Lillian Smith’s Strange Fruit ends with the lynching of Henry McIntosh and the community members’ reactions to the murder. Following Ed Anderson murder of Tracy Deen, the townspeople, specifically the poor white mill hands, seek vengeance and they accuse Henry of murdering Tracy because Henry moved Tracy’s body off of the road into the palmetto bushes. The fact that Henry is innocent doesn’t matter. The mob, whipped up into a frenzy and seeking retribution takes Henry and lynches him on the ballfield in front of a large crowd of Maxwell’s white residents. The act of state-sanctioned violence, along with the community members’ thoughts following Henry’s lynching, highlight how even someone who condemns the violence succumbs to it.

Tom Harris, the owner of a mill, thinks about the role Henry’s lynching has on the psyche of the community. After one of his workers approaches him about higher wages, Tom sits and ponders what is about to happen, specifically that “it took one dead n***** a year to keep Bill’s liver regulated.” In his mind, he sees Tracy’s family sitting up with there son as his body lies in the coffin and in the same thought he knows that Henry will disappear: “Men would sit up with the corpse and Henry would vanish in the night. That would be all.” Tom could do something about it, stop Henry’s murder, but he refuses to do anything, allowing millhands in his employ act out their racist violence against Henry and the Black community.

When Sam Perry, the Black doctor, comes to speak with Tom, the millowner makes Sam wait as he finishes up office work. Sam waits, patiently, and when he begins to speak, he tells Tom, “Things are likely to be bad around here unless . . . you and Cap’n Rushton and some of the other good white folks do something about it.” He ends his opening plea by telling his self-proclaimed “friend,” “I’d be much obliged, Mr. Harris, if you could help.” Even though Tom and Sam claim to be friends, Same becomes submissive when asking Tom to intervene and stop the lynch mob. He becomes subservient to the wealthy white man.

Tom tries to wash his hands of Henry’s lynching, telling Sam, “No decent white man takes part in a lynching.” It’s just the “riffraff.” Tom continues by, ultimately, implicating himself in the mob’s action when he says that those looking to lynch Henry “were Mr. Deen’s friends. This crowd’s after something. Colored folks moving North . . . picking time . . . hands scarce . . . reckon it’s about time to — .” Tom leaves the sentence hanging, as the thickness of the mob descends. He points to the economic strains placed on the millhands and “riffraff” that lead them to mob violence, but what he fails to do it acknowledge his role in it by keeping wages low, suppressing attempts to unionize, and controlling government. Sam tells his “friend” that he, as well as himself, is culpable in Henry’s murder, and this prompts Tom to try and stop the mob, but he fails.

After Henry’s murder, we see how different people in the community reacted. Tom, sitting on the porch with his family, speaks about the “riffraff” from his own mill who had a hand in the lynching. He calls them “hard-working” and says they are “[g]ood to their families.” Two of them even serve in the church. Charlie, Tom’s son, pushes back, telling his dad that when he thinks bout the South he can only envision “a white man kneeling on a n*****’s stomach” and that people can’t even “be a Christian in the South” because he, along with his father, “lynch the Negro’s soul” every day. Tom ends by telling his son and daughter that he hopes they will someday find an answer to the violence, thus he acquiesces to its persistent nature.

In Killers of the Dream, Smith points out how the bargain between Mr. Rich White (Tom Harris) and Mr. Poor White (the “riffraff”) leads to oppression and violence. While the bargain may have provided Tom with wealth and status, it also unleashed anger, hatred, and violence upon the region, and instead of choosing to fix it, putting the monster back into the box, Tom seeks to kick it down the road. As Smith writes, “The responsible, educated, well-to-do group who thought of themselves as dominant (or hoped they were) did not know how to stop this monster created of poverty, fear, ignorance, guilt, political greed, and crazed by the drug of white supremacy.”

Smith understood how the bargain, which harmed poor whites led to lynch mobs. After describing a man sitting on a porch talking about crops and whittling a stick, she says that “a man-hunt took on zest” and excitement “with no more thought given the running, frightened human being than to a running, frightened animal.” The dehumanization spread through the wealthy white’s blessing. Brother Dunwoodie in Strange Fruit epitomizes this when he tells Tracy to marry Dorothy Pusey but to keep Nonnie as his Black side piece. Mrs. Stephenson highlights it in her treatment of Bess, and Mrs. Harris in her treatment of Dessie.

Smith points out, in both her novel and her memoir, that when the wealthy white allows pervasive vitriol to seep into every aspect of the community (media, education, church, etc.) then violence ensues. She writes, “After all, the ‘best’ people of the South, the leaders, the preachers, the writers, the editors, those who give value to living, said Negroes were less than human and were not to be treated as human while alive, why then did they have to die like humans!” Tracy, even though he claims Henry as his friend, dehumanizes him. Trace, even though he claims to love Nonnie, dehumanizes her. Tom, even though he claims Sam as his friend, dehumanizes Sam, making him wait and take on a subservient position.

Nothing, though, changes. After the mob mutilates and murders Henry, C’apn Rushton falls alseep in his own bed, happy to be there and not amidst the crowd, even though his millhands, like Tom’s “riffraff,” murdered Henry. Bess, Nonnie, and Dessie, in the final chapter of the novel, wake up the next day, exhausted, but get dressed in their domestic uniforms to go work for the white families who were complicit in Henry’s murder. They must go on. Smith lays bare, in all of her work, the ways that segregation and white supremacy make everyone complicit, whether they had a direct hand in violence or pulled the mosquito net around them and the covers up to their chin and went to sleep.

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