What the Trees Remember: Strange Fruit, Lynching and the Desecration of the Sacred
“The axe forgets, but the tree remembers.”– African Proverb
Long before cities or roads, before borders and nations, there were trees standing quietly on the earth — roots reaching downward into dark soil, branches stretching upward toward the sky. Across cultures and continents, human beings have recognized something sacred in them. Trees shelter, trees feed, and trees endure. They are witnesses to generations of life unfolding beneath their shade. But in many African cosmologies, a tree is not merely a witness. It is a participant. It stands at the threshold between realms — the living, the ancestors (izinyanya), and the yet-to-be-born. It is said that beneath certain trees, elders gather to deliberate. Offerings are
placed at the roots. The voices of those who came before are invoked through ritual and breath.
The Dagara elder and scholar Malidoma Patrice Somé wrote that in his tradition, the natural world is not backdrop to human life but the very medium through which spirit moves — trees, water, stone, each carrying a specific kind of presence, each holding a particular kind of memory. A tree, in this understanding, is not merely wood and leaves. It is a living archive. Which is why the image at the heart of Strange Fruit — the song Billie Holiday first performed in 1939, her hands gripping the microphone, the room gone still — is not only a political provocation, but also a cosmological catastrophe.
Strange Fruit, performed by Billie Holiday in 1939
“Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root.“
The fruit is not fruit. It is Black bodies, suspended from the limbs of trees across the American South — victims of lynching, a form of ritualized racial terror that claimed more than four thousand documented lives between the end of Reconstruction and the mid-twentieth century. The metaphor is botanical and deliberate. Human beings are rendered as a harvest. Death is absorbed into the grammar of the natural world.
But the horror the song names is deeper than its imagery suggests. To understand what lynching did — not only to Black bodies, black communities, but to the land itself — we must be willing to ask a question that Western modernity has no framework to answer: what happens to a sacred thing when it is made to carry violence?
The tree did not choose this. And yet, it remembers.
To understand what was done, we must first understand what was there. African philosophical traditions do not conceive of nature as inert matter awaiting human use. The land is not empty space. It is not property in the first
instance — that designation came later, carried in the hull of colonial ships alongside everything else that was taken. In its prior life, before the cartographers and the deed-holders, land was understood as relational, animated, and alive with ancestral presence. The concept of Ubuntu (I am because we are) — extends, in its deepest expression, beyond the human. It includes the river that feeds the community, the mountain that shelters it, and the tree beneath which its elders have gathered for generations. To be in right relationship with the world is
to be in right relationship with all of it. This is not a metaphor. This is ontology.
When philosopher Sylvia Wynter writes about the ‘coloniality of the human’, she is tracing the process by which European modernity constructed a particular idea of “Man” — rational, bounded, separate from nature — and then used that construction to classify entire peoples as closer to nature, and therefore less than human. Black people and Indigenous people were placed on the wrong side of a line that European thought had drawn between the civilized world and the natural world. The cruelty of what followed is well documented. But Wynter’s insight opens something further: if Black people were coded as nature, as landscape, as the earth itself, as uQamata (the Creator) intended— then the violence enacted upon them was simultaneously a violence enacted upon the earth. The two were never separate in the colonial imagination. They could not be disentangled in the spiritual aftermath either. This is the framework within which lynching must be understood.
Black liberation theologian James H. Cone, whose The Cross and the Lynching Tree remains the most sustained meditation on this history, wrote that the lynching tree was America’s cross — a site of state-sanctioned suffering that the nation refused to reckon with. Cone’s argument is rooted in Christian theology: he draws the parallel between the crucifixion and the noose, between Calvary and the county road, asking why white American Christianity could worship one and sanction the other. It is a devastating and necessary argument. But it is also, by design, a theological one. It does not ask what the tree itself bore. That is the question that African cosmology forces us to sit with.
If trees are spiritual witnesses — if they stand, as Somé describes, as living archives of everything that has occurred in their presence — then the trees of the American South did not merely host acts of violence; they were made complicit in them. They held the rope. They bore the weight of bodies suspended between earth and sky, between the world of the living and the world of the ancestors, in a grotesque inversion of everything that suspension was meant to mean.
In African spiritual traditions, the threshold between life and death is sacred ground. The moment of crossing — from this world to the next — is tended with ritual, with prayer, with the presence of those who know how to hold such passages with care. Death is not an end but a transition, and that transition requires witnessing of a particular kind. In Xhosa culture, we perform the ceremony of Ukukhapha (to accompany the deceased spirit) by slaughtering a goat or a cow as an offering and to accompany the deceased to the land of our ancestors. After 12 months, a ceremony of Umbuyiso (to bring back the spirit of the deceased) is held to bring and welcome the spirit as a clean and guiding ancestor.
What lynching did was force that crossing to happen in public, in violence, in spectacle — with a mob for witness
instead of a community, with a rope instead of a rite. The tree, meant to mediate between worlds, was made instead to sever them.
Ida B. Wells, who spent her life documenting and exposing the geography of racial terror, understood that lynching was designed to be a landscape event. It was not hidden. It happened in fields, at crossroads, in town squares, beneath the canopy of trees whose names local people knew. Photographs were taken. Postcards were made. The violence was meant to reorganize the meaning of the land itself — to make Black people understand that no part of the American landscape was safe, that nature itself had been conscripted into the project of their subjugation.
Poet Abel Meeropol — a white Jewish schoolteacher from the Bronx who wrote the lyrics that Holiday would make eternal — understood this transformation intuitively, even if he could not have named its cosmological dimension. His words collapse the boundary between human suffering and the natural world with precision: blood on the leaves, blood at the root. Violence becomes botanical. The body becomes part of the tree’s own grammar. But it was Billie Holiday who completed the ritual.
