There was a sense of resignation, as if ‘these people are going to have power for a long time and I can’t do a damn thing about it except put it in a song.’” As we take stock of the present moment and seek for ways to channel outrage into action, Billie Holiday reminds us to look unflinchingly at the face of power, to call things by their true names. “She was standing up there singing this song as though this was for real,” Jarrett said, “as if she had just witnessed a lynching. Chicago journalist Vernon Jarrett, the father of Valerie Jarrett, watched Billie Holiday perform “Strange Fruit” in 1947. Every fresh horror that pierced me even in the reading of it had been borne in the flesh by Black people. Living with Billie Holiday in the writing of this book reminded me that what was painfully new and strange to me was to others painfully familiar. I could not have imagined that Obama would be succeeded in office by the most ruthless of the Birthers, that the Nazis who marched and murdered in Charlottesville would be praised from the White House as “good people,” that brown children in the thousands would be ripped from their parents’ arms to be warehoused in cages or disappeared. When I began writing Religion Around Billie Holiday, Barack Obama was president, and the 2016 election was several years away. Tracy Fessenden: Billie Holiday knew and told us, unforgettably, that ignorance and hatred allied with power are not new realities, that their roots run very deep. Roberto Sirvent: How can your book help BAR readers understand the current political and social climate? Her book is Religion Around Billie Holiday.
Fessenden is the Steve and Margaret Forster Professor in the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies at Arizona State University.
This week’s featured author is Tracy Fessenden. In this series, we ask acclaimed authors to answer five questions about their book. “Billie Holiday reminds us to look unflinchingly at the face of power, to call things by their true names.”
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