Category: Uncategorized

The Conflicting Image of Billie Holiday Created by the Media and Government

4/10/2021

            Billie Holiday was already a controversial figure when she first performed “Strange Fruit” in 1939. She had played with Artie Shaw and became the first Black woman to work as a headliner for an all-white orchestra, she had been kicked out of Count Basie’s band for “romancing the band members and causing dissension”[1], although she claims in earlier interviews, “Basie didn’t fire me; I gave him my notice”[2], and she had worked as a prostitute at the age of 14 before being discovered by John Hammond. However, this was to be nothing compared to the backlash and attention she would receive for the release of her most well-known, notorious song. Holiday would be both credited and shamed for the performance of this song and two conflicting images of her would arise in American media due to the song’s potent anti-lynching themes and her refusal to stop singing it until her death.

Upon her first performances of the song in Café Society, a progressive, leftist club in downtown New York City, she became an instant leader of the anti-lynching campaigns that were reaching their peak in the 1930s and, consequently, a target for the government and various media outlets that did not share in her passion for the song and its message. The Federal Bureau of Narcotics, led by Harry Anslinger, tried to smear her image and intimidate her from further performances of the song through a number of different methods, some of which being: constant harassment by federal agents, multiple arrests, and a revocation of her cabaret license, which barred her from singing in bars or nightclubs. And yet, these aggravations only increased her popularity, creating a mythos that would forever shroud the song and artist and further her reputation as the successor to Ida B. Wells.

Through the arm of the FBN, the government sought to discredit Holiday and her leadership position in an effort to continue to avoid demands for more stringent legislation following the filibusters and consequent defeats of the anti-lynching Costigan-Wagner Bill and Gavagan Bill in 1934 and 1937 respectively. Although the levels of lynching had been decreasing and fewer than 100 people were lynched in the 1930s[3] (only three lynchings were officially recorded in 1939), they were still a very prevalent and relentless subject for those within the NAACP and activists like Abel Meeropol. According to David Margolick, between 1889 and 1940, roughly 3,833 people were lynched, ninety percent of them were murdered in the South and four-fifths of them were Black.[4] Lynching was at its lowest point ever in American history, and yet, it was plain to see the indifference within the government towards the African American plight after two separate refusals to pass a bill that would regard lynching as a federal crime.  It became clear that public opinion and public awareness must first be shifted before the government would take any meaningful steps.

 Anti-lynching movements were nothing new to the NAACP. There had been previous leaders of the movement that became national figures such as Ida B. Wells and W.E.B Du Bois, who spoke out loud and often against lynching after witnessing lynchings firsthand or through photographs taken of the event. Allegedly, W. E. B. Du Bois would even unfurl a large banner outside across his office in New York with the inscription “Another Lynching Today” in order to draw more attention to the frequency of which these events happened.[5] In the years leading up to the creation of “Strange Fruit,” Du Bois and The Crisis, NAACP’s monthly magazine, were continuing to push strongly for federal anti-lynching laws and were the leading protest organization in the country.[6] However, while these events were undoubtedly effective and became the genesis for the civil rights movement as well as building on the anti-lynching movement, they still were not capturing the attention of most white Americans; a fact that greatly dispirited Du Bois, leading him to escape to Ghana in 1961 and write a letter to his friend Grace Goens before leaving, summarizing his qualms with the line, “I just cannot take any more of this country’s treatment…. I set no date for return…. Chin up, and fight on, but realize that American Negroes can’t win.”[7]

Therefore, it became necessary for the anti-lynching movement to find a way to force white Americans to confront the harsh realities they had been sidestepping for so long and do so in a manner which was too public to avoid. It is at this point that Holiday first hears “Strange Fruit” played for her by Abel Meeropol at Café Society.

