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Molly Lynn Watt is a lifelong activist, educator, ukulele player and poet living in Cambridge Cohousing since co-founding it almost 23 years ago with fifty others. She has taught poetry writing at Transition House in Somerville and Harvard Institute for Learning in Retirement, has two volumes of poetry published through Somerville’s Ibbetson Street Press, and has been published widely both for her work in education, travel writing and poems. Her poem Civil Rights Update was selected by the Dallas Public Schools to pair with Dr. King’s I Have a Dream Speech for all ninth graders to study. In 1958 she heard Billie Holiday sing Strange Fruit in a Connecticut nightclub just nine months before Billie died and Molly’s daughter was born. The impression Billie’s singing made on Molly catapulted her into the civil rights movement and in 1963 she was jailed with her young daughters in Tennessee for her work in the movement. Her poem, Billie Holiday Sings Strange Fruit, 1958, appears in her volume of poems telling the story of her journey in civil rights, On Wings of Song, Ibbetson Street Press, 2014. The story continues to be relevant as it parallels some of what our nation is struggling with still today. The struggle for civil rights is called our nation’s longest struggle.

Billie Holiday Sings “Strange Fruit” (1958)

Molly Lynn Watt

in a Connecticut nightclub
a woman enters
through eddies of cigarette smoke
a gardenia behind her ear
her white satin gown
too loose for her frame
unsteady she leans on an escort
makes her way to the stage
her ringed hands limp at her waist
she stares through the crowd
opens her ruby mouth
a low dry voice drips flooding the room
southern trees bear a strange fruit

Billie head high eyes shut
puts Jim Crow on stage
I am a witness under the live oak
I am the lynching party
I am the body swaying on the rope
I am not breathing
Lady Day burns out note after note
scorching the darkness
here is a strange and a bitter crop

Lady sways a little
her escort helps her from the stage
someone claps
another joins
the room applauds
as Lady Day fades away

I am twenty witnessing
a double lynching—
the body hanging in the song
the singer ravaged by drugs—
later
under the attic eaves
in Gramps and Della’s rope bed
bone-chilled
I can’t get warm enough
I can’t get close enough
we conceive our first child
to a chorus of howling ghosts

— Molly Lynn Watt

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