Thursday 16 June 2022

“The Trees“ by Percival Everett - review


“The Trees” by Percival Everett:


First things first: This is a very funny novel. And it’s driving theme is American racism.


The Trees is the genre satirization of a detective story involving a series of grisly murders related to America’s long, horrifying history of lynching people of color. It makes a great story and fast-paced page-turner. Everett aimes at racism and police violence and his style ensures suspenseful and entertaining reading.


The story opens in the backwater small town of Money, Mississippi, a “shithole semi-town“. For those in knowledge of American history, a historical location. The matriarch of the Bryant family, Carolyn, called Granny C, now an invalid, dottering octogenerian, is the woman whose false accusation led to the horrific lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Money, in 1955. Till, Black boy, visiting relatives from Chicago, was kidnapped, tortured, lynched and dumped in the Tallahatchie River. In the novel the fictional Carolyn regrets her accusations, of the real Carolyn Bryant exists the disputed version, that she recanted her accusation in the 2000s. 


Now her close male descendants are found cruelly, beastly murdered and mutilated in a manner similar to that of the lynching victim. Their testicles have been cut off and placed in the hands of a disfigured, bloated, ghastly beaten dead, unidentified Black body, dressed in a suspicious Depression-era outfit. This body soon after mysteriously disappears from the scene only to reappear at another ghastly crime scene with another White victim’s balls in his hand. There seems to be no other explanation to the who-dunnit than otherworldy powers. Nevertheless, the narrative stays generally grounded in realism.


Soon all over the States more castrated bodies turn up, and not only dead Blacks but Asians, too are involved and we begin to believe that something takes its revenge on the crimes of America, that some moral reckoning is unfolding. 


The MBI, the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, much to the chagrin of the very white and very racist local police force, sends two Black detectives, Jim Davis and Ed Morgan, to aid the investigation. They are later joined by a Special Agent of the FBI, a Black woman named Herberta Hind. In most other stories of the South the Black characters are often one-dimensional and have to rely on the grandiosity of their white counterparts. Here it is the Black characters who have to deal with the not-so-suprising simplicity of White folks. 


In detective fiction, in general it is good guys vs. bad. There is the hero who chases and catches the bad guy. Justice is clear and obvious, it is neatly black and white. In The Trees the direction towards where the moral compass points is not so clear anymore.


The real satire takes place in the sketching of the locals, the law enforcement and people in “power“ (even Trump has a cameo appearance) as white trash laughingstock. There is often dialogue in the local vernacular, uneducated pidgin English, that renders them even more as slapstick figures sadly based on reality. The naming of most of the characters, too is done in slapstick manner, there is a Junior Junior, there is a Pick. L. Dill, there is even Triple J, the son of Junior Junior. His mother is called by her family Hot Mama Yeller, her CB handle.


Enter Mama Z, the Black local root doctor with a big knowledge of everything and about everyone. She is over a hundred years old and has been accumulating over the years a huge collection of every recorded lynching that took place since 1913, chronicling “the work of the devil”. “If you want to know a place, you talk to its history”. At one point the lyrics to the old song “Strange Fruit” appear in their entirety and remind us that this narrative about America’s race problem has been told already for decades and not much since has changed. 


Everett has a great talent for wordplay and it is a joy to follow his characters in their verbal interactions. He also has a great sense of satire which is hilarious but also often quite hurtfully gut-punching. He puts a finger on the sins of the Nation and accuses all white Americans who have benefited from the terror and systematic repression. In choosing the masquerade of a detective novel and satirizing it he is able to perform the difficult task of approaching a very sensitive topic, the shameful conduct, the inhumanity and cruelty of America towards Blacks, and makes it easier to digest. 


The story unfolds in ever and ever more slapstick manner but in the end catharsis does not come, there is no offering of solutions and we are left to our own conclusions. This is not necessarily a bad thing. The Trees manages to evoke a dream of retribution that pays justice to all the sadly lost lives in the file cabinet of Mama Z.


A great book!


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