The song was originally a poem written in the early 1930s by Meeropol, a Jewish schoolteacher and activist who operated under the pseudonym Lewis Allan when writing poetry in order to protect his identity when writing about incendiary topics. According to Holiday, the song’s origins were fairly simple, writing in her autobiography, “It was during my stint at Café Society that a song was born which became my personal protest— “Strange Fruit.” The germ of the song was in a poem written by Lewis Allen. I first met him at Café Society. When he showed me that poem, I dug it right off. It seemed to spell out all the things that had killed Pop.”[8] Admittedly, this is largely untrue by all accounts. While there are some conflicting stories from those who were present, there is concrete evidence that the song was not written there, and it was not written specifically for Holiday. Meeropol first published the poem, originally called Bitter Fruit, in January 1937 for the New York Teacher and his wife first performed the song on November 13, 1938 for the Theatre Arts Committee’s political cabaret. After which, Meeropol states in several interviews with Nancy Kovaleff Baker that he was invited to the Café Society sometime in 1939 by Robert Gordon and Barney Josephson.[9] This statement is contested from an interview conducted by David Margolick with Josephson who states that “Meeropol just showed up there.”[10]

In interviews, Josephson also states Holiday’s claim that she immediately was captivated was largely incorrect and that she “didn’t know what the hell the song meant,”[11] and he had to push her into singing the song. It was not until he saw her crying during a performance months later that he felt she finally understood the song’s meaning.[12] In response, Meeropol suggests that he didn’t think she felt comfortable with the song but knew what it meant, asking only for clarification on what the word “pastoral” meant.[13] In Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, Angela David postulates that both men were wrong and it would have been impossible for Holiday not to understand the song’ meaning as she had already experienced a great deal of racial conflicts in her life, many had even been covered frequently and, sometimes, sympathetically by Northern newspapers like New York Amsterdam News.[14] David further states, “her stature as an artist and her ability to comprehend social issues were both disparaged and defined as results of plans conceived by savvy white men.”[15] Put simply, Davis argues that in Josephson and Gordon’s story, they present Holiday only as racially and intellectually inferior to them and it is their doing only that allowed Holiday to gain fame from the song. While no one is quite sure of the correct story, these conflicting reports on “Strange Fruit” already begin to emphasize the fact that “Strange Fruit” seemed innately discordant and would continue to divide the American people for decades to come.

The poem and song were not the first of their kind to protest lynching and racial inequality. “Black and Blue,” written by Andy Razaf and Fats Waller for the musical Hot Chocolates, was one such well known, albeit generic, tune written about race inequality. Lawrence Gellert, a leftist activist, collected and published over 200 songs from anonymous blues singers in the South for his volume Negro Songs of Protest; an effort which was applauded by many mainstream outlets and led Time magazine to congratulate Gellert for “collecting Negro songs that few white men have ever heard.”[16] The most powerful being Lead Belly’s Bourgeois Blues which was a searing indictment of segregation and Jim Crow laws that operated with impunity in the city of Washington D.C that he had faced while visiting for recording session in the Library of Congress. However, none of these songs were ever able to break into mainstream society as every writer but Lead Belly requested anonymity[17] and thus, were never able to make a difference in any meaningful way beyond propaganda. Most protest songs were never designed to go mainstream,[18] but rather stay within specific social circles, a fact which likely weighed heavily on Meeropol as he wrote “Bitter Fruit” and which likely prompted him to offer the song to Holiday. He designed it to be as blunt and explicit as possible and evoke the sentiment that many anti-lynchers had felt since the start of Reconstruction and Jim Crow. Holiday herself even states that the song “had a way of separating the straight people from the squares and cripples.”[19]

Before the first performance, Holiday and Josephson created a very specific atmosphere in Café Society. By dimming the lights, stopping all bar service and placing a lone spotlight on the singer when it came time to perform her final number, “Strange Fruit” became impossible to ignore and forced listeners to grapple with the visceral anti-lynching imagery of the lyrics. After her first performance, Holiday states in her autobiography, “There wasn’t even a patter of applause when I finished. Then a lone person began to clap nervously. Then suddenly everyone was clapping.”[20] She claims that after a while, the song caught on and people started to ask for it and go watch her just for that performance, making her the most demanded act at Café Society every night a week for the next two years. It was during these two years that Holiday would be subjected to criticism and condemnation from the Federal Bureau of Narcotics whose federal agents were often in attendance.

The only official recording of “Strange Fruit” was not performed by Columbia Records, the record Holiday was signed to at the time, but rather the small, independent label Commodore Records run by Milt Gabler. According to Gabler, Commodore would not let Holiday record the song as they felt it to be too controversial and that it would not sell.[21] Instead, he told Holiday to inform Columbia Records that he would record the song, even though he was only a small record label, as long as she performed one or two others as well. Columbia agreed and Holiday was able to record her collection of singles on April 20, 1939.

