“Southern Trees”
The opening line is accusatory. Alaska, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Connecticut are the only states that never reported a single lynching. On the other hand, while Arizona, Idaho, Maine, Nevada, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wisconsin did report at least one lynching, none of the victims were black. While southern states love to point out the historical record which states that this crime was definitely not one relegated only to their regions, that same historical record also leaves an irrefutable footprint: most if not every single victim in Confederate states were black. So, those “Southern trees” which form the first two words serve to symbolize distinctly unique form of lynching which occurred there.
“Strange Fruit”
The central symbol of the poem is, of course, the strange fruit which hangs from those Southern trees: the bodies of black men, women and children. Those bodies are literal but collective become symbolic of the systemic racism upon which southern white society not only functions, but has been dependent.
Magnolias and Poplars
The only two types of trees mentioned specifically are magnolias and poplars. The magnolia is both the state tree and the state flower of Mississippi. The connection of that state to the history of lynching need not even be explained. On the other hand, the state tree of Kentucky is the Tulip Poplar and is actually a type of magnolia.
“Pastoral scene of the gallant south”
In general, the imagery of the strange fruit is appropriately grotesque and direct, avoiding metaphor with descriptions of “black bodies” and “burning flesh.” The opening line of the second stanza thus become so out of place as to become jarring in setting the scene of this abominable crime as idyllic portrait of pre-abolition Dixie as something straight out of Gone with the Wind or tales of Uncle Remus. In this way, the imagery becomes symbolic of the way that the southerners have successfully transformed the brutal reality of slavery into something far more inappropriately Romantic. There was nothing gallant about the Confederacy.
Crows
The final stanza also begins with imagery that reflects upon history, but this time the history is real and the symbolism is jarring for taking the gruesome quality of the imagery to a new level. The image of birds feasting on the corpses of the lynched still hanging from the trees could have been just as powerful had the fowl in question been mockingbirds, jays, or vultures. But the all-encompassing term of a system of justice enacted specifically to create an injustice against blacks was not called Jim Vulture, but Jim Crow.
