The Trees

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.

"Money, Mississippi looks exactly like it sounds." (It's true...google it.) Money is the town where Emmet Till was brutally murdered in 1955, and the opening sentence of this unique book hints at the darkly hilarious, frequently shocking, and ultimately cathartic events that follow.

Using a murder mystery as its platform, the Booker shortlisted novel tells a story that begins with the murders of three present day descendants of the perpetrators of Till's murder (the real life murderers were acquitted). Curiously, each victim also has a dead Black man nearby, who, in the case of the male victims, is holding their severed testicles. A couple of Black detectives are called in from the state to help the yokelish local law enforcement puzzle it all out. The crimes escalate around the country, even involving the White House, and the White folk reach for their guns.

The descriptions of the locals in Money, Mississippi, are gut bustingly funny, and some might think a a bit mean. I don't know if they are accurate depictions or not, but when you find out why the victims are being targeted, those descriptions seem to be just what these folks deserve.

This author has written many books, but he is new to me. His writing is smart, really funny, and he uses humor brilliantly to get at some very hard truths about racism.