With Delores Purdy and Leopold Bloom in the graveyard / Strange Fruit

 

The very night we watched the second part of In The Heat Of The Night, not having done so for years (as magnificent as every performance is, Rod Steiger's is still my favourite), once in bed, I turn to James Joyce's Ulysses, which I am reading in parts, between novels which I can finish in totality. Being between books, I picked up with Joyce again. Well, damned if it isn't the part where Leopold Bloom is attending a funeral. As I'm sure you know, Delores Purdy's memorable dialogue is about how the cop, Sam Wood, seduced her with a promise of pleasure in the graveyard on the cool slabs. For Bloom, there is no such pleasure, naturally, and Joyce ponders burial in his own inimitable style:

'I daresay the soil would be quite fat with corpse manure, bones, flesh,

nails, charnelhouses. Dreadful. Turning green and pink, decomposing.

Rot quick in damp earth. The lean old ones tougher.'

Whilst In The Heat Of The Night has entered Hollywood film lore as a classic depiction of racism in America, on the same subject, a 'pop' example of creating poetry from death, which matches Joyce in terms of power, is Abel Meeropol's Strange Fruit.

'Southern trees bear a strange fruit

Blood on the leaves and blood at the root

Black bodies swingin' in the Southern breeze

Strange fruit hangin' from the poplar trees

Pastoral scene of the gallant South

The bulgin' eyes and the twisted mouth

Scent of magnolias sweet and fresh

Then the sudden smell of burnin' flesh

Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck

For the rain to gather

For the wind to suck

For the sun to rot

For the tree to drop

Here is a strange and bitter crop.'

Most famously sung by Billie Holiday...