Scent of magnolia
Sweet and fresh,
then the sudden stink
of burning flesh.

It’s late Wednesday evening, and jazz diva Cassandra Wilson covers the song “Strange Fruit” on the stereo, her blue notes echoing through a quiet house. The tune was made a standard by Billie Holiday; it describes the scene of a lynching in minute, ironic detail.

Wilson’s voice is low and sweet, like blackstrap molasses, closer to the truth than most sweetnesses because so much bitterness is also there.

“This is a nice version,” says James, a guest. “Marianne Faithfull also does a good version, and so do the Cocteau Twins.” The conversation moves on to the macabre compositions of Kurt Weill  Mack the Knife, spreading pools of blood and so forth. These are dark subjects for a morbid day, a day tinted by clouds of depression drifting from the scene of the most spectacular lynching of all.

Thousands are dead in New York in the name of superstition, and a country with a proud tradition of creative killing is transfixed, unaccustomed to dealing with death as an import.

The image of an airliner banking sharply into a shining office tower is frozen in our minds for good, like the dead baby in Oklahoma City, and the fuselage on the ground in Lockerbie. Seared into our minds like Wounded Knee and Hiroshima, like the Life Magazine image of a dark-skinned man chained to a Mississippi tree, twisted in death, with rivulets of blood angling across his torso.

During the two decades between 1890 and 1910, there were more than 2,000 documented lynchings in the American South. Hangings, shootings, drownings and draggings. Not a single conviction came in any of these cases. Not one. The line between violence and entertainment began to blur — it was just something else to do on a hometown Saturday night.

By Wednesday night, one television network has packaged the New York tragedy for resale as “America’s New War!” and people scramble to sell pieces of the debris on Ebay. Soon, on another network, there appears a photo-collage of death and destruction, placed music video-style over the sound of “New York Minute,” a 1980s pop song. Other tunes show up on the radio, with sappy lyrics and dubbed snatches of panicked 911 calls.

Meanwhile, a London newspaper reports that the Afghan government is groveling for mercy. “No factory in our country is worth the price of the missiles you’ll fire at us,” an official says.

The British reporter points out that if America chooses to “bomb Afghanistan back into the Stone Age,” it won’t have far to go. War and drought-ravaged and subject to the whims of a violent theocracy, Afghanistan is described as a beautiful, awful place, where starving children play in minefields and widowed mothers beg in the streets. What’s left of these people will be lynched for Osama bin Laden’s transgressions.

The phone rings. Michelle, a friend, left the Atlanta airport Tuesday morning bound for Newark, but found herself in a mysterious holding pattern over Virginia, and was then unceremoniously plopped in Raleigh. A day later, she’s given up on her trip and has tickets home.

“OK,” I say without thinking, “what time does your plane land?”

“My plane rolls into the Greyhound bus station at 3 a.m.,” she says.

Later, I drive to pick her up, brooding and wondering at the sight of a blood-red crescent moon in the sky over Canton — a box knife slash in the thick September fog.

I wonder, like many, how it might feel to lose a loved one in such a violent, hateful way. We can only wonder at it from a distance, and dread the prospect of the coming weeks, when the media will try to do the impossible; to narrow that distance with a thousand sentimental video clips.

As I drive, AM radio stations from Cincinnati, Chicago and New York give telling snatches of news and thoughtfulness, sandwiched in between vast expressions of outrage and banality.

How many of the hijackers received some of their training from American sources, asks one caller, before being shouted down. A good number, probably — it’s one of the prices of our free society. It’s also a matter of government policy, though; we encourage and practice violence when it suits us, and it suits us frequently. We reserve the right to act with unilateral ferocity to further our own interests, then we’re surprised when others follow our lead.

The lighted sign over a truck stop flashes: “President Bush, do whatever it takes.”

What it takes to do what? The hijackers in New York killed some 5,000 innocent people to further their warped view of Islam. We have bombed and killed women and children to keep gas prices down, among other reasons. Where does the difference lie?

Another caller points out that we judge ourselves by our ideals, others by their actions.

A big slice of our economic pie comes from the sales of arms overseas. American arms makers profit handsomely from the deaths of innocent people around the world, then the same companies buy full page newspaper ads to express their sadness and outrage when the seeds they’ve sown in foreign lands help produce bitter fruit in the streets of Manhattan.

As I roll into deserted Asheville, the calls pour in to “The Big One,” WGN, Cincinnati. Expressions of self-righteousness and calls for violence are at the forefront, but the undercurrent is an unmistakable sadness. A deep, black confusion, verbalized most often with the simple phrase “God Bless America.”
How this lynching will change us remains to be seen.

But certainly that sadness will be the lasting legacy. Certainly now, when we spot a blinking jet sliding silently through the night sky, our minds will take us as unwilling passengers to this past Tuesday, and our breath will catch. We’ll think not of the glamour of faraway places, but of a loss of innocence, surely, a lack of innocence, if we’re honest, and briefly, our own deaths.

(Bill Graham lives in Sylva.)

 

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The Smoky Mountain News