The Trees

A small town in Mississippi is shocked by a series of brutal killings, where in each case the corpse of an unidentified Black man is found next to the even more badly mutilated body of an unpopular white resident. Bizarrely, it seems to be the same Black man each time, and the body has an odd resemblance to a certain historical photograph. The local sheriff’s office is overwhelmed, and external detectives are sent in from State and Federal forces to assist with the investigation. The locals have to mind their words when it becomes clear that all these outsiders are Black…

As everyone says, it’s a mystery how Everett managed to write a genuinely funny book about lynchings. Part of the answer seems to be Everett’s use of a Swiftian show more style of satire that exaggerates reality to the point of absurdity and sees absolutely no need to cater to the requirements of good taste, but there’s obviously more to it than that. There was something about the set-up that reminded me oddly of Terry Pratchett’s angrier books — Everett makes the cliché southern small town (and perhaps, by extension, the whole United States and its troubled history of racist violence) into a world as weird and remote from common-sense reality as Pratchett’s Discworld, allowing him to make us laugh at things that would be exceedingly dark and disturbing in any other context.

Of course, there is a serious message behind all the clever literary foolery: Everett is making fun of the right-wing notion of “race war” or “threats to white America” by imagining what those things would look like if they did exist, and he also wants us to understand how much we owe it to the victims of racism and slavery to remember their stories. In some ways, he’s coming to the same point as Toni Morrison, but from a diametrically opposed perspective. show less

Part police procedural, part savage satire, part tragic history, but also funny as hell. A white man is savagely murdered and mutilated in Money, Mississippi, and found alongside the body of a black man strongly resembling Emmett Till. The black man’s body goes missing, until it turns up again when another white man is killed and mutilated. The main characters are two black detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, and much of the humor comes from their dealings with the small-town white-trash racists they encounter in the course of their investigation. Just when you think you’ve got things figured out, things take a deep dive. The ending is just perfect.

Baffling murders, gruesome and apparently vengeful, are troubling the small town of Money, Mississippi---two White men, found separately, each strangled with barbed wire, each emasculated, each with a battered and dirty Black corpse nearby. Both White men have a family connection to the men believed to have murdered Emmett Till 60 years before. Then, the decrepit old White woman who first accused Emmett of whistling at her, and later recanted her story, is found dead of natural causes...but also accompanied by the same--or a very similar--Black corpse. It all proves too much for Sheriff Red Jetty and his force. Enter two special agents from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation...two Black special agents from the MBI. They don't make show more a lot of progress in figuring out what the devil is going on either...but for a while they, and the reader, have a hell of a lot of fun trying. There are some of the darkest bits of humor I have ever encountered in the first two hundred pages of this book, and I could not put it down. Everett's characters are drawn with wicked accuracy, and named with a whimsy that defies description. As deaths multiply all across the U. S., the mysterious unidentified unmutilated companion corpses begin to include Chinese and Native American men in addition to Black men. The situation gets less amusing, more profound, more bewildering and even the instigators of the original retributive killings do not understand what they have set in motion. There is no subtlety here, and ultimately not the slightest suggestion of hope for a resolution of either the burgeoning Rising, or the historical atrocities that brought it all into being. Unforgettable. show less

Anger is an energy
-John Lydon - Rise

And I'll rise up, I'll rise like the day
I'll rise up, I'll rise unafraid
I'll rise up
And I'll do it a thousand times again
And I'll rise up, high like the waves
I'll rise up in spite of the ache
I'll rise up
And I'll do it a thousand times again
-Andra Day - Rise Up

Alabama's gotten me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam
- Nina Simone - Mississippi Goddam

Southern trees bear a strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black bodies swingin' in the Southern breeze
Strange fruit hangin' from the poplar trees
-Milt Raskin - Strange Fruit

A few years back a couple of friends, just days apart, suggested to me that I read Percival Everett's A Touch of Blue." I show more meant to, I really did, but my TBR rivals K2 and I just never got there. Last year I read a great review of Telephone in the NYT, and I meant to read it, and (repeat the first verse). Then recently my GR friend Robin gave a rhapsodic review to Everett's I Am not Sidney Poitier and I decided I needed to turn intention into action. Alas, with all those good reviews of three specific books, I opted to start with Everett's most recent book, The Trees. I am now mad at myself for not picking up Everett's earlier books.

