Percival Everett’s The Trees is a page-turner that opens with a series of brutal murders in the rural town of Money, Mississippi. When a pair of detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation arrive, they meet expected resistance from the local sheriff, his deputy, the coroner, and a string of racist White townsfolk. The murders present a puzzle, for at each crime scene there is a second dead body: that of a man who resembles Emmett Till.
The detectives suspect that these are killings of retribution, but soon discover that eerily similar murders are taking place all over the country. Something truly strange is afoot. As the bodies pile up, the MBI detectives seek answers from a local root doctor who has been documenting every lynching in the country for years, uncovering a history that refuses to be buried. In this bold, provocative book, Everett takes direct aim at racism …
Percival Everett’s The Trees is a page-turner that opens with a series of brutal murders in the rural town of Money, Mississippi. When a pair of detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation arrive, they meet expected resistance from the local sheriff, his deputy, the coroner, and a string of racist White townsfolk. The murders present a puzzle, for at each crime scene there is a second dead body: that of a man who resembles Emmett Till.
The detectives suspect that these are killings of retribution, but soon discover that eerily similar murders are taking place all over the country. Something truly strange is afoot. As the bodies pile up, the MBI detectives seek answers from a local root doctor who has been documenting every lynching in the country for years, uncovering a history that refuses to be buried. In this bold, provocative book, Everett takes direct aim at racism and police violence, and does so in fast-paced style that ensures the reader can’t look away. The Trees is an enormously powerful novel of lasting importance from an author with his finger on America’s pulse.
Winner of the 2022 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award
Shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize
Finalist for the 2022 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award
Longlisted for the 2022 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
is it a spoiler to say the ending was a disappointment?
Luckily the writing is so awesome I'm going to give it a reread soon so maybe the ending will grow on me.
A book about death, lynching and racism that makes you laugh out loud, that's a tall order but The Trees manages this.
Read it. I'm going to work my way through the rest of the vast body of work of this author hoping for equally compelling reads
White "good Christians" get slaughtered and mutilated in Money, Mississippi, and every single time a dead Black person is also found. The Black corpse disappears, and police and FBI have no clue what's going on.
We get to see how this feels for relatives of the victims, who turn out to be not so good and not so Christian at all. All current victims were perpetrators of lynchings. We get to read pages of names of Black lynching victims, and pages of lists of places where they were lynched - and we learn how police "forgot" to investigate, often because they were directly involved and so on.
And still, the book is written in a very funny way. It's a page-turner by design, I guess: we need to read about the lynchings, we need to understand they are part of the US history. And best way is a book that …
White "good Christians" get slaughtered and mutilated in Money, Mississippi, and every single time a dead Black person is also found. The Black corpse disappears, and police and FBI have no clue what's going on.
We get to see how this feels for relatives of the victims, who turn out to be not so good and not so Christian at all. All current victims were perpetrators of lynchings. We get to read pages of names of Black lynching victims, and pages of lists of places where they were lynched - and we learn how police "forgot" to investigate, often because they were directly involved and so on.
And still, the book is written in a very funny way. It's a page-turner by design, I guess: we need to read about the lynchings, we need to understand they are part of the US history. And best way is a book that makes every effort to be read. This is the book.
I find it important to remember this topic: lynchings, by white men, on no reason whatsoever, like with Emmitt Till, 14 years, who supposedly has said "Hi" to a white woman in Money, Mississippi, and was killed, slaughtered, mutilated, shot. His face was mutilated so much he wasn't recognizable anymore (s. Wikipedia for a picture of this by scrolling down to his funeral: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmett_Till). The white woman later recanted her story, but did not suffer any consequences. Tills murders were acquitted by a white jury.
Percival Everett’s THE TREES is the most sarcastic, gut-punchingly funny novel about the Emmett Till lynching. As I type that sentence, I think, What the hell? In the apt words of one of the characters from THE Trees, it is, “A sentence I never imagined myself saying.” Very on-brand that this book, which short-listed for the Booker Prize, gave me a meta moment with one of its characters. (The first paragraph contained a word I didn’t know: nescience; it means ignorance. Can you believe that?)
When I started reading Everett’s The Trees, I had no idea its subject matter. I picked it up because it was Everett’s latest novel, and critics loved it. I was first introduced to Everett at Oxford Conference for the Book decades ago. He was on a panel. He stated: “Every writer in America should be writing about race. Until we get that figured out, we …
Percival Everett’s THE TREES is the most sarcastic, gut-punchingly funny novel about the Emmett Till lynching. As I type that sentence, I think, What the hell? In the apt words of one of the characters from THE Trees, it is, “A sentence I never imagined myself saying.” Very on-brand that this book, which short-listed for the Booker Prize, gave me a meta moment with one of its characters. (The first paragraph contained a word I didn’t know: nescience; it means ignorance. Can you believe that?)
When I started reading Everett’s The Trees, I had no idea its subject matter. I picked it up because it was Everett’s latest novel, and critics loved it. I was first introduced to Everett at Oxford Conference for the Book decades ago. He was on a panel. He stated: “Every writer in America should be writing about race. Until we get that figured out, we shouldn’t write about anything else.” Or something like that.
So I come to the book all nescience and I’m reading and I’m like, wait. The first character’s last name is Bryant. In Money, Mississippi. Then comes the character Granny Carolyn—Carolyn Bryant is the notorious white woman who triggered the murder of Emmet Till (I wrote at my blog about the commemoration we attended.). By this point, I’ve already re-read sentences two, three times because they’re so hilarious (the first scene takes place beside an empty aboveground backyard pool in a “suburb” of Money called Small Change.) And I realize: we’re laughing at the folks responsible for Emmett Till’s early, terrible death.
It’s not much of a spoiler to say Caroline and her descendants (as well as J. W. Milam’s descendants) don’t fare well. Death ensues. Two Black Mississippi Bureau of Investigation agents arrive. They become our primary narrators. Eventually, an actual FBI agent joins them. Her name is Herberta, last name Hind. Her parents nicknamed her Herbie. Say her name out loud. Everette is using the “lowest” form of humor as the tool for delivering the highest satire and irony imaginable. It’s not just funny. It’s genius.
Why all this snickering and jewel-like irony? It works to totally castrate the power of the racists. They disintegrate into a laugh and blow away. Left is the honoring of the thousands and thousands and thousands of Americans who other Americans murdered by lynching. (These killings are NOT confined to the South; not in the book, not in real life). Everett’s Trees does what so many books and films don’t: it strips the racists of agency and power.
I will be talking about this dark comic supernatural murder mystery to everyone I meet for a good long while.