It is the rare novel that can strike a delicate balance between satire and violence, a feat achieved by the celebrated writer Percival Everrett in his most recent book, The Trees. Perhaps Everrett is one of the only writers working today who could manage to make a book reckoning with the history of lynching in the United States into a truly brilliant piece of satire whose sharpness and wit infuses every page. The Trees begins with a classic murder mystery conceit: a man is found dead in his home in the small town of Money, Mississippi, and authorities are surprised to find the body of a mysterious young black man at the crime scene as well, whose face is disfigured and beaten beyond recognition. The local police are even more baffled when another local man winds up dead, and the corpse of that same young black man is found at the scene (who had mysteriously disappeared from the morgue earlier that week). The Mississippi Bureau of Investigation sends two black detectives to investigate these crimes, Jim Davis and Ed Morgan, who immediately run into the brick wall of of extreme prejudice an backwards beliefs about race from the local police and townspeople. Davis and Morgan quickly piece together, as many readers will, that the deaths in Money are related to the lynching of Emmett Till, who was brutally murdered in Money by a group of white townspeople for the crime of allegedly whistling at a white woman a couple of decades ago. The detectives believe the corpse that keeps showing up at the crime scenes and disappearing from the morgue is Till’s, who is exacting some revenge from beyond the grave—especially since the men who were killed are the sons of the men who lynched Till themselves.
The mysterious killings set off the resurgence of the Klan in Money, portrayed as a group of imbeciles who aren’t intelligent enough to organize themselves around anything other than their base hatred of black people. The townspeople of Money are overall not an impressive bunch, and much of the novel’s humor comes from poking fun at their backwardness. The dialogue between the white families is quite hilarious, and clearly Everrett is referencing the racist literary tradition of rendering the dialogue of black characters in a sort of pseudo-English dialect riddled with spelling and grammar issues, and flipping the script for comic effect. The basically illiterate townspeople are constantly tripping over their words, unable to express themselves without dropping a racial slur every other word. In one scene, Everrett captures the ethos of one of the white characters, writing, “Charlene thumbed through the Popular Mechanics magazines and tried to eavesdrop. She looked at the science magazine instead of People. She hated them intellectual elites in People.” Detective Davis and Morgan can barely contain themselves laughing at the locals, especially the local police force, who are comically helpless in the investigation.
But soon the central thread of the novel reveals itself, as white people all over America are showing up dead, all of them with a disfigured and unidentified body at the scene. All of these white people are connected with historic lynchings and racial violence, not only against black people, but of Asian immigrants, queer people, and so on. It becomes clear that some sort of supernatural historical reckoning is happening across America, where the long deceased lynching victims are seeking revenge against the racist white institution that allowed their deaths to happen, and their murderers to walk free without justice. Detectives Davis and Morgan are introduced by a friendly diner waitress to Mama Z, her great grandmother, who has been endeavoring on the staggering historical project of chronicling every lynching that has occurred in her 113 year lifetime. Mama Z is a sort of mystical figure, endowed with a sort of magical connection to history and memory. Mama Z is also introduced by her great granddaughter to Damon Thruff, an author and academic whose body of work has touched upon black history and racial violence. Mama Z and Damon Thruff provide a fascinating contrast in the discourse surrounding racial violence in the U.S., whose differing methods are both driving at the practice of witnessing and reckoning with the disturbing history of racial violence in this country—the two characters perfectly illustrate the tension that Everrett is holding at the center of this novel between the supernatural and intellectual threads he’s weaving.
The novel is ultimately a fascinating and reverential testament to the lives that have been touched by racist violence, and the many victims of brutal lynchings throughout history. With a frankness that honors the request of Emmett Till’s mother that her son’s beaten and bloodied face be on the front page of newspapers so that no American could turn away from the reality of his murder, Everrett’s novel confronts the graphic racial violence that has plagued black Americans for generations. The novel’s plot swells to implicate not only the American South, a region with a long documented sordid history of racism, but cities and towns up north and all across the country. Everrett is asserting that all white Americans have inherited a responsibility for the sins of their ancestors, and their continued participation in the racist institutions that terrorize black Americans to this day. The Trees is one of the most formally innovative and unique novels I’ve read in recent months, and Everrett’s singular voice will make this one difficult for readers to shake off.