Upon its release, most mainstream media outlets either discreetly and fleetingly praised Holiday or were reluctant to comment on her—a trend that would follow in the next two decades, whereas her more unproblematic peers like Ella Fitzgerald and Bessie Smith tended to enjoy more publicity and coverage.[22] Time magazine was one exception to this trend, noting immediately upon its release the song had “provided the NAACP a prime piece of musical propaganda” and mocking Holiday, calling her a “roly-poly young colored woman” who “does not care enough about her figure to watch her diet, but loves to sing”.[23] John Hammond, the esteemed music talent scout, had refused to record the song and labeled “Strange Fruit” as “artistically the worst thing that ever happened” to Holiday and she had begun taking herself too seriously as “a darling of the left-wing intellectuals”.[24]

Holiday did have a few outlets willing to praise her and her performance; the biggest public compliments being paid to the song were from columnist Samuel Grafton of the New York Post in 1939, who wrote in his weekly column I’d Rather Be Right, “This is about a phonograph record which has obsessed me for two days. It is called “Strange Fruit,” and it will, even after the tenth hearing, make you blink and hold onto your chair. Even now, as I think of it, the short hair on the back of my neck tightens and I want to hit somebody. And I think I know who”[25]

The song was reportedly banned from playing on any radio stations and while this may not have been officially true in every case, it certainly did not receive any respectable time on the radio waves. Many DJs were concerned about the political nature of the song as it had been famously dubbed “Anti-Lynching in Swingtime, on a Disc” by Variety.[26] Therefore, it was in the best interest of many radio stations avoid the song and Holiday altogether, even if it did become her biggest selling hit of all time. Milt Gabler recalls that with the song’s message, it effectively kept itself off the air and states “it [Strange Fruit] was a downer”.[27] One radio personality who did choose to play the song regularly was Holmes “Daddy-O” Daylie on Chicago’s WAIT radio station who recalls “I would play it when I felt like it, sometimes two or three times a month, because it gave a good message”[28]. Daylie states in the same interview that he was labeled a rabble-rouser for playing the song on the airwaves but continued to do so anyway and play it for friends who wanted to record it for their small, independent stations. The highly political implications of the song had already begun to tear Billie’s image in two as radio stations were conflicted as to whether to support her in her stance as an anti-lynching advocate or ignore her, leading some stations, like the BBC, to completely ban her from their airtime while others, like WAIT, forced the song upon its listeners in order to appeal to white, liberal listeners.[29]

The biggest public damnation of Holiday’s image would come from the government, under the auspices of Harry Anslinger and the Bureau of Narcotics. Before Holiday’s performances in 1939, Anslinger had been the Commissioner of the FBN for nine years, in which time he had turned his department from a defeated and corrupted force to one of the most powerful and efficient agencies in America. He was a fervent racist, even for the time, and had begun to focus his attention on marijuana as he believed that it was used most by two minority groups, Mexican Americans and African Americans.[30] As he began to print more outlandish stories of the evils of marijuana, he was offered more space in William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers, which were leading the fight in the war on drugs, to print more of these violent, inaccurate anecdotes of drug users.[31] He focused his attention on the jazz music scene, sending undercover officers such as Jimmy Fletcher, to these nightclubs to obtain more proof that marijuana was bringing out the “primitive impulses that lurk in black people that are just waiting to emerge”[32] and justify a government intervention. While this approach did not work with most musicians, Anslinger received word from Fletcher, his only African American agent, that there was a singer at Café Society who was performing overtly political songs and was rumored to be hooked on heroin. Thus, Anslinger, at the height of his power and veneration in America and angry that he had not been able to successfully penetrate the jazz world, decided to punish Holiday for her outspoken and non-conformist views.

