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The Trees
When a pair of detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation arrive in Money, Mississippi, to investigate a series of brutal murders, they find at each crime scene an unexpected second body: that of a man who resembles Emmett Till. After meeting resistance from the local sheriff, his deputy, the coroner, and a string of racist white townsfolk, the MBI detectives suspect these are killings of retribution. Then they discover eerily similar murders taking place in rapid succession all over the country. The past, it seems, refuses to be buried. The uprising has begun. In this provocative page-turner that takes direct aim at racism and police violence, Percival Everett offers a devastating critique of white supremacy and confronts the legacy of lynching in the United States.
309 pages, Paperback
First published September 21, 2021
About the author
Percival Everett
72 books3,615 followersPercival L. Everett (born 1956) is an American writer and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.
There might not be a more fertile mind in American fiction today than Everett’s. In 22 years, he has written 19 books, including a farcical Western, a savage satire of the publishing industry, a children’s story spoofing counting books, retellings of the Greek myths of Medea and Dionysus, and a philosophical tract narrated by a four-year-old.
The Washington Post has called Everett “one of the most adventurously experimental of modern American novelists.” And according to The Boston Globe, “He’s literature’s NASCAR champion, going flat out, narrowly avoiding one seemingly inevitable crash only to steer straight for the next.”
Everett, who teaches courses in creative writing, American studies and critical theory, says he writes about what interests him, which explains his prolific output and the range of subjects he has tackled. He also describes himself as a demanding teacher who learns from his students as much as they learn from him.
Everett’s writing has earned him the PEN USA 2006 Literary Award (for his 2005 novel, Wounded), the Academy Award for Literature of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award (for his 2001 novel, Erasure), the PEN/Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature (for his 1996 story collection, Big Picture) and the New American Writing Award (for his 1990 novel, Zulus). He has served as a judge for, among others, the 1997 National Book Award for fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1991.
There might not be a more fertile mind in American fiction today than Everett’s. In 22 years, he has written 19 books, including a farcical Western, a savage satire of the publishing industry, a children’s story spoofing counting books, retellings of the Greek myths of Medea and Dionysus, and a philosophical tract narrated by a four-year-old.
The Washington Post has called Everett “one of the most adventurously experimental of modern American novelists.” And according to The Boston Globe, “He’s literature’s NASCAR champion, going flat out, narrowly avoiding one seemingly inevitable crash only to steer straight for the next.”
Everett, who teaches courses in creative writing, American studies and critical theory, says he writes about what interests him, which explains his prolific output and the range of subjects he has tackled. He also describes himself as a demanding teacher who learns from his students as much as they learn from him.
Everett’s writing has earned him the PEN USA 2006 Literary Award (for his 2005 novel, Wounded), the Academy Award for Literature of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award (for his 2001 novel, Erasure), the PEN/Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature (for his 1996 story collection, Big Picture) and the New American Writing Award (for his 1990 novel, Zulus). He has served as a judge for, among others, the 1997 National Book Award for fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1991.
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April 12, 2023
Now Shortlisted for Dublin Literary Prize 2023
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2022
Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. I read this with my new GR group and what a way to begin my journey with them. I’ve never heard of the author or the book before but the blurb looked interesting so I decided to give it a try. The novel was the perfect blend of dark humour, fast paced murder mystery and also historical drama. The humour was ridiculously good and right up my alley. It does make fun of some type of people living in the South of US so some might feel offended.
The novel covers the investigation of several brutal murders in the rural Money, Mississippi. For each scene there are two dead people, one mutilated white man and a black one holding the severed testicles of the other in his hand. The local police do not seem to understand much of what is going on so two black special detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation are sent to investigate in the very racist white town. More bodies appear, some disappear and return to other murders scenes and it all seems to be connected to a dark part of American history, the less known genocide of black people through lynching.
What can I say? Only a master of the written word could have pulled this book off. It was funny and horrid at the same time. It made me laugh, angry and sad. Brilliant, as I said.
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2022
Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. I read this with my new GR group and what a way to begin my journey with them. I’ve never heard of the author or the book before but the blurb looked interesting so I decided to give it a try. The novel was the perfect blend of dark humour, fast paced murder mystery and also historical drama. The humour was ridiculously good and right up my alley. It does make fun of some type of people living in the South of US so some might feel offended.
The novel covers the investigation of several brutal murders in the rural Money, Mississippi. For each scene there are two dead people, one mutilated white man and a black one holding the severed testicles of the other in his hand. The local police do not seem to understand much of what is going on so two black special detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation are sent to investigate in the very racist white town. More bodies appear, some disappear and return to other murders scenes and it all seems to be connected to a dark part of American history, the less known genocide of black people through lynching.
What can I say? Only a master of the written word could have pulled this book off. It was funny and horrid at the same time. It made me laugh, angry and sad. Brilliant, as I said.
January 17, 2023
I... I'm honestly not sure what just happened...
August 19, 2022
This one hits hard. Percival Everett is a master stylist, as always, and here he adopts the trappings of detective fiction, coupled with bitingly funny humor, to tell a story about lynching in the United States. Everett makes no bones about the reality of lynching, showing unambiguously that it is an ongoing genocide that didn't stop with the civil rights movement. I found the humorous tone - some of it dark humor; in other places slapstick - to be a stroke of brilliance: the story is told in such a readable way that when the reality of the genocide sets in, it hits hard. Everett has observed that "America has a great talent for hiding its own transgressions" - a comment that very much rings true for me. For many of us who grew up in the United States, lynching is outside the standard history curriculum even though it was - and is - a tool to enforce the racial order. The Trees connects the dots and shows the genocide for what it is. As a reader, this can be a heavy burden. What we do with this knowledge is up to each of us individually, but when the transgressions are no longer hidden, and our complicity in genocide laid bare, we cannot in good conscience do nothing to challenge the system that perpetuates it.
January 25, 2022
The Trees
is a chimera. Its predominant tone is one of puerile, derisive humour. Its subject is a provocative race-revenge fantasy. Its method is schlocky horror with a little buddy-cop banter thrown in. The resulting loopy comedy/horror/history lesson is (at times) hilarious and (always) a powerful Black Lives Matter polemic.
This is a novel that reaches its top gear right out of the gate—delivering multiple shocks with grisly (and impossible) murders, grotesque, openly racist characters (who make frequent use of the n-word) with kooky names, and a never-let-up pace. This is exhilarating but the effect wears off somewhat as the book settles into its rhythms.
The story then advances by adding volume rather than variation or intensity: more murders, more victims, the same M.O. repeated ad nauseum. I think this was purposeful, a way to mirror the banality and repetitiousness of the crimes being avenged—centuries of lynchings (and as one character says ‘I consider police shootings to be lynchings’). But if so, the aim was better achieved by the inclusion of two lists: a roll call of victims of race-hate violence, and later, the locations of the crimes. With their gravity and use of real victims’ names—some recent, painfully recognisable; others lost to time—these litanies puncture the book’s generally waggish tone to sobering effect.
