Billie Holiday as activist: Can a movie change the singer's image?

Commentary

History has been unkind to the memory of Eleanora Fagan, the jazz singer popularly known as Billie Holiday. 

For years, her tragic demise was the subject of gossip columns, documentaries, and pop culture lore. But that could change now. More than 60 years after her death, the new Hulu original movie “The United States vs. Billie Holiday,” directed by Lee Daniels, may have rescued and reshaped her legacy.  

Throughout the critically acclaimed film, screenwriter Suzan-Lori Parks redeems the crackly voiced singer by bringing context to her pain and celebrating her valiant commitment to unveil the nasty national sin of lynching through the song “Strange Fruit.” 

With this reframing by the Pulitzer Prize winner – coupled by the genius portrayal by ingénue Andra Day – the public has another way to see Holiday: not as someone who “disgraced her people,” as a character in the film puts it, but as a complicated shero who tried with all her might to make a difference. Together, the author and actor have crafted a forgiving narrative that positions the songstress in a fresh way. They show Holiday as one of the mothers of the civil rights movement, a voice of freedom-fighting compromised by an addiction that helped her numb the pain of poverty, exploitation, and Jim Crow. Though this is not the first film to note Holiday’s role as a civil rights activist, it does so especially effectively.

Unlike the 1972 “Lady Sings the Blues,” which earned five Academy Award nominations and won the most promising newcomer Golden Globe for Diana Ross, Ms. Parks’ film doesn’t use Holiday’s heroin addiction as a crippling catalyst to her demise. Instead, it presents a courageous, dignified, and talented character flawed by an extraordinary opioid addiction, a woman who warrants the viewers’ compassion and grace.

Inspired by a chapter in Johann Hari’s bestseller “Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs,” Ms. Parks’ film dramatizes how Harry J. Anslinger, the first head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, assigned a Black agent to go undercover to bring Holiday down for singing an anti-lynching song – under the guise of the government’s war on drugs. They believed “Strange Fruit” would start a different war – a race war. 

Over and over, her managers and handlers, her husbands (one of whom set her up to be arrested), and those pushing dope into her body urged her to abandon her quest to perform the controversial song. But her calling to bring awareness to these “Southern trees [that] bear strange fruit” was greater than the payout of any cabaret, the high from her injections, or her fear of incarceration. 

While the screenplay takes some creative license, there is no doubt that Holiday was targeted for speaking out – just as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Paul Robeson, Eartha Kitt, and members of the Black Panther Party were. (The Warner Bros. film “Judas and the Black Messiah” and the documentary “MLK/FBI” show the use of surveillance to bring down civil rights movement activists and supporters.) 

The key difference was Holiday’s dependency.

Ms. Day’s Holiday is richly textured with a believable vulnerability, earning her a Golden Globe award for best performance by an actress in a motion picture – drama. Her portrayal packages the scars of the icon’s childhood (being raised in a brothel and working as a prostitute in her adolescence) with the longing to be deeply loved – and the perversion of settling for quick fixes. At the same time, it convincingly gives Holiday power in all of her brokenness. 

Holiday is oftentimes dismissed as someone who died without honor and penniless. But in Ms. Day’s depiction, we see an entertainer – not unlike a defiant Bono from U2, Common, Aretha Franklin, or Kanye West (circa 2005) – break social norms with her interpretation of art juxtaposed with her social gaze. After all, “Strange Fruit’’ (written in 1937 by Abel Meeropol as the poem “Bitter Fruit”) was not just a cute, little ditty, but her “I Have a Dream” offering to the world.

Each painful break in her voice as she sang the song convicted the most shameful segregationist. Yet, to the likes of Anslinger, it was a confirmation of change bound to come to a progressing America.

The film may also point to another sign of progress by reminding viewers of the ungodly practice of criminalizing the disease of addiction. 

In the scene before Holiday is sentenced to one year and a day in prison, she is stopped by the press on the stairway of the courthouse and asked about the possibility of incarceration. She flatly says, “I need help” – a revolutionary notion that law officials are now considering. Today, we are more compassionate about the opioid crisis plaguing the nation – offering support to those in the downward spiral of drug addiction and lobbying for laws that help instead of merely punish them.

Imagine if the media had not assisted in the degrading of Billie Holiday’s public image. Consider what her life would have been like if the overzealous policing of Anslinger’s federal department had not singled her out because of “Strange Fruit,” arresting her for drugs when it was the song that irked their sense of justice. Perhaps her life – and death – would have been completely different.

Maybe the lady who sang the blues could have found a song of healing, victory, and, ultimately, social salvation. Hopefully, with this film, the world will listen to the melody of her life with new ears.

The Rev. Nicole Duncan-Smith is a journalist, hip-hop enthusiast, wife, mom, preacher, and all-around cool kid.