The Trees is a look at racism in America built on the history of lynching and using the conventions of southern satire, police procedural, and horror. Sounds a little crazy, I know, but it works perfectly. The book is smart, and affecting, and radical in its way. One of the characters in the book is a brilliant academic who writes about racism, one of the other characters notes the dispassion in his work, and he says something like the dispassionate recitation of facts is there to provide the information and the reader supplies the outrage. I agree with that, but sometimes that only works in theory. Everett is clearly a restrained writer, the kind of writer I like, who lets me feel my way about things, but here he shows his cards. This is the least dispassionate book I can imagine. It is stark, it is violent, and Everett does not shrink from inserting himself and telling you that the more things change the more they stay the same, telling you that you should be outraged. And he is right, you should.

I don't want to make this seem grim though. It is also a wryly funny revenge fantasy peopled by absurdly named side characters (my favorite is Helvetica Quip, or maybe Herbie Hind, or maybe Junior Junior and his son Triple J) and our blandly named main characters, Jim and Ed. The heart of the action is in Money, Mississippi infamous for being the place Emmett Till was lynched. I am sure everyone knows that the white woman who claimed Emmett Till whistled at her sort of recanted her story when she was an old woman. I mean, I guess the recantation made identifiable one more slab of evil in human form, but even if she had been telling the truth the crime/lynching would not have been any less horrible. When it appears Emmett Till's ghost has risen to exact revenge against the families of the men who lynched him and the woman who lied, the MBI and later the FBI are called in. Then when other ghosts appear to rise all over the country, Black and Chinese and Native American, apparently also exacting revenge, things really heat up. Alongside the colorful descriptions of the modern revenge killings, apparently perpetrated by ghosts or reanimated corpses, are lists of the men and women lynched in America, and those lists are followed by the names of all the places where racial hatred cost people their lives. Horrible lists. Scarier than any ghost.

Seven years ago I took my son to Selma and Montgomery to walk the streets people trod on, miles and miles, back and forth to work during the bus boycott. We visited the churches which were so integral to the civil rights movement. I raised my son in Atlanta, he attended elementary school in the Old 4th Ward. Our temple's sister congregation was Ebenezer Baptist, and our own congregation's building was bombed by the Klan. My kid had spent his fair share of time walking historically important streets and sitting in historically important houses of worship so the Freedom Trail vacation might have seemed like a bit too much, but I wanted most of all to take him to the Montgomery Lynching Memorial. Designed by Maya Lin (who designed the Vietnam Memorial on the Mall in Washington among many other things, and this year had a really wonderful climate change installation in Madison Park here in NYC with an exhibit on its development at just down the road at Fotografiska.) it lists the names of every person known to have died by lynching, while acknowledging there were many more never recorded. We spent 4 hours reading every name, and where any other information was available reading that. We both walked in with a commitment to social justice and a history of working for change but still the memorial was life-changing for us both because there was nothing historical about it, those names were there in the moment, and they were real people not abstractions. This book, with its lists, has the same effect. It is stunning. What this man does with words -- the wordplay is next level, but at the same time the language is pretty spare and gritty. The way Everett puts all that spare language together makes it sing, ugly sing, the way the blues are described by Ed and Jim on their visit to Beale St. I don't usually post my kindle highlights here, but for this book I will. Check out these fragments if you are interested. It will tell you a lot about the book.