There is something important in the fact that it was Holiday’s voice — a Black woman’s voice, carrying everything the body carries — that gave these words their enduring power. Meeropol named the wound, and Holiday inhabited it. In her performance, the song becomes something closer to a dirge, a ritual acknowledgment of what the land had been made to hold. She did not explain. She did not editorialize. She stood still, and she sang, and she let the silence after each phrase do its own devastating work. In that stillness, something ancient moved.
The African diasporic traditions that survived the Middle Passage — fragmented, transformed, but not destroyed — retained an orientation toward the natural world as spiritually animate. The Yoruba traditions that became Candomblé and Santería, the Kongolese spiritual practices that shaped the cosmology of the American South, the Afro-Caribbean traditions that preserved what the plantation tried to erase — all of them maintained, in various forms, the understanding that land, water, and tree were not passive. They were present. They were listening.
For those who carried such cosmologies, even in residue, even in the wordless inheritance of gesture and instinct, the sight of a Black body hanging from a tree was not only a political terror, it was a spiritual rupture. A desecration of the very architecture through which their ancestors had once communicated with the divine.
The tree was supposed to be a bridge. It was made into a gallows. And the land, which does not forget, absorbed it all.
The trees are still standing. This is the fact that refuses to settle. Long after the mobs dispersed, long after the photographs faded in desk drawers and the postcards yellowed in attic boxes, the trees remained. Roots still drinking from the same soil. Bark is still recording the years in its slow, patient way. The tree does not have the luxury of forgetting. It cannot choose amnesia the way nations do. It simply continues — season after season, leaf after leaf — holding in its rings and its roots everything that occurred beneath its canopy.
This is both the burden and the provocation of what African cosmology asks us to consider. In recent years, there has been a quiet but significant movement to reckon with the geography of racial terror in America. The Equal Justice Initiative, founded by Bryan Stevenson, has documented over four thousand lynching deaths across the American South and erected memorials to those lives in Montgomery, Alabama. As part of related acts of remembrance, soil from lynching sites has been collected in glass jars — a gesture that is at once archival and devotional. The earth itself is treated as testimony. The ground is understood to hold what the official record refused to. These gestures, emerging from within an American context, are nonetheless doing what African cosmology has always known how to do: treating the land as a witness whose account matters. But witnessing alone is not restoration.
Potawatomi botanist and author of Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer, writes about what she calls the grammar of animacy — the way certain Indigenous languages encode the living world as somebody rather than
something. A tree, in such a grammar, is not an ‘it’. It is a presence with standing, with interiority, with a relationship to time that exceeds the human. Kimmerer’s framework is rooted in North American Indigenous thought rather than African tradition, but the resonance is not accidental. It points to something that many non-Western cosmologies share: the understanding that the natural world is not a backdrop to human history but a participant in it, with its own form of memory and grief. If we take this seriously — if we allow ourselves to follow the logic of African cosmology rather than merely admiring it from a distance — then the question the trees are asking is not simply historical. It is not only: what happened here? It is something more demanding than that. It is: what do you owe us?
Across the African diaspora, something is stirring. People are returning — sometimes consciously, sometimes by instinct — to practices of reverence for the natural world that colonial modernity systematically severed. Offerings
left at the base of trees. Prayers spoken at rivers (a sacred ritual I have adopted into my life), the quiet, deliberate act of placing one’s hands on earth and acknowledging what lies beneath. These are not performances of tradition. They are acts of repair — small, persistent attempts to re-enter into the relational understanding of the world that was disrupted but never fully destroyed.
Elder Malidoma Patrice Somé wrote that in Dagara tradition, when a sacred site has been violated, restoration does not come through erasure but through acknowledgment. The wound must be named before it can be tended. The spirit of a place must be addressed directly, with honesty about what occurred there, before healing can begin to move through the ground. This is a different kind of reckoning than the one America has largely practiced — which is to say, largely avoided. It does not ask only for monuments, legislation, or the formal acknowledgment of historical guilt. It asks for something more intimate and more difficult: a willingness to stand before a tree and understand that it has been waiting, that the land beneath your feet has been holding a grief that no human institution has yet had the capacity to properly receive. It asks us to grieve with the earth, not only for it.
Billie Holiday understood something about this kind of grief. She did not perform Strange Fruit as a protest; she performed it as a lament. There is a distinction. Protest addresses power. Lament addresses the wound itself, the thing beneath the politics, the place where language almost fails and music must carry what words cannot hold alone. Holiday’s voice, in those recordings, is not angry. It is something older than anger. It is the sound of someone standing very close to an unbearable truth and refusing to look away. That refusal is its own form of reverence.
And perhaps that is where the hope lives — not in resolution, not in the fantasy that the trees can be made to forget, but in the act of return. The return to the understanding that we are not separate from the land we live on. That which is done to the earth is done to us, and what is done to us reverberates through the earth. That the natural world has been bearing witness all along, and that witness is both wound and invitation.
The strange fruit that hung from southern trees revealed what a nation was capable of when it severed itself from the sacred: when it made nature into property and people into property and called that arrangement civilization. But the trees endured.
And they are still asking, with the patience of things that have outlasted every empire that has ever tried to own them, whether we are ready — slowly and imperfectly — to come back into right relationship with the ground beneath our feet. The roots are still there. The question is whether we are willing to go that deep.
Scholars & Works Referenced
Malidoma Patrice Somé — Of Water and the Spirit (1994)
Sylvia Wynter — Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom (2003)
James H. Cone — The Cross and the Lynching Tree (2011)
Ida B. Wells — Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892)
Robin Wall Kimmerer — Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)
Abel Meeropol —“Strange Fruit” (1937); performed by Billie Holiday (1939)
Special mention- The Equal Justice Initiative