Holiday faced a great deal of bad luck that never seemed to strike the rest of the jazz community. Anslinger first attempted to force Fletcher to surprise Holiday in her hotel room and issue a warrant for the search of the premises. When this did not yield anything substantial, Anslinger found a witness in Louis McKay, Holiday’s former pimp and husband. Holiday had finally worked up the courage to cut him off so, in turn, McKay decided to talk to Anslinger and discuss her heroin habits. He reportedly vowed that “I got enough to finish her off” and wanted “Holiday’s ass in the gutter in the East River”[33], an accusation that rung decidedly true and led to the very public “United States of America versus Billie Holiday” trial in which Holiday was subjected to a “year and a day”[34] in the Federal Woman’s Reformatory in Alderson, West Virginia. Upon this verdict, Holiday’s reputation was permanently tarnished, with many of her former entertainers, such as Sarah Vaughan, turning their noses up at the singer. To further prevent Holiday from resuming her title as a leader in the civil rights movement, Anslinger had her Cabaret license revoked meaning she was legally barred from singing in clubs like Café Society which were best suited for her intimate performances of “Strange Fruit”.

However, Holiday still continued to perform her anti-lynching anthem to the chagrin of Anslinger and he had now formed a personal vendetta against her and was growing desperate. In many of his writings and memoirs, it was clear that Anslinger had become obsessed with Holiday,[35] which led him to direct his “ace” investigator, Colonel George White, to watch Holiday’s performances at Café Society and scout informants who would be willing to speak against Holiday. Colonel White found one in John Levy, a boyfriend of Holiday and Ebony Club manager, a fact that she did not learn until speaking with her lawyer before her second trial.[36] Holiday was again arrested for drug possession in her hotel room; however, by this time she was off heroin after kicking the habit from her prior stint in the Federal Woman’s Reformatory.[37] Many historians agree that the drugs were planted in an act of desperation by Colonel White, who was not averse to planting and dosing unsuspecting victims. White would go on to lead the infamous CIA operation in which prostitutes secretly dosed men and women with LSD in a Greenwich Village apartment while the CIA watched in the apartment opposite from a double-sided mirror.[38]

 Holiday was found not guilty by a jury, but Anslinger had been successful in knocking Holiday off the pedestal, writing in his “Marijuana and Musicians” file that “she had slipped from the peak of her fame” and “her voice was cracking”.[39] Anslinger was ultimately responsible for her death, handcuffing her to a hospital bed shortly after she had collapsed suddenly in a Manhattan apartment. After claiming they had found drugs in the hospital room, he refused her any visitors, flowers, chocolates, magazines, and methadone and she succumbed to liver cirrhosis days later. Anslinger had succeeded in creating a such different image of Holiday by the time she died that most major news outlets either discussed it so briefly that it may well not even have been mentioned at all or they scorned her for dying of her drug addiction. Time, a mainstream magazine in which she was the reportedly the first black person ever to have their picture included, includes only a small section in the back of the issue discussing Holiday and lambastes her for being “born of indigent, teen-agers schooled in a Baltimore brothel” and “succumbing to the dope addiction which dogged her to the end”.[40]

Through government manipulation and the mixed reviews of “Strange Fruit”, it is clear to see the media did not have a straightforward opinion on Billie Holiday and instead created a very bipolar view of the entertainer after she began to fill a role as the new leader of the recent anti-lynching movement. As of 2020, no official anti-lynching law has ever been passed, although the Emmett-Till bill was introduced in 2020 to formally acknowledge lynching as a crime that, after slavery, is “the ultimate expression of racism in the United States”.[41] While Holiday was never officially a part of the NAACP and never formally got involved in politics similar to many other civil rights leaders before her, she was still a very useful tool in the NAACP public awareness campaign regarding lynchings. Her refusal to discontinue her performances of the song created her own form of protest, yet ultimately resulted in her alienation from the mainstream media and led to her death at the hands of a Treasury agent with a vendetta against a non-conformist black woman. Nevertheless, it is clear to see why the song was later voted as “Song of the Century” by Time.[42] “Strange Fruit” and its abrasion were important for the development of mass media; it forced publications to take a stance and grapple with real issues facing the Jim Crow America and led to an eventual shift in public opinion away from lynching.

Sources Cited

“Anti-Lynch Propaganda. In Swingtime, on a Disc .” Variety . May 10, 1939, 134 edition, sec. Music .

https://archive.org/details/variety134-1939-05/page/n95/mode/2up?view=theater&q=billie+holiday

Baker, Nancy Kovaleff. “Abel Meeropol (a.k.a. Lewis Allan): Political Commentator and Social Conscience.” American Music 20, no. 1 (2002): 25-79. Accessed April 29, 2021. doi:10.2307/3052242.