I admit I was waiting for a twist of the knife that never came, a final implication or provocation. No one reading The Trees would ever recognise themselves in the gormless idiots that are Everett’s over the top caricatures of white racism. And by focusing on ‘lynchings’ as such, there is a glaring lack of attention given to racist violence against women throughout history.
The Trees is audacious, farcical, perverse, and ultimately potent, utilising the schlock-horror-comedy genre to examine Black trauma in a unique way. 4 stars.
This is a novel that reaches its top gear right out of the gate—delivering multiple shocks with grisly (and impossible) murders, grotesque, openly racist characters (who make frequent use of the n-word) with kooky names, and a never-let-up pace. This is exhilarating but the effect wears off somewhat as the book settles into its rhythms.
The story then advances by adding volume rather than variation or intensity: more murders, more victims, the same M.O. repeated ad nauseum. I think this was purposeful, a way to mirror the banality and repetitiousness of the crimes being avenged—centuries of lynchings (and as one character says ‘I consider police shootings to be lynchings’). But if so, the aim was better achieved by the inclusion of two lists: a roll call of victims of race-hate violence, and later, the locations of the crimes. With their gravity and use of real victims’ names—some recent, painfully recognisable; others lost to time—these litanies puncture the book’s generally waggish tone to sobering effect.
I admit I was waiting for a twist of the knife that never came, a final implication or provocation. No one reading The Trees would ever recognise themselves in the gormless idiots that are Everett’s over the top caricatures of white racism. And by focusing on ‘lynchings’ as such, there is a glaring lack of attention given to racist violence against women throughout history.
The Trees is audacious, farcical, perverse, and ultimately potent, utilising the schlock-horror-comedy genre to examine Black trauma in a unique way. 4 stars.
March 25, 2023
Shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize!
Percival Everett’s “The Trees” begins in Money, Mississippi with the consecutive murders of two of its white residents. In both cases, two bodies, one Black and the other White, respectively disfigured and mutilated, are discovered. When mysterious circumstances connect the two murders, the MBI (Mississippi Bureau of Investigation) sends two Black detectives to take charge of the case. These murders are found to have ties to the decades-old lynching of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till. However, the spree of murders is just beginning, and as the narrative progresses, similar murders are being committed in different parts of the country. An FBI agent joins the MBI detectives in a race to uncover the truth behind the crimes and find whoever is responsible.
The small town of Money, MS is home to a cast of interesting characters (the author entertains us with some not-so-subtly named characters) and deep-rooted racism. As incidents of violence directed toward white men become more frequent and the body count increases, we get a glimpse into the reactions among White Supremacist groups and how they gear up for the “race war” that they knew was coming. Here, the author addresses relevant issues with a good dose of humor, keeping it light-hearted but impactful.
We also meet a 105-year-old woman,who maintains “records” of everything ever written about every lynching in the United States of America since 1913 ( she mentions the number “seven thousand and six”), the year she was born. She takes pride in her efforts and does not hesitate to share her records with the investigators in charge of the case. She makes it a point to mention that she considers police shootings to be lynchings.
“They’re investigating a crime, a crime of history. They need to know about this place, so of course they would come to me.”
She enlists the help of an assistant professor at the University of Chicago, who visits Money, MS at the urging of her great-granddaughter. He assists in her efforts to chronicle past and present events.
“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 put her hand against the side of Damon face. “Why pencil?” “When I’m done, I’m going to erase every name, set them free.”
Percival Everett is a masterful storyteller. This was my first book by this author and I could not put it down. He weaves an insightful and absorbing narrative of what begins as a murder mystery but evolves into so much more. While on the one hand, we have moments of humor and elements of social satire there are also moments of darkness and elements of surrealism. But at the heart of this story is racial discrimination and violence – a narrative of the history and the legacy of injustice with an emphasis on the lynching of Black people . In turn suspenseful, funny, infuriating, heartbreaking and terrifying, Percival Everett blends fact and fiction to create a layered, genre-defying novel. (In 1955, Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old Black boy was kidnapped and murdered, and his body dumped into the Tallahatchie River, by family members of a White woman who alleged that he had misbehaved with her. His case garnered national attention and was pivotal in the Civil Rights Movement. )
“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 outrage is always for show. It has a shelf life."
(Please note that there are graphic descriptions of the crime scenes and frequent usage of racial slurs in the story.)
Percival Everett’s “The Trees” begins in Money, Mississippi with the consecutive murders of two of its white residents. In both cases, two bodies, one Black and the other White, respectively disfigured and mutilated, are discovered. When mysterious circumstances connect the two murders, the MBI (Mississippi Bureau of Investigation) sends two Black detectives to take charge of the case. These murders are found to have ties to the decades-old lynching of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till. However, the spree of murders is just beginning, and as the narrative progresses, similar murders are being committed in different parts of the country. An FBI agent joins the MBI detectives in a race to uncover the truth behind the crimes and find whoever is responsible.
The small town of Money, MS is home to a cast of interesting characters (the author entertains us with some not-so-subtly named characters) and deep-rooted racism. As incidents of violence directed toward white men become more frequent and the body count increases, we get a glimpse into the reactions among White Supremacist groups and how they gear up for the “race war” that they knew was coming. Here, the author addresses relevant issues with a good dose of humor, keeping it light-hearted but impactful.
We also meet a 105-year-old woman,who maintains “records” of everything ever written about every lynching in the United States of America since 1913 ( she mentions the number “seven thousand and six”), the year she was born. She takes pride in her efforts and does not hesitate to share her records with the investigators in charge of the case. She makes it a point to mention that she considers police shootings to be lynchings.
“They’re investigating a crime, a crime of history. They need to know about this place, so of course they would come to me.”
She enlists the help of an assistant professor at the University of Chicago, who visits Money, MS at the urging of her great-granddaughter. He assists in her efforts to chronicle past and present events.
“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 put her hand against the side of Damon face. “Why pencil?” “When I’m done, I’m going to erase every name, set them free.”
Percival Everett is a masterful storyteller. This was my first book by this author and I could not put it down. He weaves an insightful and absorbing narrative of what begins as a murder mystery but evolves into so much more. While on the one hand, we have moments of humor and elements of social satire there are also moments of darkness and elements of surrealism. But at the heart of this story is racial discrimination and violence – a narrative of the history and the legacy of injustice with an emphasis on the lynching of Black people . In turn suspenseful, funny, infuriating, heartbreaking and terrifying, Percival Everett blends fact and fiction to create a layered, genre-defying novel. (In 1955, Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old Black boy was kidnapped and murdered, and his body dumped into the Tallahatchie River, by family members of a White woman who alleged that he had misbehaved with her. His case garnered national attention and was pivotal in the Civil Rights Movement. )
“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 outrage is always for show. It has a shelf life."
