave traders and slaveholdersattempts to monitor, regulate, and circumscribe both the literacy and the diet of theirhuman property.Equally often, they refer to acts of resistance to moments of foodtheft and foraging, to surreptitious self-education, and to other individual rebellions thatchallenged such circumscription.What these acts suggest is that, within the plantation,the almost constant ability of slaveholders to control access to food and words coincidedwith the occasional ability of slaves to disrupt this calculated distribution.(Warnes 2004:1 3)Against this background, it was almost natural that racial tensions were oftenexpressed in terms of food and edibility (Tompkins 2007).The actual consumptionthrough physical exhaustion of black bodies that sustained the plantation and laterJam, Juice, and Strange Fruits " 121the post-Civil War economy, where black men reclaimed their manhood at the econ-omic and social level, often took the metaphorical tone of symbolic incorporation.It is in the horrifying phenomenon of lynching that we find clear traces of thistransition (Perloff 2000).In one of the most disturbing books published on the subject, a collection oflynching photographs, Leon Litwack explains:Newspaper reporters dutifully reported the events under such lurid headlines as COLORED MAN ROASTED ALIVE, describing in graphic detail the slow andmethodical agony and death of the victim and devising a vocabulary that would benefit theoccasion.The public burning of a Negro would soon be known as a Negro Barbecue,reinforcing the perception of blacks as less than human.(Allen et al.2000: 10)What Litwack misses, probably in the subconscious refusal to acknowledge thepatent cannibalistic drive of these popular expressions, are precisely the foodmetaphors.We have to keep in mind that most lynching victims were black males,often accused of not staying in their place and, more specifically, disrespecting,touching, or even raping white women, revealing the uncontrollable sexual depravitythat was considered typical of the race.The images from Griffith s Birth of a Nationsummarized and voiced these lingering fears (Bogle 2003).Although lynchinghad always been a fast method of imposing extra-legal justice in the Far West, itis not by chance that a peak in this practice was recorded between 1890 and 1920,a reaction of white Americans to free African American communities that werestriving to find a new place in society after the Reconstruction and often constitutedalso an economic threat to the lowest classes of white blue-collar workers.Litwackalso gives us specific details that seem to corroborate the element of symbolicconsumption of lynching.If execution is by fire, it is the red-hot poker applied to the eyes and genitals and thestench of burning flesh, as the body slowly roasts over the flames and the blood sizzlesin the heat.Whether by fire or rope, it is the dismemberment and distribution ofsevered bodily parts as favors and souvenirs to participants and the crowd: teeth, ears,toes, fingers, nails, kneecaps, bits of charred skin and bones.Such human trophies mightreappear as watch fobs or be displayed conspicuously for public viewing.The severedknuckles of Sam Hose, for example, would be prominently displayed in the window of agrocery store in Atlanta.(Allen et al.2000: 14)The presence of pieces of black bodies in a grocery store would seem to indicate theneed for white communities to exorcize the perceived threat of these powerful andsexually potent males by breaking them down into more controllable and almostmagical fragments.We witness a sort of symbolic cannibalism whose rituals aresupposed to enhance the strength of the white community.This elusive element,122 " Bite Meoften ignored by scholars and historians, was perfectly perceived by one of thegreatest, and most tormented, jazz vocalists of all times: Billie Holiday.Whenperformed in 1938, her signature song Strange Fruit created havoc even in themost progressive circles, to the point that her recording label, Columbia, refusedto produce it.The song actually began as a poem by Abel Meeropol, a Jewishschoolteacher and union activist from the Bronx who later set it to music.Disturbedby a photograph of a lynching, the teacher wrote the stark verse and broodingmelody under the pseudonym Lewis Allan in the late 1930s.In the song, the trees ofthe pastoral South, thriving on blood both on the leaves and in the root, are describedas producing unusual fruits with bulging eyes and twisted mouths, swinging fromthe trees to the Southern breezes.The food metaphors are right in your face: the black body who used to producefood in the South has been transformed into a horrific crop, whose smell of burningflesh reminds us of the quasi-cannibalistic elements of lynching.Sometimes the connection between food and black males has been taken to itsextreme: the 1975 movie Mandingo offers one of the most disturbing examplesin recent times.As the title already suggests, it is a sort of plantation fantasy builtaround a slave from the Mandingos, an African tribe supposedly particularly giftedwith courage, strength, and sexual potency.The film was adapted from a 1957 novelby Kyle Onstott, a work written during the Civil Rights movement, arguably as anexpression of regret for the demise of the last remnants of plantation society.Formerboxer Ken Norton plays Mede, a slave who is bought and trained by his owner asa bare-knuckle fighter.His name, short for Ganymede the cupbearer of the Godson Mount Olympus according to Greek mythology already points to a connectionbetween the slave, with his impressive but controlled power, and food.During themovie, Mede is literally cooked twice, in a huge iron cauldron placed in the frontof the house.The first time he is brined in hot salt water to harden his skin andenhance his resistance during the fights.He stands up to the quasi-torture bravely,with his master observing him complacently.The second time, Mede is thrown intothe cauldron filled with actual boiling water by the son of his master, whose wifehad enticed him into her bed to get revenge against her husband and his black slavelover.The images, in their unflinching rawness, present us with a weird inversion ofthe usual fantasy concerning African cannibals, often depicted boiling the innocentwhite explorer in their cauldrons.Here is the slave owner who seems to exorcise hisdeepest fears about his male slave and the actual humiliation suffered because ofthe slave s sexuality, not by destroying him but by truly cooking him, making himsymbolically ready for consumption and, maybe, ingestion
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