Review of THE TREES by Percival Everett

 4 Stars

I came across this title on the shortlist for the 2022 Booker Prize for Fiction.  It’s a powerful genre-mixing book.

Money, Mississippi, is the town where in 1955 14-year-old Emmett Till was lynched after being accused of making suggestive remarks to a white woman named Carolyn Bryant.  In 2018, Wheat Bryant is found mutilated and murdered with the corpse of a black man found next to him.  The corpse disappears, only to reappear twice next to two other murder victims.  Black officers from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation and the FBI arrive to investigate.

The novel is a hybrid genre; it is social commentary that has elements of a police procedural, comedy, and horror.  The book examines the legacy of lynching and police shootings, a legacy which Americans tend to ignore.  The detectives who come to assist in the investigation add much of the comedy with their banter.  And the names given many of the white characters are hilarious:  Cad Fondle, Pinch Wheyface, Hickory Spit, and Chalk Pellucid.  Considering the subject matter, the humour might seem inappropriate, but it both provides some brief relief and emphasizes the seriousness of the issue.  Off-hand comments like blacks joining the police force “’So Whitey wouldn’t be the only one in the room with a gun’” reveal so much.  An element of the horror genre is added with the apparent rising of the lynched dead to exact revenge.

The title is a reference to the trees from which lynching victims were hanged, but it also suggests family trees.  The sins of the fathers have been passed down to their descendants.  Not much has changed.  The whites are unabashed rednecks, wearing red caps and spewing racial epithets.  And racists are found everywhere, even in positions of power.  For instance, President Trump delivers a speech in one chapter, a speech which leaves no doubt of his racism. 

Whites are stereotyped as incredibly stupid bigots.  This portrayal is intentional:  it mirrors the one-dimensional way blacks were perceived.  The author gives the whites no sympathy; again, this reflects how blacks received none.

It is not difficult to determine the author’s intention:  “’Everybody talks about genocides around the world, but when the killing is slow and spread over a hundred years, no one notices.  Where there are no mass graves, no one notices.  American outage is always for show.  It has a shelf life.’”  America is as racist as it has ever been.  There have been no consequences for the killings of blacks.  Such killings are seen merely as an academic matter:  “’One hopes that dispassionate, scientific work will generate proper outrage.’”  Of course, it doesn’t.  The book imagines what would happen if there were a reckoning for such atrocities. 

Chapter 64 is chilling.  It consists of a list of names of people who were lynched; the list goes on for pages:  “’When I write the names they become real, not just statistics.  When I write the names they become real again.  It’s almost like they get a few more seconds here.’”  Chapter 102 is revealing; it lists places where lynchings/shootings have occurred.  Though Mississippi is repeated most often, 20 other states are also mentioned. 

This book is shocking and devastating and should generate outrage at racism both past and present.