Summer’s the best time for picking. Though the fruit buds and ripens all year round, there’s no better time than the height of summer, the heat radiating off the sidewalks and the car windows, people’s radiators blowing out cool-hot air, the whirring sound of A/C mingling with blasting music, people laughing, people talking, cussing, the summer bugs. Feels like one big hum, your skin and scalp prickling with sweat, like you could wring yourself and hang yourself out to dry on the porch railing.
Mama’s too sick to go with us this time, so me, Rochelle, Tito, and Kiki go by ourselves. Takes a while to get there if you don’t got a car or a bike. Kiki and Tito—they’re siblings, half—used to have bikes, but their daddy put them away after what happened to Ricky. Too close to home, he said, so now the four of us are walking down the street, some of us holding machetes, some of us holding black garbage bags, heading out to the field where all the fruits are. As we walk, people join us. It’s some kids, some teenagers, some adults, but all of us have the same look, brown and Black skins carrying things, lugging wagons and strollers and shopping carts, holding knives and garden shears to make the cutting down easier, all going the same direction.
When I was little, Mama would hold the tools and I’d hold on to Tyrone. He was real big, even back then, but gentle as a butterfly. He’d let me sit on his shoulders if I asked, and I always asked because up there, you could see the whole block, all the houses and the curve of the hill, the subtle line where concrete became dirt and then field. Now that I’m big—not as big as him, nobody is big like him—I don’t sit on Tyrone’s shoulders. I just walk with a cramp in my side that I huff through. I’m the one holding the machete this time, and it feels serious in my hand. We usually use it for cutting open fruit, cutting the grass, and I guess it has the same purpose this year, only different because the shape of the fruit is different.
We’re walking, and Rochelle is talking aloud, talking to anybody that’ll listen to her. Kiki and Tito are like me, quiet and thinking. This is the fourth time they’ve been out to the field to pick the fruit, which is a lot but not as much as some people. One lady, Miss Johnson, she goes to the field just about every season, every year, and each time she goes, her shoulders sink lower and lower. She’s somewhere near the back, folded over her son’s shoulder, eyes red and mouth drawn tight like she got the dark, sour part of the plum right beneath the skin. Kiki and Tito are almost drawn in like that, ’cept that they’re too young for it, and on them it looks like they’re corpses, small and wrinkled.
It’s real easy to lose yourself in a sea of people. The whole street is bodies carrying, bodies moving forward. I’m myself, then I’m just an arm and a leg, a neck, a head. Are those my box braids or hers? Whose brown hand is that? Whose dark eye and nose, whose lips, whose voice? I hold my machete close to my chest and think like an ant. March forward, march on, go with the line, you little black thing, don’t get stepped on, don’t get crushed, keep carrying things two times your weight and more.
Rochelle stops short. Bends down to scratch her ankle. People jostle her, push her around, but she doesn’t seem to notice them. She bends down even farther, squatting, looking at something on the ground.
“Chel . . .” I tug the back of her shirt, ill fitting and splotched. Not hers. Her sister’s, my cousin’s. “Come on.”
“Look!” And she shows me the hot asphalt, sparkling bits of broken glass on the street. Beer bottles, windows, whatever. Her mind is funny like that. Sometimes she can think plain and straight, narrow as a hall, and other times her mind goes wavy, circumventing the heavier stuff to pick up the lighter. Rochelle runs her hand along the street, picking up gravel and dirt and glass in her palm. I tug her along because I’m some of the only family she’s got left, and if I leave her there on the street, touching broken bottles and sunlight, there’ll be nobody from her family to pick this year. Usually somebody else, a friend or a play uncle, will take care of it, big folks from the neighborhood picking for somebody down and out, but Rochelle doesn’t have much of anybody. Her daddy’s gone and all four of her brothers, two of her sisters, and her mama is barely holding on, just scraps of meat stuck to the bone trying not to be blown away.