(Please note that there are graphic descriptions of the crime scenes and frequent usage of racial slurs in the story.)
March 6, 2024
Every year there are many books I spend the next year kicking myself for not having read. At the top of that list from 2021 is “The Trees,” by Percival Everett. Having passed over “The Trees” when it came out last September, I didn’t read it when it was longlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award in February, or even when it won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in April. But Tuesday, when it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, I finally wised up.
Better late than never: “The Trees” is a novel that doesn’t seem possible. It’s a shocking and shockingly funny story about lynching in America. (Stay with me.) Presented as a contemporary crime story slathered with a thick gravy of absurdist comedy, “The Trees” follows the investigation into a series of baffling murders that start in Money, Miss. If you recognize that town as the place where 14-year-old Emmett Till was murdered back in 1955, you’re already onto Everett’s subversive theme.
The novel opens with a gruesome scene: a White man named Junior Junior has been castrated and strangled with barbed wire; next to him is the battered body of a Black man who looks unnervingly like Emmett Till. Before long, that crime, with its peculiar details, is repeated. And then repeated again. Could these be revenge killings? Could the murderer be a ghost?
The two Black investigators charged with solving these mysteries discover a town where rednecks talk – and act – like nothing has changed since Jim Crow. Mama Z, a local witch doctor, has been collecting records of lynchings since she was born 105 years ago: a vast library of atrocities ignored and victims forgotten.
With its buffoonish antics, its gothic gore and especially its ferocious social insight, “The Trees” exists in a strange intersection of Mark Twain and Toni Morrison. I was reminded of “The Sellout,” Paul Beatty’s similarly unsettling “comedy” about slavery and segregation. And remember: In 2016, “The Sellout” became the first novel by an American ever to win the Booker Prize.
Better late than never: “The Trees” is a novel that doesn’t seem possible. It’s a shocking and shockingly funny story about lynching in America. (Stay with me.) Presented as a contemporary crime story slathered with a thick gravy of absurdist comedy, “The Trees” follows the investigation into a series of baffling murders that start in Money, Miss. If you recognize that town as the place where 14-year-old Emmett Till was murdered back in 1955, you’re already onto Everett’s subversive theme.
The novel opens with a gruesome scene: a White man named Junior Junior has been castrated and strangled with barbed wire; next to him is the battered body of a Black man who looks unnervingly like Emmett Till. Before long, that crime, with its peculiar details, is repeated. And then repeated again. Could these be revenge killings? Could the murderer be a ghost?
The two Black investigators charged with solving these mysteries discover a town where rednecks talk – and act – like nothing has changed since Jim Crow. Mama Z, a local witch doctor, has been collecting records of lynchings since she was born 105 years ago: a vast library of atrocities ignored and victims forgotten.
With its buffoonish antics, its gothic gore and especially its ferocious social insight, “The Trees” exists in a strange intersection of Mark Twain and Toni Morrison. I was reminded of “The Sellout,” Paul Beatty’s similarly unsettling “comedy” about slavery and segregation. And remember: In 2016, “The Sellout” became the first novel by an American ever to win the Booker Prize.
March 28, 2023
Now shortlisted for the 2023 Dublin Literary Award after its 2022 Booker Prize shortlisting
6th in my longlist rankings so in my own shortlist - my Bookstagram rating, ranking, summary review and Book themed Golden Retriever photo is here: https://www.instagram.com/p/ChRfg3WMM...
I read this book due to its longlisting for the 2022 Booker Prize – one of only 4 of the 13 books I had not read pre-longlist.
As with the inclusion of the veteran English author Alan Garner – the longlist seems like an overdue recognition of an influential, prolific, versatile but often overlooked literary author.
Percival Everett’s books have since 2019 been published in the UK by Influx Press – an independent publisher based in North London who I first came across in 2018 when they were the winners of a book prize I helped judge (the Republic of Consciousness Prize) for Eley Williams “Attrib.”. The author has said “My agent said they’re a small press doing good things and that sounded good to me; I like a cheque as much as anyone else, but I’d rather then books have a good life” – and one hopes this deserved longlisting will lead to a decent cheque for author, publisher and agent.
If I did have a disappointment with this book it is that it seems less experimental than what had always intrigued me about what I had heard of Everitt’s other work, for example: the multiple embedded narrative styles of “Erasure” albeit retaining the same idea of genre parody; the cinematic plot mirroring of “I am Not Sidney Poitier” albeit this book does read like its own film script; the story inside a story inside a story of “Percival Everett by Virgil Russell” albeit this book perhaps more admirably voices the story of those that history and racism has tried to erase; the three different plot versions of “Telephone” albeit retaining the idea of loss and grief, albeit here funneled in the direction of retributive justice. But this relative lack of experimentation does increase the book’s accessibility which I think was a key for the author in his conception of this novel.
And if I had one other reservation it is that it feels very USA-focused for a UK Book Prize – I felt the book only confirmed my biases rather than confronting them.
This book is effectively a very hard hitting, explicit and directly confrontational expose of the USA’s violent and racist 20th Century history of lynching – one that the author explicitly links to more contemporary police shootings of non-whites, but smuggled in undercover inn a wrapper of a novel which uses humour, stereotyping and also the genre conventions of a detective novel in an extremely effective way to draw readers into something they would otherwise shy away from. The author has said:
The novel opens in Money, Mississippi – the real life location of the abduction, torture and lynching of the fourteen year-old black boy Emmett Till by Roy Bryant and his half brother JM Milam after he spoke to a white grocery story proprietor Carolyn Bryant (Roy’s wife). Emmett’s tragic death acted as a catalyst of the civil rights movement not least due to his mother’s brave decision to hold an open top coffin so that her son’s mutilated and bloated face could be viewed. The two murderers were acquitted by an all-white jury.
The book provides information for readers unfamiliar with the history – this was actually aimed at US readers (the author has commented “America has a great talent for hiding its own transgressions”) but is extremely useful for non-US readers as if one had a criticism of what is a very strong Booker longlist it is the unfortunately perennial one that it has too many books which assume a familiarity with US society, culture and history.
As an aside and to show the topicality of the book (even on top of the very explicit Black Lives Matter link the book draws to recent police shootings of unarmed black men – e.g. Maurice Granton in 2018) - only in 2022 was lynching finally made a federal hate crime (something under discussion for more than a century) when Joe Biden signed into law the Emmett Till Antilynching Act.
