Actor, singer and songwriter Andra Day plays Billie Holiday in the new Lee Daniels’ Billie Holiday biopic playing on Hulu February 28th, and appears here in a preview of her fashion story and interview in V Magazine’s issue #128.

Patti Wilson styles Day in Prada with support from What Katie Did retro lingerie and Cartier jewelry, in images by Djeneba Aduayom. [IG]/ Hair by Lacy Redway; makeup by Porsche Cooper

Mathias Rosenzweig interviews both Lee Daniels and Andra Day in advance of V#128 Spring 2021 arriving in subscriber’s mailboxes. You can pre-order this important issue here.

‘United States vs. Billie Holiday’ follows the unlikely romance between the jazz great Billie Holiday and Jimmy Fletcher, the FBI street agent man of color on the beat of America’s drug culture. Just as artists of every discipline and skin color were accused of being Communists in the 1950s, Black musicians were of particular interest to the FBI and Harry Anslinger, head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.

It became the job of Jimmy Fletcher to take down Billie Holiday, especially when she refused to stop singing that damn song.

Note: Photographer Djeneba Aduayom was interviewed by the Washington Post in August 2020: With her dreamlike self portraits, Djeneba Aduayom seeks to create an escape from reality.

The song ‘Lady Day’ made most famous had nothing to do with love or the blues. This video of ‘Strange Fruit’ — lyrics not written by Billie Holiday, but by Abel Meeropol, a Jewish schoolteacher from the Bronx and first recorded in 1939 — is a song about lynching.

The lyrics of ‘Strange Fruit’ are:

Southern trees bear strange fruit.
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant south,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.

AOC is working on an in-depth post on the song and lynching, finding ourselves in a state of disbelief over certain verified — if not well-known — factoids about lynching we’ve learned in the last two weeks. I will be reading ‘At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America’ by Philip Dray and published in 2003.

Two years ago I embarked on a journey to investigate Black History in America in the greatest possible detail. Racial justice has always been a deeply-held core value of my activist life, but even I was not prepared for the atrocities committed by white people against people of color — acts equal to the horrifying inhumanity of today’s ISIS terrorists.

With the murder of George Floyd, I wept for so many days that I got an eye infection that required medical treatment. But because I had wept with total abandon and disbelief for countless late nights in the winter and early spring of 2019, I was not shocked. One might say that my emotions were fortified against the nearly nine-minute atrocity that played out before our eyes around on televisions and the Internet around the globe.

My sorrow was intense, but my mind was fiercely strong, confirming my move to Virginia, once home of the Confederacy and now a purple state run by Democrats. I want to live in the New South, as its history runs deep in this Yankee-woman’s veins.

Just as ISIS commits these atrocities in the name of Allah today, America’s Christian Southerners committed these atrocities against people of color — mostly slaves, but not exclusively — in the name of God.

I will never recover from the savagery of learning these revelations about Black history in America, and I live and breath for the purpose of rebuking them. ~ Anne