“Strange Fruit” captures the great contradiction in southern culture and the religion that defined it. “Lynching is part of the religion of our people,”[39] one white man told another. Blacks have always wondered how whites could live comfortably with that absurdity. How could white Christians reconcile the “strange fruit” they hung on southern trees with the “strange fruit” Romans hung on the cross at Golgotha? How could they reconcile the “pastoral scene of the gallant South” with “the bulging eyes and twisted mouth,” the contrast between the “scent of magnolia sweet and