And to further increase its tragic topicality - the case has re-entered the courts in the very month of the Booker longlist - see this article by my neighbour (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...)
Returning to the novel – the book opens with Granny C (who is in fact Carolyn Bryant), her son Wheat and his wife Charlene at a family gathering which also includes her nephew Junior Junior – the son of JW Milman.
Both are shortly after in turn found hideously murdered – with barbed wire wrapped around their neck, their face attacked and with them bloodily castrated. More oddly each body is found next to a dead (and in appearances long dead) black man with a mutilated and bloated face, and holding their testicles in his hands. Even more oddly the black man is the same in both cases – the black body disappearing after each murder and even more oddly as Granny C realises immediately and others a little later, the body looks the same as that of Emmett Till.
The murder baffles the bumbling incompetent and casually racist local police force and authorities – all of whom have deliberately satirical names (Sherriff Red Jetty for example based on redneck, Reverend Cad Fondle, Delroy Digby, Braden Brady) and the (I think fictional) MBI (the Mississippi Bureau of Investigations) are called in sending two of their operatives to Money later joined by an FBI operative.
These out of town policemen are black (the topic of whether blacks should or should not serve in inherently racist organisations is a recurrent debate in the novel), named deliberately conventionally – Ed Morgan and Jim Davis – and run verbal rings around the local prejudiced whites while still struggling to work out what is going on.
In Money they befriend Gertrude (who goes as Dixie for tips) a waitress in the local eating place Dinah (named by Delores whose catfish cooking is at least a little better than her spelling). Later she takes them to meet Mama Z – a black centurion whose father was lynched in 1913 and has made it her lifetime work to compile a written archive of lynching victims “you should know I consider police shootings to be lynchings”.
Gertrude has also invited a college friend – Damon Thruff, an academic genius wth PhDs in molecular biology, psychobiology and Eastern philosophy who the University of Chicago have placed in the Department of Ethnic Studies as “they didn’t know where to put him” and denied tenure as being too productive – to both meet Mama Z and to look into what is happening.
From there things rather spiral out of control – as first a string of copycat, equally brutal and similarly set piece murders (all it seems delayed retributive justice) spreads not just across Mississippi but the South and wider USA - even the White House proves not to be immune - and then with what seems like vengeful armies of dead Black and of Chinese bodies carrying out some retributive mob killings. Later. Note that the book was initially inspired by the author hearing the country singer Lyle Lovett pair “Ain’t No More Cane” with “Rise Up” and decided to write a book about the dead victims of lynchings rising up – and this latter part is as close as the book comes to his preliminary but discarded idea of a zombie book.
The attacks with their similar but slightly different gory detail can feel a little repetitive and is if the author has not found a way to really move the story on (other than to simply turn things up more and more) but of course this impact is very deliberate and is mirrored in Thruff’s reaction as he reads Mama Z’s archives:
As the book progresses we do get some insight into the perpetrators of the initial attacks – although even they are baffled and worried by the wider and wider spread. And through the eyes of the three detectives, with their easy humour, measured observations and confident banter – we also see the dilemma of understanding the need for justice while still being appalled at the methods implied.
The author has said of the real lessons of the book that “there’s a distinction to be made between morality and justice: justice might not always feel moral to us, and that’s a scary thought”
There is also an incredibly powerful section where Thruff simply lists the names of the real life lynching victims compiled by Mama Z – ending with Maurice Granton. I would really recommend readers at this stage to pause reading and spend some time picking names and googling the victims and their stories as a matter of respect and to really gain an understanding of the true nature of the genocide.
Overall I found this an impressive read. The book is extremely easy to read with short episodic chapters and copious snappy dialogue but also very hard to read with its subject matter – and the combination somehow works.
6th in my longlist rankings so in my own shortlist - my Bookstagram rating, ranking, summary review and Book themed Golden Retriever photo is here: https://www.instagram.com/p/ChRfg3WMM...
“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 outrage is always for show. It has a shelf life. If that Griffin book had been Lynched Like Me, America might have looked up from dinner or baseball or whatever they do now. Twitter?”
I read this book due to its longlisting for the 2022 Booker Prize – one of only 4 of the 13 books I had not read pre-longlist.
As with the inclusion of the veteran English author Alan Garner – the longlist seems like an overdue recognition of an influential, prolific, versatile but often overlooked literary author.
Percival Everett’s books have since 2019 been published in the UK by Influx Press – an independent publisher based in North London who I first came across in 2018 when they were the winners of a book prize I helped judge (the Republic of Consciousness Prize) for Eley Williams “Attrib.”. The author has said “My agent said they’re a small press doing good things and that sounded good to me; I like a cheque as much as anyone else, but I’d rather then books have a good life” – and one hopes this deserved longlisting will lead to a decent cheque for author, publisher and agent.
If I did have a disappointment with this book it is that it seems less experimental than what had always intrigued me about what I had heard of Everitt’s other work, for example: the multiple embedded narrative styles of “Erasure” albeit retaining the same idea of genre parody; the cinematic plot mirroring of “I am Not Sidney Poitier” albeit this book does read like its own film script; the story inside a story inside a story of “Percival Everett by Virgil Russell” albeit this book perhaps more admirably voices the story of those that history and racism has tried to erase; the three different plot versions of “Telephone” albeit retaining the idea of loss and grief, albeit here funneled in the direction of retributive justice. But this relative lack of experimentation does increase the book’s accessibility which I think was a key for the author in his conception of this novel.
And if I had one other reservation it is that it feels very USA-focused for a UK Book Prize – I felt the book only confirmed my biases rather than confronting them.
This book is effectively a very hard hitting, explicit and directly confrontational expose of the USA’s violent and racist 20th Century history of lynching – one that the author explicitly links to more contemporary police shootings of non-whites, but smuggled in undercover inn a wrapper of a novel which uses humour, stereotyping and also the genre conventions of a detective novel in an extremely effective way to draw readers into something they would otherwise shy away from. The author has said:
It would be very easy to write a dark, dense novel about lynching that no one will read; there has to be an element of seduction. Humour is a fantastic tool because you can use it to get people to relax and then do anything you want to them. The absurdity of the inattention to the subject was the driving force of the comedy, but the novel lives as much in turning around stereotypes as it does in revealing the truth of lynching. I’m happy to say I’ve [annoyed] a lot of people for my stereotyping of the white characters. Someone in an interview [objected] and my response was: “Good, how does it feel?” When I started the book, I said to my wife [the writer Danzy Senna], “I’m not being fair to white people”, and then I said, well, f.. it: I just went wild.
