Jena's strange fruit spreads across the land

This is a story about how there is no such thing as private sin, or sin that stays between what we think of as "the offender" and "the offended."

This is a story about how sin is a great big rock, and how dirty, rotten sinners (and that would be all of us) take that big rock and pitch it in the pond, just for the hell of it. And then big ripples spread across the water's surface from the splashdown point.

AND THE LITTLE WAVES upend little Johnny's little boat, prompting little Johnny to take out his frustration on his little sister. Which causes little Johnny's dad, upset that the commotion has disturbed his peace and quiet -- not to mention his fishing -- to beat the hell out of both of them.

Then, little Johnny's mom, upset that her old man has flown off the handle again, starts to think that maybe this is the last straw, that she ought to take the kids and leave his sorry ass.

Now consider that the nooses that hung from that schoolyard oak tree in Jena, La., constituted a damned big rock, and it made a damned big splash. And consider that the idea of responding to a black kid wanting to sit under the "white tree" with hangman's nooses -- a potent reminder of all the "strange fruit" that's hung from Southern trees throughout history -- doesn't come from nowhere.

Consider that it does take a village to raise a child, and that when it comes to hating your fellow man, you've got to be carefully taught.

The ripples from the sins of some hateful rednecks in Jena, La., suddenly start to resemble a hurricane on the open sea.

AND IT'S JUST BEEN BUMPED UP to a Category 5, as The Associated Press reports:

In the months since nooses dangling from a schoolyard tree raised racial tensions in Jena, La., the frightening symbol of segregation-era lynchings has been turning up around the country.

Nooses were left in a black Coast Guard cadet's bag, at a Long Island police station locker room, on a Maryland college campus, and, just this week, on the office door of a black professor at Columbia University in New York.

The noose - like the burning cross - is a generations-old means of instilling racial fear. But some experts suspect the Jena furor reintroduced some bigots to the rope. They say the recent incidents might also reflect white resentment over the protests in Louisiana.

"It certainly looks like it's been a rash of these incidents, and presumably, most of them are in response to the events in Jena," said Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks white supremacists and other hate groups. "I would say that as a more general matter, it seems fairly clear that noose incidents have been on the rise for some years."

Thousands of demonstrators, including the Revs. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, converged on Jena on Sept. 20 to decry what they called a racist double standard in the justice system. They protested the way six blacks were arrested on attempted murder charges in the beating of a white student, while three whites were suspended but not prosecuted for hanging nooses in a tree in August 2006.

The noose evokes the lynchings of the Jim Crow South and "is a symbol that can be deployed with no ambiguity. People understand exactly what it means," said William Jelani Cobb, a professor of black American history at Spelman College in Atlanta.

He said the Jena incident demonstrated to some racists how offensive the sight of a noose can be: "What Jena did was reintroduce that symbol into the discussion."

Though the terror of the civil rights era is gone, the association between nooses and violence - even death - remains, Potok said.

"The noose is replacing the burning cross in the mind of much of the public as the leading symbol of the Klan," Potok said.

I DON'T WANT TO HEAR a word of complaint from Jena's mau-mauing mayor about how John Mellencamp done went and did his town wrong. What's happened there -- and spread far and wide -- doesn't come out of nowhere, and I think we all have a pretty good idea about the origin of the sparks that lit a thousand fires.