“Best of the Century .” Time 154, no. 27, December 31, 1999.

http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,993039,00.html

Davis, Angela Yvonne. Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude ‘Ma’ Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday. New York: Vintage, 1999.

https://books.apple.com/us/book/blues-legacies-and-black-feminism/id422527952

Du Bois , W.E.B. “Letter from W. E. B. Du Bois to Grace Goens, September 13, 1961.” Credo. University of Massachusetts Amherst, September 13, 1961. https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b153-i208.

Emmett Till Antilynching Act . Bill (2020).

https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/35/text

Hari, Johann. Chasing the Scream: the First and Last Days of the War on Drugs. New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2015.

Holiday, Billie, and William Dufty. Essay. In Lady Sings the Blues: 50th Anniversary Edition. New York: Harlem Moon, 2006.

Letter to Herbert Hoover . “Mr. Hoover .” New York City , New York : Greenwich Village , July 2, 1953.

http://thememoryhole2.org/blog/fbi-george-white

Lynskey, Dorian. 33 Revolutions per Minute. London: Faber, 2013.

https://books.apple.com/us/book/33-revolutions-per-minute/id414559901

Margolick, David. Strange Fruit: the Biography of a Song. Harper Collins , 2001

“Songs of Protest ,” Time , June 15, 1936.

http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,756315,00.html

“Milestones .” Time 74, no. 4, July 27, 1959.

https://time.com/vault/issue/1959-07-27/page/68/

“NAACP History: W.E.B. Dubois.” NAACP, July 13, 2018.

https://www.naacp.org/naacp-history-w-e-b-dubois/.

Ornstein , Cindy. “Rallying Cry: Songs of Social Change .” Thesis, UM-Flint, 2013. https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/117877/Ornstein.pdf%3Fsequence=1&isAllowed=y

 Seguin, Charles, and David Rigby. “National Crimes: A New National Data Set of Lynchings in the United States, 1883 to 1941.” Socius, (January 2019). https://doi.org/10.1177/2378023119841780.

Special. (1949, Oct 29). Slug billie holiday’s escort in bar: MUSICIAN BEATEN BY DIXIE THUG resents party in old colony, motor city swank tavern ‘lady day’ humiliated. New York Amsterdam News (1943-1961) Retrieved from https://login.lp.hscl.ufl.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/historical-newspapers/slug-billie-holidays-escort-bar/docview/225867499/se-2?accountid=10920

“Strange Records .” Time 33, no. 24, June 12, 1939. http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,762422,00.html

Teagarden , Jack. “Billie Holiday for the First Time Tells Why She Left Shaw & Basie: ‘Too Many Bad Kicks’.” DownBeat Archives. DownBeat Magazine , November 1, 1939. https://downbeat.com/archives/detail/billie-holiday-for-the-first-time-tells-why-she-left-shaw-basie-too-many.

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[1] Billie Holiday and William Dufty, “Lady Sings the Blues: 50th Anniversary Edition,” in Lady Sings the Blues: 50th Anniversary Edition (New York: Harlem Moon, 2006), pp. 94-103, 65.

[2] Jack Teagarden , “Billie Holiday for the First Time Tells Why She Left Shaw & Basie: ‘Too Many Bad Kicks’,” DownBeat Archives (DownBeat Magazine , November 1, 1939), https://downbeat.com/archives/detail/billie-holiday-for-the-first-time-tells-why-she-left-shaw-basie-too-many.

[3] Charles Seguin and David Rigby, “National Crimes: A New National Data Set of Lynchings in the United States, 1883 to 1941,” Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World 5 (May 6, 2019), https://doi.org/10.1177/2378023119841780.

[4] David Margolick, Strange Fruit: the Biography of a Song (Harper Collins , 2001). P. 34

[5] Ibid 35

[6] “NAACP History: W.E.B. Dubois,” NAACP, July 13, 2018, https://www.naacp.org/naacp-history-w-e-b-dubois/.

[7] W.E.B Du Bois , “Letter from W. E. B. Du Bois to Grace Goens, September 13, 1961,” Credo (University of Massachusetts Amherst, September 13, 1961), https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b153-i208.