The novel opens in Money, Mississippi – the real life location of the abduction, torture and lynching of the fourteen year-old black boy Emmett Till by Roy Bryant and his half brother JM Milam after he spoke to a white grocery story proprietor Carolyn Bryant (Roy’s wife). Emmett’s tragic death acted as a catalyst of the civil rights movement not least due to his mother’s brave decision to hold an open top coffin so that her son’s mutilated and bloated face could be viewed. The two murderers were acquitted by an all-white jury.
The book provides information for readers unfamiliar with the history – this was actually aimed at US readers (the author has commented “America has a great talent for hiding its own transgressions”) but is extremely useful for non-US readers as if one had a criticism of what is a very strong Booker longlist it is the unfortunately perennial one that it has too many books which assume a familiarity with US society, culture and history.
As an aside and to show the topicality of the book (even on top of the very explicit Black Lives Matter link the book draws to recent police shootings of unarmed black men – e.g. Maurice Granton in 2018) - only in 2022 was lynching finally made a federal hate crime (something under discussion for more than a century) when Joe Biden signed into law the Emmett Till Antilynching Act.
And to further increase its tragic topicality - the case has re-entered the courts in the very month of the Booker longlist - see this article by my neighbour (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...)
Returning to the novel – the book opens with Granny C (who is in fact Carolyn Bryant), her son Wheat and his wife Charlene at a family gathering which also includes her nephew Junior Junior – the son of JW Milman.
Both are shortly after in turn found hideously murdered – with barbed wire wrapped around their neck, their face attacked and with them bloodily castrated. More oddly each body is found next to a dead (and in appearances long dead) black man with a mutilated and bloated face, and holding their testicles in his hands. Even more oddly the black man is the same in both cases – the black body disappearing after each murder and even more oddly as Granny C realises immediately and others a little later, the body looks the same as that of Emmett Till.
The murder baffles the bumbling incompetent and casually racist local police force and authorities – all of whom have deliberately satirical names (Sherriff Red Jetty for example based on redneck, Reverend Cad Fondle, Delroy Digby, Braden Brady) and the (I think fictional) MBI (the Mississippi Bureau of Investigations) are called in sending two of their operatives to Money later joined by an FBI operative.
These out of town policemen are black (the topic of whether blacks should or should not serve in inherently racist organisations is a recurrent debate in the novel), named deliberately conventionally – Ed Morgan and Jim Davis – and run verbal rings around the local prejudiced whites while still struggling to work out what is going on.
In Money they befriend Gertrude (who goes as Dixie for tips) a waitress in the local eating place Dinah (named by Delores whose catfish cooking is at least a little better than her spelling). Later she takes them to meet Mama Z – a black centurion whose father was lynched in 1913 and has made it her lifetime work to compile a written archive of lynching victims “you should know I consider police shootings to be lynchings”.
Gertrude has also invited a college friend – Damon Thruff, an academic genius wth PhDs in molecular biology, psychobiology and Eastern philosophy who the University of Chicago have placed in the Department of Ethnic Studies as “they didn’t know where to put him” and denied tenure as being too productive – to both meet Mama Z and to look into what is happening.
From there things rather spiral out of control – as first a string of copycat, equally brutal and similarly set piece murders (all it seems delayed retributive justice) spreads not just across Mississippi but the South and wider USA - even the White House proves not to be immune - and then with what seems like vengeful armies of dead Black and of Chinese bodies carrying out some retributive mob killings. Later. Note that the book was initially inspired by the author hearing the country singer Lyle Lovett pair “Ain’t No More Cane” with “Rise Up” and decided to write a book about the dead victims of lynchings rising up – and this latter part is as close as the book comes to his preliminary but discarded idea of a zombie book.
The attacks with their similar but slightly different gory detail can feel a little repetitive and is if the author has not found a way to really move the story on (other than to simply turn things up more and more) but of course this impact is very deliberate and is mirrored in Thruff’s reaction as he reads Mama Z’s archives:
What was most unsettling was that they all read so much alike, not something that one wouldn’t expect, but the reality of it was nonetheless stunning. They were like zebras, he thought—not 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 realized that 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.
As the book progresses we do get some insight into the perpetrators of the initial attacks – although even they are baffled and worried by the wider and wider spread. And through the eyes of the three detectives, with their easy humour, measured observations and confident banter – we also see the dilemma of understanding the need for justice while still being appalled at the methods implied.
The author has said of the real lessons of the book that “there’s a distinction to be made between morality and justice: justice might not always feel moral to us, and that’s a scary thought”
There is also an incredibly powerful section where Thruff simply lists the names of the real life lynching victims compiled by Mama Z – ending with Maurice Granton. I would really recommend readers at this stage to pause reading and spend some time picking names and googling the victims and their stories as a matter of respect and to really gain an understanding of the true nature of the genocide.
Overall I found this an impressive read. The book is extremely easy to read with short episodic chapters and copious snappy dialogue but also very hard to read with its subject matter – and the combination somehow works.
March 31, 2023
Now Shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award 2023
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2022
German: Die Bäume
This is amazing: Percival Everett writes a satiric revenge novel about lynching that ridicules the ugliness and stupidity of racists and the system they have built - yes, this is also a book about the fact that history is never over. The story starts with the murder of two white rednecks whose families were involved in the lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955. At the crime scenes, the same Black body is found, a man holding the severed testicles of the deceased - and have I mentioned that the Black body resembles Emmett Till, and that the killings take place where Till was lynched, in Money, Mississippi?
The white trash police force is no good, but professional help comes from two Black state detectives, both cool and sharp and right out of a Spike Lee movie, as well as a Black female FBI detective. Together, they try to solve the case while more and more white racists are murdered and, well, neutered, their balls held by Black corpses found at the respective crime scenes. Meanwhile, a mysterious old woman who has recorded all lynchings in the history of the US hires a writer to compile the stories of the victims she has archived...
The writing here is just so spot on, the whole novel comes alive through the rage that fuels the wicked humor. There is a Blaxploitation element to it, a horror element (I want Jordan Peele to turn this text into a movie!!), and of course a comedy angle (the Klan members in "The Trees" are about as smart as those in "Django Unchained"). The intellectual contrast between the reigning white racists and the empathic, smart Black characters does both grant catharsis (yes, look at those despicable racist fucks!) and it infuriates, because as the novel progresses, the story becomes both more surreal AND more real: There is a televised speech given by a certain orange moron that used to govern the USA, and while he reacts to fictional events, I couldn't help but feel that this is exactly what he would have said - and the upset such scenes generate is the social criticism at the heart of the book. The book might be satire, but we know what Everett says here is true, and it makes. you. MAD.
Some parts of the book are historically accurate, other aspects are altered to make a statement (just compare the historical roots of the term "lynching" with the explanation in the novel!), others again turn the text into a riotous allegory on racism in the United States. I was perpetually perplexed by the ideas and the stellar narration. This is another Booker entry that, just like Booth, can be read as a commentary on the Great American Novel, and I love it.
