There is a video recording of the song Strange Fruit, made in 1959. There, Billie Holiday, standing at the threshold of Death, as if Her faithful messenger, plunges the receptive viewer/listener into the inky darkness of torment and pain, into a man-made cave of nightmares, from which Billie herself has been trying to blindly escape all her life, asking for help in the voice of an unfortunate kitten. The poem “Strange Fruit”, a ruthless document of the era, was written in 1937 by Abel Miropol, a communist Jew from the Russian Empire, who later set it to music. Holiday recorded the song in 1939, completing the creation of a masterpiece, reinforcing with her own experience the story of a Negro swaying in the branches in a shroud woven by a gentle south wind.
Eleanor Fagan (Holiday is Dad’s last name) was born in the spring of 1915, but eleven years later her spring was cut short by violence from a drunken neighbor. The mother, fleeing the depressions of the Great Depression, took her daughter from Philadelphia to New York, where both were arrested for prostitution in 1929. Eleanor was fourteen.
The prologue in the graphic novel is the words of Billie Holiday herself, spoken by her posthumously, imprinted on paper in the same way as her songs are locked on longplay discs. The beginning of a confusing narrative: New York, 1989, late Saturday night at an unnamed publishing house. An unnamed reporter asks his assistant to find all the materials about the jazz singer for the central feature of the Sunday edition. The singer died 30 years ago, and he hadn’t even heard her. “Just One Of Those Things” can be heard from the pages.
The megacities of the United States in the early thirties cultivated the layman with might and main: jazz of varying degrees of shaking got stuck in clouds of tobacco smoke, while music lovers tasted Canadian / Cuban tea, more often the bugs of the local underground distillation. The entertainer, after drinking tea, pronounced “Eleanor” for a long time, he had to use the unfeminine “Billy”, and there were embarrassments with the surname Fagan, his father’s was useful. Billie began performing in clubs that were as different as possible from the respectable Cotton. It is not known who got her hooked on heroin – a pimp or an entrepreneur, but over a couple of years of performances, the young singer’s voice and phrasing acquired the necessary sharpness and lightness, coupled with a thin veil of anguish. It was discovered in 1933 by the famous producer John Hammond. This was the first time she appeared before a respectable audience as part of the orchestra of the famous clarinetist Benny Goodman.
The graphic novel does not curtsey to anyone: what the reporter is looking for is hidden far from the spotlights and tailcoats, a noir-style gateway where there is even less light than on Caravaggio’s canvases, the faces are frighteningly grotesque and ooze vice. Lady Day is beating the canary in the cages of the comic panels. For a while, her loneliness is shared by Lester Young, a saxophonist who is brilliant to the point of madness, disappears, reappears, only to disappear again, forever.
After 1939, Billie Holiday’s influence and popularity began to grow outward, and loneliness spread. She was no longer in the shadow of large orchestras, limiting the composition of the accompanists to small combos, but off stage, old acquaintances played along with her – a syringe and a bottle, adding sandpaper to her voice. These addictions made Billie vulnerable to internal organs, both governmental and in her own body. Lady Day did not survive the last arrest, having died in the hospital with a policeman outside the door. The greatest Jazz Singer died on 17.07.1959.
The graphic novel’s farewell track is “Lover Man,” which Billie dedicates to Lester, who is four months ahead of her. An unnamed reporter lives the night, following the course of Billie Holiday’s fate under the sail of her songs. He won’t stay the same.
Argentines Jose Munoz (graphics) and Carlos Sampaio (text) are long-time accomplices: their duo created a series of dark crime comics Alack Sinner, which inspired Frank Miller to create Sin City. Billie Holiday’s work is scary, sometimes ugly and surreal, heartbreaking and absolutely necessary. The original was released in 1991, having nothing to do with the political agenda. The book was published in Russian by the publishing house “Bumkniga”, with a preface from Francis Marmand, a major literary and music critic. The only disadvantage of the edition, to our taste, is the 60×90.1/8 format, which is slightly too large for these panels. But this is nothing compared to the possibility of owning an iconic graphic work, not to mention the possibility of reading it in your native language. It is recommended to all people of good taste and goodwill. Adios, as the Argentines say.