[8] Billie Holiday and William Dufty, “Lady Sings the Blues: 50th Anniversary Edition,” in Lady Sings the Blues: 50th Anniversary Edition (New York: Harlem Moon, 2006), 94.

[9] Nancy Kovaleff Baker. “Abel Meeropol (a.k.a. Lewis Allan): Political Commentator and Social Conscience.”    American Music 20, no. 1 (2002): 25-79. Accessed April 29, 2021. doi:10.2307/3052242.

[10] David Margolick, Strange Fruit: the Biography of a Song (Harper Collins , 2001. 42

[11] thekinolibrary, “1970S Barney Josephson on Billie Holiday, CAFE Society | Kinolibrary,” July 3, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZG97p31rUk.

[12] Ibid 43

[13] Ibid

[14] Special. (1949, Oct 29). Slug billie holiday’s escort in bar: MUSICIAN BEATEN BY DIXIE THUG resents party in old colony, motor city swank tavern ‘lady day’ humiliated. New York Amsterdam News (1943-1961) 

[15] Davis, Angela Yvonne. Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude ‘Ma’ Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday. New York: Vintage, 1999. 187

[16] “Songs of Protest ,” Time , June 15, 1936.

[17] ibid

[18] Dorian Lynskey, 33 Revolutions per Minute (London: Faber, 2013).5

[19] Billie Holiday and William Dufty, “Lady Sings the Blues: 50th Anniversary Edition,” in Lady Sings the Blues: 50th Anniversary Edition (New York: Harlem Moon, 2006), 95

[20] Ibid 94

[21] Cindy Ornstein (UM-Flint, 2013), pp. 80-89, 89.

[22] David Margolick, Strange Fruit: the Biography of a Song (Harper Collins , 2001. 95

[23] “Strange Records ,” Time , June 12, 1939.

[24] David Margolick, Strange Fruit: the Biography of a Song (Harper Collins , 200178

[25] Ibid, Originally from I’d Rather Be Right weekly column by Samuel Grafton. October 21, 1939

[26] “Anti-Lynch Propaganda. In Swingtime, on a Disc ,” Variety , May 10, 1939, 134 edition, sec. Music , pp. 40-40.

[27] David Margolick, Strange Fruit: The Biography of a Song (Harper Collins. 93

[28] Ibid 93

[29] Ibid 96

[30] Johann Hari, Chasing the Scream: the First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2015). 93

[31] Melvin Urofsky , “Harry Jacob Anslinger (1892–1975),” Civil Liberties and Civil Rights in the United States (US Civil Liberties , October 20, 2011), https://uscivilliberties.org/biography/3112-harry-jacob-anslinger.html.

[32] Johann Hari, Chasing the Scream: the First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2015). 20

[33] Ibid 24

[34] Billie Holiday and William Dufty, “Lady Sings the Blues: 50th Anniversary Edition,” in Lady Sings the Blues: 50th Anniversary Edition (New York: Harlem Moon, 2006). 151

[35]Johann Hari, Chasing the Scream: the First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2015). 20

[36] Billie Holiday and William Dufty, “Lady Sings the Blues: 50th Anniversary Edition,” in Lady Sings the Blues: 50th Anniversary Edition (New York: Harlem Moon, 2006),  186

[37] Ibid (182)

[38] Letter to Herbert Hoover . “Mr. Hoover .” New York City , New York : Greenwich Village , July 2, 1953.

[39] Johann Hari, Chasing the Scream: the First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2015). 29

[40] “Milestones ,” Time , July 27, 1959, pp. 66-66.

[41] Emmett Till Antilynching Act . Bill (2020).

[42] “Best of the Century ,” Time , December 31, 1999.

I was pretty proud of this paper so I decided to post it here in case anyone was unfamiliar with her story and why she died such a needlessly early death. She was a brilliant singer who deserved more than America gave her, just like so many others. For more information, be sure to read her autobiography even if it does have more than a few factual errors.

Regret is a weird thing. How often do we find ourselves in a mindset where we can’t escape our feelings toward the past? Why? Why do humans have this ineffable ability to be nostalgic and relive our past experiences over and over, rather than live in the present world and be happy in the moment? We choose to be sad and wistful in lieu of being grateful for the opportunities that lay ahead.