So, I make her come with me. I hold her hand with one of mine, and the machete in the other, and the three of us walk together, Rochelle in her sister’s tie-dye shirt, and me thinking about my brother, Tyrone, who used to be her cousin as well.
When we get to the field—all of us, the whole damn neighborhood, practically—we see what we see every year. The trees heavy with fruit, the ground covered with the overripe ones, purple and oozing, blue and bursting with juice. The smell is unthinkable, the skin rotting and the pits turning sour. The newer fruits, still fresh enough to be recognizable as one person’s or another’s, aren’t that bad, but they’re stiff and banged up. These are wicked plants, fed by flesh and watered by blood. The roots are red; the fruits are strange. Still, every year, every season, every week, they’re planted. Still, we return to the field and take our pick, filling our baskets and bags and wagons and carts so there’s a little bit of peace and not so much of a smell.
This isn’t my first time going to the field, but it is my first time picking. Usually, I’m at the edge of the field with all my cousins, doing kid stuff, kicking rocks and playing tag. We let the big kids and the adults handle the picking. Our hands were too new to be smeared with brown and red, the skins coming off like roach wings in our grasps. Sometimes, we’d look over and see them taking the fruit down or hauling it off the ground when it was overripe, and feel all shivery because it was a matter of when, not if, and just about everybody knew somebody in the field.
We spread out. Kiki and Tito go there, and Rochelle goes here, and everyone helps everybody else where they can. Some are weak in the limbs. Others are weak in the spirit, like their whole soul is doubled over. There’s always crying on the harvest days, long and full of an unspeakable pain. For the thirteenth year in a row, Miss Johnson falls to her knees and beats her chest. I see grown men and women tearing their hair, face down on the ground wailing like children. My friends, people who I go to school with, stare blankly at the trees, swaying like saplings, too wrung out to cry. They pick their fruits. Their bodies grow weary, but they carry on—ants lifting, carrying, even when it hurts.
It used to be Tyrone would go into the field with Daddy, then the uncles, then finally by himself. He wouldn’t let Mama do it alone. Didn’t like the look on her face when she came back from it, like she’d been gutted and all her organs were on the outside of her, heart included, exposed to the air and raw. He was big, my brother Tyrone. He put the fruit over his shoulders and carried them home to replant them in a gentler garden. My brother was gentle, meeker than Jesus. Sweet, like a song, and all the old folks in the community remember him for taking the loads they couldn’t, for being kind and nice and good.
I remember him the same way, nice and kind and good, big and gentle and sweet, but it doesn’t seem fair. What if he was mean, like the Lewis girls? What if he was big and cold like Mr. Johnston, or big and unyielding like they say the others were? What if he was carrying a machete, like me, or a gun, like that boy? He didn’t do nothing wrong, our Tyrone, but what if he was hungry like we all got hungry, needy like we all were needy?
No use wondering. I find the fruit low down in the poplar tree, blue and purple and bloodless. He’s nothing like he used to be, just big and black and a little familiar around the mouth. He’s tall, and the soles of his Nikes touch the top of my head. I feel like Miss Johnson, screaming, and like my friends, quiet and screaming too. On my own, I climb the tree and cut the branches. On my own, I untie the rope and gently lower him down to the ground, the rope burning my palms as it rushes through my hands. I cover his eyes with silver dollars, then cover his face.
We’re through picking by sundown. There’s still fruit in the trees and on the ground, some having been there for ages, unclaimed or unwanted. Maybe tomorrow people will come and pick again, or maybe they’ll stay there, rotting on the vine, family too scared or too tired to take down another fruit, another neck, another leg. For now, we wrap our tools, our strange fruits, and we take them home where they belong, where they can be buried and known and remembered.
I’m not big like Tyrone was, but for the first time, I carry him on my shoulders. Let him see the whole block, where the field becomes the street, all the houses and the curve of the hill.
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“Strange Fruit” first appeared in Southern Humanities Review. Copyright © 2024 by Yah Yah Scholfield. Reprinted by permission of the author.