The Trees by Percival Everett
Text Publishing
Pp. 308
This
contemporary novel of rage, violence and vengeance is underpinned with
supernatural Gothic undertones, like Get Out or other Jordan Peele films,
and moments of obvious humour that make it clear this could be a film. People
begin showing up dead in hog-tying incidents across the country with seemingly
nothing to relate them. The police (Ho, Chi and Minh) are called in to
investigate the first death at Money, Mississippi, and they note that at each
crime scene there is a second dead body; a disfigured Black man who
mysteriously resembles Emmett Till (who was lynched in Money in 1955). It soon
transpires that all the white folk brutally murdered have ties to historical
racism.
The novel is populated with
characters from central casting including country bumpkins who pepper their
speech with colourful expressions: “Your pappy didn’t have sense enough to pour
piss out of a boot with the directions wrote on the heel.” We also encounter a
local waitress named Gertrude who could just be a friendly gossip with a
notepad, but she seems to know a lot and turns up in many places, such as a
speakeasy bar with secret rooms out the back. She invites her friend, scholar
Damon Thruff, to town to meet her great-grandmother, Mama Z, an old blind woman
with more than a whiff of voodoo magic about her.
Damon has written an academic
book on racism, and Mama Z encourages him to witness the more personal and
emotive repercussions of this evil. She keeps records: “a file here for nearly
every person lynched in this country since 1913.” The files are contained in
cabinets which fill rooms, and the names are also embossed on the cover of the
book. Damon obsessively transcribes the names he finds in the files. “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. Do
you know what I mean? I would never be able to make up this many names. The
names have to be real. They have to be real. Don’t they?” Mama Z tells him
that, “Every White person in this country, if they didn’t lynch somebody
themselves, then somebody in their family tree did.” The names are listed
individually within the book, and they occupy four pages. Written history is
harder to ignore, and Everett is giving it space.
“They
were like zebras, he thought – no one had stripes just like any other, but who
could tell one zebra from another? He found it all depressing, not that
lynching could be anything but. However, the crime, the practice, the religion
of it, was becoming more pernicious as he realised the similarity of their
deaths had caused these men and women to be at once erased and coalesced like
one piece, like one body. They were all number and no number at all, many and
one, a symptom, a sign.”
Damon records the names in
pencil, so that “When I’m done, I’m going to erase every name, set them free.” There
is power in the recitation of a dead person’s name. Mama Z believes that White
people lynch Black men for sport, explaining to Damon, “Less than 1 percent of
lynchers were ever convicted of a crime. Only a fraction of those ever served a
sentence. Teddy Roosevelt claimed the main cause of lynching was Black men
raping White women. You know what? That didn’t happen.”
The retribution is strong and timeless,
as Damon and the cops seem of this world but the people they are investigating
do not. The linear and logical particulars of the plot do not entirely make
sense, but the oppressive feeling and the need for justice are pervasive. Mama
Z claims, “Everybody talks about genocides around the world, but when the
killing is slow and spread over a hundred years, no one notices. When there are
no mass graves, no one notices. American outrage is always for show. It has a
shelf life.” Percival Everett is demanding a reckoning, and it hits with the
same power as Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit. Without irony, those Southern
trees are doing a lot of heavy lifting.
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