One note: members of Trumpster Fire Nation are going to hate this, but they would have anyway even if the attack was less frontal. show less

This novel begins with an apparent double murder in Money, Mississippi. Then one of the bodies disappears from the morgue. When another man is found murdered, and the missing corpse is with the body, things get weird. And then two special detectives for the MBI (Mississippi Bureau of Investigation) show up to solve the crime and find the (again) missing corpse.

This is a novel that defies easy description. It's a novel about lynching that is also really funny? A humorous novel about racism? Whatever it is, it's best book I've read this year.

Set during the time period of the Trump's first presidency, Percival Everett’s novel, The Trees, opens in Money, Mississippi, the place where Emmett Till was lynched in 1955 for supposedly having addressed a White woman while being Black. In this dark social satire, which escalates into a bloodbath, three relatives of people involved in Till’s death turn up dead and mutilated, apparently killed by a Black battered corpse found nearby. The trouble is, this corpse continues to disappear from custody, only to turn up at later crime scenes.

Sent to Money are two Black detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigations, and they are later joined by a Black FBI agent seeking to untangle the supernatural aspects of these crimes. These show more three individuals are what make this story such an engaging read. Everett provides them, as well as the other characters, with crisp dialogue of wisecracks and black humor that delights the mind’s ear. Meanwhile, though dressed as a police procedural, the crime scene it presents is our country’s past sins. The novel is a caricature of the South’s redneck culture, intent on showing that not much has changed since the Civil War.

In the book, the first three murders spark copycat killings across the United States, resurrecting a marauding mob of ghostly Blacks and Chinese intent on revenge. Even the guarded environs of the White House are not immune from their reach. While the story ultimately spirals into unbelievability, its dark humor provides a rich stew to savor. The ending left me incredulous, but its haunting message of sweet revenge resonated. The Trees is a strange and unsettling novel, combining crime and horror to address this country’s history of lynching its minority citizens. show less

Blackbird singing

Read by Dwayne Glaption
Length: 7 hrs and 43 mins

Wow! It’s really the only word needed to describe this excellent novel. But wait, there’s more.

Of course a synopsis won’t do. I have no desire to spoil this must-read for anyone. The genre? Well it’s dark and funny and tragic and mysterious all at once. It starts here.

In the neighborhood of Small Change in the town of Money, Mississippi a white family comprising of Charlene (Hot Mama Yellah), and Wheat, Granny C, Junior Junior and Lullabelle, gathers around an empty pool outside a grassless shotgun house. They are discussing using the pool to keep pigs in. Little do they know, but one of them is about to be murdered, his body mutilated, his scrotum stuffed into the show more hand of a dead black man.

So starts the story. I took notes for my review. A few will hopefully give y’all a flavor of this remarkable book..

“There’s be no First Amendment without the Second”
“If guns are outlawed only outlaws will have guns”
“When the trumpet sounds I’m outa here”
- Stickers on the deputy coroner’s rusted-out car.

The top coroner is called Reverend Fondel. A nasty fellow a KKK supporter who discovers he is black. Only one of many of Everett’s imagined characters, so exquisitely described that we can’t wait to meet the next one. Then there’s their names. Junior’s son Junior, Junior Junior, Mister Mister, Fondel, Hobsinger.MacDonald MacDonald, Pick L. Dill. Not since Dickens has a novel’s characters so matched their owners’.

“You kill em We chill ‘em”
“You stab ‘em we slab ‘em”
“You slay ‘em We slab ‘em”
Two detectives pay a visit to the Acme Cadaver Company. The receptionist has a tattoo on her neck, “Break here in case of emergency”. One of the detectives doesn’t get it. When they enter the warehouse Marvin Gaye is being played. The cadavers are kept head-to-toe on a conveyor belt. One cadaver is just male head, the rest of its pieces being scattered somewhere in Pennsylvania. Some employees are playing catch with an eye ball. Others play soccer with a head.

But it’s not all fun, and there’s some serious stuff going on. Seriously.

This is a book to read at leisure and to be taken very, very seriously. show less