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2022
German: Die Bäume
This is amazing: Percival Everett writes a satiric revenge novel about lynching that ridicules the ugliness and stupidity of racists and the system they have built - yes, this is also a book about the fact that history is never over. The story starts with the murder of two white rednecks whose families were involved in the lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955. At the crime scenes, the same Black body is found, a man holding the severed testicles of the deceased - and have I mentioned that the Black body resembles Emmett Till, and that the killings take place where Till was lynched, in Money, Mississippi?
The white trash police force is no good, but professional help comes from two Black state detectives, both cool and sharp and right out of a Spike Lee movie, as well as a Black female FBI detective. Together, they try to solve the case while more and more white racists are murdered and, well, neutered, their balls held by Black corpses found at the respective crime scenes. Meanwhile, a mysterious old woman who has recorded all lynchings in the history of the US hires a writer to compile the stories of the victims she has archived...
The writing here is just so spot on, the whole novel comes alive through the rage that fuels the wicked humor. There is a Blaxploitation element to it, a horror element (I want Jordan Peele to turn this text into a movie!!), and of course a comedy angle (the Klan members in "The Trees" are about as smart as those in "Django Unchained"). The intellectual contrast between the reigning white racists and the empathic, smart Black characters does both grant catharsis (yes, look at those despicable racist fucks!) and it infuriates, because as the novel progresses, the story becomes both more surreal AND more real: There is a televised speech given by a certain orange moron that used to govern the USA, and while he reacts to fictional events, I couldn't help but feel that this is exactly what he would have said - and the upset such scenes generate is the social criticism at the heart of the book. The book might be satire, but we know what Everett says here is true, and it makes. you. MAD.
Some parts of the book are historically accurate, other aspects are altered to make a statement (just compare the historical roots of the term "lynching" with the explanation in the novel!), others again turn the text into a riotous allegory on racism in the United States. I was perpetually perplexed by the ideas and the stellar narration. This is another Booker entry that, just like Booth, can be read as a commentary on the Great American Novel, and I love it.
September 13, 2022
This novel is so pleasurable to read while also making a big impact! Percival Everett's “The Trees” has the structure of pulp crime fiction and a biting sense of humour that comes from sharply drawn characters. But it also seriously engages with the legacy of racially-driven lynching in American history and the persistence of racism in the country today. The authorities of Money, Mississippi are flummoxed when the bodies of a badly-beaten black man and a mutilated/castrated white man are discovered together. Shortly after another white man's body is found alongside the same corpse of the black man from the first murder scene. Special detectives Jim and Ed arrive to investigate though they are looked upon with suspicion as black men in an overtly racist community. What at first appears to be bizarre supernatural acts of revenge gradually shade into the surreal as the plot thickens and similarly violent crimes spring up around the country. The story is so well paced with short, punchy chapters and a vibrant cast that kept me enthralled until the ending. It also builds in meaning as a commentary on contemporary American life where “The image of the boy in his open casket awakened the nation to the horror of lynching. At least the White nation. The horror that was lynching was called life by Black America.”
Many sections of the novel include a heavy amount of dialogue which vibrantly brings the characters to life and evokes a lot of humour.
Read my full review of The Trees by Percival Everett at LonesomeReader
Many sections of the novel include a heavy amount of dialogue which vibrantly brings the characters to life and evokes a lot of humour.
Read my full review of The Trees by Percival Everett at LonesomeReader
April 12, 2023
A wild ride of a book that is surprisingly funny despite the topic of lynching being central to the narrative. Combined with an excellent ear for dialogue, this was a joy to read
The world has become six gallons of shit in a one gallon bucket
Propulsive and funny, written in ultra short chapters, I am happy this book made the Booker Prize 2022 shortlist! This is my favourite of the shortlist for 2022.
Percival Everett his writing is snappy, and in The Trees narrates the story of the dead rising up and doing on the descendants of lynchers what their parents did to black people. From small town Money, Missisippi to Chicago, dead bodies are found everywhere and the police is struggling to address the implications. The events trigger a lot, from a cult seemingly centred around a hundred year old to a resurgence of the KKK (Yeah people on fire is a straight up red flag) and full on FBI involvement.
In a sense, with the supernatural, unexplained phenomena at it's centre, it made me think of The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier, the Prix Concourt winner.
But The Trees is so funny, with even Trump coming into the story at the end, that this French book pales in comparison. Also the litany of names of lynching victims somewhere slightly before 2/3 of the book is chilling, and hits harder when interwoven in all the humor Everett uses to tell the story.
The world has become six gallons of shit in a one gallon bucket
Propulsive and funny, written in ultra short chapters, I am happy this book made the Booker Prize 2022 shortlist! This is my favourite of the shortlist for 2022.
Percival Everett his writing is snappy, and in The Trees narrates the story of the dead rising up and doing on the descendants of lynchers what their parents did to black people. From small town Money, Missisippi to Chicago, dead bodies are found everywhere and the police is struggling to address the implications. The events trigger a lot, from a cult seemingly centred around a hundred year old to a resurgence of the KKK (Yeah people on fire is a straight up red flag) and full on FBI involvement.
In a sense, with the supernatural, unexplained phenomena at it's centre, it made me think of The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier, the Prix Concourt winner.
But The Trees is so funny, with even Trump coming into the story at the end, that this French book pales in comparison. Also the litany of names of lynching victims somewhere slightly before 2/3 of the book is chilling, and hits harder when interwoven in all the humor Everett uses to tell the story.
November 23, 2021
I'm a little speechless.
September 26, 2022
One of the best novels on rascism I have read recently!
The power is in the language and dialogues, and though they may seem comic at first, there is nothing comic about them. While reading, I thought they reminded me of the Cohens' characters, with their weird world and ideas.
The Trees gets darker and darker as we dive deeper into contemporary Mississippi and at times the novel is like a punch in the gut .....
I hope there is an award or two waiting for The Trees behind the corner.
The power is in the language and dialogues, and though they may seem comic at first, there is nothing comic about them. While reading, I thought they reminded me of the Cohens' characters, with their weird world and ideas.
The Trees gets darker and darker as we dive deeper into contemporary Mississippi and at times the novel is like a punch in the gut .....
I hope there is an award or two waiting for The Trees behind the corner.
September 12, 2022
I’ll have me some southern fried catfish while I review this gritty story with some white trailer trash folk in the upside down backwards county of Money, Mississippi.
A murder or two or three. 2 men. One white, one black. Except the same black man disappears who was thought to be dead at another murder scene with a white man. Say what?! Other similar gruesome murders are happening around the country. Appears karma is kicking in for decades earlier hate crimes.