More often than not, I find that I slip back into the same routine of replaying past events and people in my head. I see people that I wish were still a part of my life, I see choices that I wish I had the power to change and I see a different life I could have had. I am only 21, but regret is a damned thing because I have felt it as long as I can remember. What do you have to be nostalgic about at 14, really? They heydays of being 13? Yet, it was still present.

I regret that I am so bad at just talking with people because I decided to stay home rather than go out for most of my life.

I hate that I am so bad at any leadership positions that have been given to me because, at every opportunity in my life, I chose to run away from leadership rather than pursue it.

I regret losing friends because I am just selfish at heart. There are so many people I wish I could see again but that isn’t the way life works. I’ve made my decisions, so I must live with them.

I regret stumbling my way through many of the most important events in my life that affect how my life will unfold from here on in.

This shouldn’t be a big deal, but sometimes you are trying to swim through so much regret that the second you stop kicking, your body is wrenched down immediately.

I don’t really know why I’m writing this for everyone to see. I guess I would just hope to help all of you with something that I have been fighting for the longest time. Depression and regret are very closely intertwined.

For anyone who doesn’t understand depression and never had the misfortune of bearing its burden, I want to take a sec to really discuss what it actually is:

This week, I slipped up and stopped kicking for just a second. I don’t know how it happened but it did, and as a result, I couldn’t get out of the bed all day. Why get up? Your life is just a series of regrets, right? That’s what you keep telling yourself.

I keep myself busy every day, trying to juice life for any delicious moment it might dole out. French in the morning, followed by breakfast and guitar practice, class work, gym, more work and meetings, read, dinner and making/listening to music before bed. However, I understand this plan is flawed. Being busy does not equate to satisfied.

So why is it, that with all of this keeping me occupied, I can still wonder why I should be on this earth? Why does business not equate to satisfaction?

Depression, to me, is like that “floor is lava” game. You can bounce from activity to activity, person to person, place to place, but no matter how much you are keeping yourself afloat above the lava, the floor is always there. You are stuck in your room, seeing as you only have one, so it becomes a constant game where you must learn to get good at learning to wrestle and “jump”.

My life isn’t quite where I want it yet and very often I get very discouraged by my apparent lack of speedy progress. I tell myself I am going to make things different and I’m so close to the life I want, but in reality I still have a long way to go. This week I finally acknowledged that for the first time in nearly two years. I’ve hidden behind a machismo costume adorned with an ignorant, can-do attitude for so long and I finally have come to see my life objectively, sub specie aeternitatis.

But, I’m still here typing. I’m still here breathing. Most of all, I’m still here trying.

Regret is a cancer. There is nothing we can do to change the past; it is the ultimate symbol of finality, even above death. Humans are getting better at fighting death and elongating life, but we are still no closer to the past than we were when you first started reading this post. Each moment in each day slips calmly and quietly away from us and coagulates into the existing group of moments that have already occurred that we call the past. Now is then, and we can’t mourn the loss of a moment when millions more have passed in the time it took to reminisce.

I believe that the duty of anyone who wants to live life fully is to embrace as many present moments as possible. That is the secret at the end of the day. People who truly live, people who others tend to look up to, are simply not letting any moments pass them by without their permission.

I’ve endeavored to be that person. To have the level of curiosity where every day is a new adventure and life is full of mysteries ready to be sifted and analyzed. I believe being curious is the most important trait a person can possess. Who ever has met a person genuinely curious for life that they didn’t immediately love and look up to? How can you have regret when you are interested and inquisitive about what is coming next? Curiosity is, by its nature, forward thinking.

This blog has no answers, it is just my thoughts. I am not seeking to end the feeling of regret or determine why we even still have it in the first place (I’m sure it has something to do with evolution and the cave man). I just believe the only possible solution for someone living in regret is to understand that it is always going to be there but, we can influence the regret to come.

Regret from action is always better than regret from inaction. No longer do I look back and wish I had done something at all; rather, I wish that I had made a different choice instead. That is easier to live with. The times that I didn’t act are the times that eat me up the most inside and I refuse to allow any more moments like that.

Live life curiously. Push yourself. Don’t keep things in your head as that’s the only place no one can see.