The Trees by Percival Everett
Review by Hannah Clark
When I was an undergraduate studying English Literature, one of my professors used to begin each seminar by asking us each to describe a book we had just read using only a single word. Whoever she deemed to have come closest to capturing the essence of the novel would win her favour and, sometimes, a Cadbury’s Twirl. If I had to play that game with Percival Everett’s latest novel, I would choose the word: mordant. The Trees is a grizzly murder mystery set in the notorious town of Money, Mississippi and it is, by turn, both hilarious and horrifying.
Money, Mississippi may ring a bell: a distant alarm in the back of your mind. It is the town in which Carolyn Bryant Donham accused fourteen-year-old Emmett Till of whistling and grabbing at her at the country store: an accusation that led to the twentieth century’s most infamous lynching. On August 28, 1955, Donham’s husband, Roy Bryant, and her brother-in-law, J.W. Milam, kidnapped, tortured, and killed the boy (who was in Money visiting his relatives.)
The case was reported around the world, but ended in Bryant and Milam’s acquittal by an all-white jury. During a 2017 interview, Donham, by then comfortably into her eighties, admitted that she had lied about her interaction with Till, though she made no apology for her role in his death.
In his 2017 article published in the New York Times, Richard Pérez-Peña points out that: “As a matter of narrow justice, it makes little difference; true or not, her claims did not justify any serious penalty, much less death.” However it is clear that her lack of apology is symptomatic of a culture that is not willing to confront the enormity of the injustice and violence that has been and continues to be directed to Black people in America.
In The Trees, Everett confronts white America’s relative ambivalence to the legacy of lynching with a carefully constructed ambivalence of his own. The Trees makes a mockery of self-imposed white ignorance and it is an unflinching questioning of what it takes to make America notice a plague of terror spreading through communities? The hypothesis Everett calmly presents is that in order to notice a Black body, there must also be a white one.
The novel begins gently. Hillbilly hi-jinks. Meet: Wheat Bryant, an ex-trucker who has lost his job in a drunk-driving incident that went viral; his wife, Charlene, who is using a long-wave radio to have phone-sex with other truckers; his no-good cousin Junior Junior Milam; and his mother, Granny C, who arrives on a stolen motorized shopping cart while the family bickers about whether or not to invest in pigs. Granny C is uninterested in the conversation and keeps to herself, reflecting on “something I wished I hadn’t done. About the lie I told all them years back on that n- boy.”
Granny C, it turns out, is a fictionalised Carolyn Bryant Donham and her family cares little for her guilty secret, unwilling or unable to see the connections between her history and their present day suffering.
In the opening chapters, first Junior Junior and then Wheat are each found castrated, barbed wire partially severing their necks. Beside each body lies a dead Black man in a suit, disfigured as Till was, and clutching the white man’s severed testicles in his hand. The investigation is given to two Black detectives: Ed Morgan and Jim Davis, from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, who are received with open hostility by the all-white police force in Money. The detectives, paired together because they struggle to get on with anyone else, lace their banter with a spiked cynicism :
‘“Fuck,” Ed said, “I never even heard of Money, Mississippi until this morning. And lay off my damn car. It’s comfortable. I don’t care what you say. This motherfucker’s got three hundred thousand miles on it.”
“A thousand for every pound of your fat ass.”
Ed cut Jim an evil look. “Open up the damn file and remind me what we’re getting into.”’
Later, when similar murders occur elsewhere in Mississippi and then spread throughout the country, Ed and Jim are joined by Special Agent Herberta Hind, a no-nonsense Black female FBI agent, and their quest to find the person or people responsible for the crimes intensifies. Could it be a perverted serial killer with a sick sense of humour? An army of corpse-toting ninjas? Vengeful ghosts? The Trees entertains all options.
This is not through any casual vagueness on Everett’s part — rather it serves as a wryly raised eyebrow at the pervasive amnesia enjoyed by white America in the face of its horrific history. In 1955, when photographs of Till's disfigured corpse made headlines, the country, it was argued, was not ready to confront racism and the matter of lynchings; even those at the heart of the problem could not make sense of them. Now in the twenty-first century we have dashboard cams and YouTube but it seems little else has changed. America is still not ready. Everett acknowledges the excuses, but he does not accept them. Within the novel, white supremacists are presented not as any significant threat, but rather as idiots partaking in a self-perpetuated absurdist satire. One chapter is set in a local Klan meeting that is being managed poorly by the men gathered, with all the clumsy and disorganised banality of a satirised PTA meeting. (UK readers might recall the recorded ZOOM meeting of a Parish Council that went viral in 2020). Reverend Doctor Fondle attempts to steer the discussion toward finding a solution to the killing spree but he cannot get the group to focus, as they lament the old days:
‘“Used to be back when my daddy was alive, we had meetins all the time, every week,” Jared said’
“And they used to have cross burnins a lot more and family picnics and softball games and all such,” said Donald. “I remember eatin’ cake next to that glowing cross. I loved my mama’s cake.”’
In such fleeting exchanges, Everett exposes the glorification of a past that was, by any rational standard, horrendously unjust, and the utter lack of accountability that many white people cling to in order to avoid change. What was terrorism to some, was a spoiled picnic to others. And so the cycle continues.
This collective lack of cultural awareness is further explored within the novel by the character of Mama Z. The only character we see remain in her own space, surrounded only by her own legacies and curated history, Mama Z is 104 years old and introduced as the person to see if you want to know the truth about Money, Mississippi. It transpires that she has spent years quietly constructing an archive of every lynching that has occurred in her lifetime, including that of her father. Her home is filled with meticulously arranged filing cabinets that do not amount to a sentimental dossier, but a historical collection of otherwise forgotten casualties of ritualised murder. Even the other Black characters are shocked by the many files and the hundreds of names they contain. The histories these files hold have been hidden and pushed aside and now, it would seem, they are making themselves known by force.
Like Mama Z and her meticulous observation of the facts, Everett remains a cool narrator, reporting each new killing neutrally. This creates a disconcerting atmosphere within the novel, and a growing unease for the reader, but it is also eerily familiar. In his refusal to outright condemn the killer(s) whoever they may be, Everett is mirroring the ‘thoughts and prayers’ tolerance for loss of life that the American often media adopts. It is a risky technique and could appear callous in less experienced hands but Everett makes it work.
Creating art about racial violence is an ethical tightrope, even for Black artists and writers. There have been disagreements over the right to draw on the experience of others, particularly in the wake of the 2020 murder of George Floyd and the wave of artistic tributes that followed. To profit from the legacy of Black trauma, or to take an individual such as Floyd (or Till) and place his likeness or his name within a work of art can be considered inherently problematic no matter who the creator is: the argument being that victims of racial violence have been robbed of their right to life, and there is an argument that to weave them into works of fiction is to further strip away their individuality and reduce their death to an objet d’art of political struggle.
Everett acknowledges this issue within his writing in an abstract way. If the fictionalised dead cannot be fully realised versions of themselves, neither can the truly fictitious characters encountered. The Trees has a complex and sprawling cast, all of whom are given enough space within the novel to fully resolve their particular dilemmas: Granny C and her hopeless guilt; Jim, Ed, and Herberta, who battle with their dual identities and the cultural difficulties of being ‘Black and Blue’; Sheriff Red Jetty and the discovery which stands him in stark contrast with his place in the Money community; Mama Z and her hidden archive. No one achieves true catharsis, because, in order to experience catharsis, one must experience justice; and justice, Everett seems to say, is still only to be found in fiction. The Trees is a bold and compelling examination of racism in America: an uncomfortable read and a vital one.