The story is shockingly rudimentary- the racial discrimination -but not so surprising. Mississippi has been backwards for decades.
I did chuckle a few times at the absurdity of the language. White cops, the stereotypical ones, from down south, who don’t know their sister from their mama. Neither does the community for that matter.
A story with genuine quirkiness threaded throughout the heaviness of white supremacy and the horrific history of lynching. This was one badass read!
4⭐️
A murder or two or three. 2 men. One white, one black. Except the same black man disappears who was thought to be dead at another murder scene with a white man. Say what?! Other similar gruesome murders are happening around the country. Appears karma is kicking in for decades earlier hate crimes.
The story is shockingly rudimentary- the racial discrimination -but not so surprising. Mississippi has been backwards for decades.
I did chuckle a few times at the absurdity of the language. White cops, the stereotypical ones, from down south, who don’t know their sister from their mama. Neither does the community for that matter.
A story with genuine quirkiness threaded throughout the heaviness of white supremacy and the horrific history of lynching. This was one badass read!
4⭐️
September 19, 2022
Shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize
Winner of the 2022 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award
Finalist for the 2022 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award
Longlisted for the 2022 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
My my my, I thought James McBride was the best author of dark social satire regarding our nation’s historical ugly racial injustices. Author Percival Everett used one of our country’s most famous and heinous lynching as a focal point to his new novel “The Trees”. In 1955 a teenaged black child was accused of flirting with a married white woman. Three days later, he was lynched and brutally beat. The woman recanted her claim 60 years later.
This is the preamble of the story. What Everett highlights is our history of lynching. From the beginning of slavery, lynching was commonplace. In this novel, a woman has recorded all the lynchings of our country. This is impossible of course, merely fiction. But the idea gives the reader pause. We have Holocaust records detailing (thanks to the Nazi recordkeeping) the number and sometimes names of victims. As a country, we will never know and recognize all who were lynched.
Given the uneasy topic, Everett went the way of McBride; he added dark humor and farcical situations to make his story readable. Two black detectives are sent to a remote area in Mississippi after white men are found brutally strangled with their testicles ripped from their bodies a held in the hands of a very dead black man. What drew the attention of the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation was that it happened again: more white men dead, testicles missing and in the hands of the same dead black man. Furthermore, the crime scenes mimicked the brutality of the 1955 death of the young boy. Somehow the rural police department lost the dead black man and he reappeared for a second time.
Everett writes this with humor. The two detectives who reluctantly are forced into the back woods of Mississippi are clever. And Everett has fun making the white people, well, trashy. This can be off-putting, as the epithets are ugly racial slurs (ie use of the “n” word) but add authenticity to their red-necked behavior. In “The Trees”, the Black characters are the educated and clever ones. Perhaps Everett intended to reverse the stereotypical characterization. Yes, it’s over-the-top, but sometimes that is necessary to tell a meaningful story,
Racism runs strong in our country. This is not a novel for racists. It’s a novel to wake up the non-racists, to recognize the horror that people of color endured, to recognize that there is quiet collusion in benefitting from the horrors of racism, even if one isn’t an active participant. Everette includes Chinese people in Wyoming who were mistreated during the railroad expansion. He wanted to capture all racism, not just from the Jim Crow South. Everette included the list of known lynchings in a powerful way,
This is a revenge fantasy novel. It’s a gritty and at times gruesome read. It’s an entertaining read in that he is one clever author! He has great fun with names. I chuckled and gasped, in equal measure.
I recommend it as an illuminating read. I’m ashamed to admit I had not heard of Emmett Till and his gruesome murder until reading this story. We must not forget from where we came so we don’t repeat the same mistakes.
Winner of the 2022 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award
Finalist for the 2022 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award
Longlisted for the 2022 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
My my my, I thought James McBride was the best author of dark social satire regarding our nation’s historical ugly racial injustices. Author Percival Everett used one of our country’s most famous and heinous lynching as a focal point to his new novel “The Trees”. In 1955 a teenaged black child was accused of flirting with a married white woman. Three days later, he was lynched and brutally beat. The woman recanted her claim 60 years later.
This is the preamble of the story. What Everett highlights is our history of lynching. From the beginning of slavery, lynching was commonplace. In this novel, a woman has recorded all the lynchings of our country. This is impossible of course, merely fiction. But the idea gives the reader pause. We have Holocaust records detailing (thanks to the Nazi recordkeeping) the number and sometimes names of victims. As a country, we will never know and recognize all who were lynched.
Given the uneasy topic, Everett went the way of McBride; he added dark humor and farcical situations to make his story readable. Two black detectives are sent to a remote area in Mississippi after white men are found brutally strangled with their testicles ripped from their bodies a held in the hands of a very dead black man. What drew the attention of the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation was that it happened again: more white men dead, testicles missing and in the hands of the same dead black man. Furthermore, the crime scenes mimicked the brutality of the 1955 death of the young boy. Somehow the rural police department lost the dead black man and he reappeared for a second time.
Everett writes this with humor. The two detectives who reluctantly are forced into the back woods of Mississippi are clever. And Everett has fun making the white people, well, trashy. This can be off-putting, as the epithets are ugly racial slurs (ie use of the “n” word) but add authenticity to their red-necked behavior. In “The Trees”, the Black characters are the educated and clever ones. Perhaps Everett intended to reverse the stereotypical characterization. Yes, it’s over-the-top, but sometimes that is necessary to tell a meaningful story,
Racism runs strong in our country. This is not a novel for racists. It’s a novel to wake up the non-racists, to recognize the horror that people of color endured, to recognize that there is quiet collusion in benefitting from the horrors of racism, even if one isn’t an active participant. Everette includes Chinese people in Wyoming who were mistreated during the railroad expansion. He wanted to capture all racism, not just from the Jim Crow South. Everette included the list of known lynchings in a powerful way,
This is a revenge fantasy novel. It’s a gritty and at times gruesome read. It’s an entertaining read in that he is one clever author! He has great fun with names. I chuckled and gasped, in equal measure.
I recommend it as an illuminating read. I’m ashamed to admit I had not heard of Emmett Till and his gruesome murder until reading this story. We must not forget from where we came so we don’t repeat the same mistakes.
January 30, 2022
Goodness, I don't know how to describe this book or if I should even try. More impactful I think the less known going in the better. What the author has accomplished here is amazing. I've never read anything like it. An author that can take racism and horrific crimes, making this impactful but also using a great deal of tongue in cheek humor and ending by turning into a horror story. Let's just say it makes a very strong point. I'll also add that as is often said, revenge is a dish best served cold or as a detective in the story states, "The shit has hit the fan."
November 27, 2022
3.5, rounded down.
Satire is really difficult to pull off and especially to sustain (see: The Sellout). Although for the most part I enjoyed this, it seemed heavily padded and kind of a 'one-trick pony' - I didn't NEED umpteen scenarios all along the same path of dead white guys with their testicles cut off found alongside desiccated black corpses ... I got it by the third one!
By the time the former buffoon that had occupied the WH made his obligatory appearance, it just had kind of devolved into nonsense, which is too bad, since it deals with an important and overlooked subject (i.e., America's lynching history). And - for lack of a better phrase, the 'magical realism' elements didn't really work for me and were never satisfactorily explained. Still, I read 50% of it in one day, so it had a propulsive energy that kept me going, so there is that. But I preferred this author's other two books that I've read.
Satire is really difficult to pull off and especially to sustain (see: The Sellout). Although for the most part I enjoyed this, it seemed heavily padded and kind of a 'one-trick pony' - I didn't NEED umpteen scenarios all along the same path of dead white guys with their testicles cut off found alongside desiccated black corpses ... I got it by the third one!
By the time the former buffoon that had occupied the WH made his obligatory appearance, it just had kind of devolved into nonsense, which is too bad, since it deals with an important and overlooked subject (i.e., America's lynching history). And - for lack of a better phrase, the 'magical realism' elements didn't really work for me and were never satisfactorily explained. Still, I read 50% of it in one day, so it had a propulsive energy that kept me going, so there is that. But I preferred this author's other two books that I've read.
June 27, 2024
4.5 Stars
Detective story meets zombie horror meets slapstick revenge fantasy. This doesn't sound like my kind of read, yet somehow Percival Everett pulls it off.
Everett's novel The Trees deals with the history of lynching from 1913 to the present day (recent police shootings of black men are included as lynchings). He uses humor to draw me in and to keep me there alternately laughing and sorrowing. This book is dialogue heavy with short chapters that make this novel readable and propel me quickly through the story until . . .
Pages 185 - 194 contain a list of people who were lynched during this time period. When I got to this chapter I began to skip right over it. Something stopped me. I put the book down and came back to it later when I had a lot of time. I sat and read each of those names aloud--what an impact that had on me.
Mama Z states that “Less than 1 percent of lynchers were ever convicted of a crime. Only a fraction of those ever served a sentence.”
I had to sit with this for quite a while before I could continue on. Then I was quickly drawn back into the humor of the absurd and the horror of the real.
I think with his work Everett is pointing to the difference between justice and morality, and it is up to us to figure out how to come to any kind of resolution.
The Trees is a very powerful read which I highly recommend. If this novel seems outside of where you usually read, give it a chance. I think it will surprise you.
For those interested in a little beyond reading the novel:
In an interview, Everett said Lyle Lovett's renditions of Ain't No More Cane, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrDmg..., and Rise Up, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfqBt..., planted the seeds for this novel.
He included the lyrics to Billie Holiday's song "Strange Fruit," which is sung by a character in the book. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHGAM...
Everett created these works as companion pieces for this novel. https://www.show.gallery/percival
6/27/2024 - The companion pieces are no longer on display here. However Everett's most recent work is if you're interested.
Detective story meets zombie horror meets slapstick revenge fantasy. This doesn't sound like my kind of read, yet somehow Percival Everett pulls it off.
Everett's novel The Trees deals with the history of lynching from 1913 to the present day (recent police shootings of black men are included as lynchings). He uses humor to draw me in and to keep me there alternately laughing and sorrowing. This book is dialogue heavy with short chapters that make this novel readable and propel me quickly through the story until . . .
Pages 185 - 194 contain a list of people who were lynched during this time period. When I got to this chapter I began to skip right over it. Something stopped me. I put the book down and came back to it later when I had a lot of time. I sat and read each of those names aloud--what an impact that had on me.
Mama Z states that “Less than 1 percent of lynchers were ever convicted of a crime. Only a fraction of those ever served a sentence.”
I had to sit with this for quite a while before I could continue on. Then I was quickly drawn back into the humor of the absurd and the horror of the real.
I think with his work Everett is pointing to the difference between justice and morality, and it is up to us to figure out how to come to any kind of resolution.
The Trees is a very powerful read which I highly recommend. If this novel seems outside of where you usually read, give it a chance. I think it will surprise you.
For those interested in a little beyond reading the novel:
In an interview, Everett said Lyle Lovett's renditions of Ain't No More Cane, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrDmg..., and Rise Up, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfqBt..., planted the seeds for this novel.
He included the lyrics to Billie Holiday's song "Strange Fruit," which is sung by a character in the book. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHGAM...
Everett created these works as companion pieces for this novel. https://www.show.gallery/percival
6/27/2024 - The companion pieces are no longer on display here. However Everett's most recent work is if you're interested.
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September 30, 2022Among the quotes I've collected on my profile page, there's this one from Virginia Woolf: "Books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately."
She may have been speaking as a writer, but that quote captures something I experience as a reader—and more and more, the more I read. Books continue each other, overlap with each other, echo each other, and all to an extent I'd never have suspected when I started out on this reading habit that has become so essential to my life.
However, I don't expect books to echo each other quite as much as they've been doing lately. After all, what connections could there possibly be between The Trees and the previous book I read, The Crying of Lot 49 which itself echoed the one before that, The Man in the High Castle. No, The Trees is a completely different kind of book to those two, and set in a different place and a different time. So when the number 49 was mentioned, I said nothing to myself about coincidences. But when a group of mysterious revenge seekers all dressed in black appear and disappear on several different pages of The Trees, I thought I was back in the pages of Lot 49 where a similar group pop in and out of the story frequently. And both books are full of black comedy. In fact I wondered if Percival Everett had constructed his book based on the definition of 'black comedy' and its near relatives, dark humor, morbid humor, gallows humor, all of which exploit taboo subjects for their effect. But even if the book is a perfect definition of a black comedy and even if it exploits taboos on every other page (laughing at itself as it goes along), there's plenty of underlying seriousness too. The list of names of people who were lynched in the Southern States of the US in the twentieth century erased the lurking smile from my face.
And I fear I will never look at a bunch of cherries with equanimity again. Strange fruit indeed.
She may have been speaking as a writer, but that quote captures something I experience as a reader—and more and more, the more I read. Books continue each other, overlap with each other, echo each other, and all to an extent I'd never have suspected when I started out on this reading habit that has become so essential to my life.
However, I don't expect books to echo each other quite as much as they've been doing lately. After all, what connections could there possibly be between The Trees and the previous book I read, The Crying of Lot 49 which itself echoed the one before that, The Man in the High Castle. No, The Trees is a completely different kind of book to those two, and set in a different place and a different time. So when the number 49 was mentioned, I said nothing to myself about coincidences. But when a group of mysterious revenge seekers all dressed in black appear and disappear on several different pages of The Trees, I thought I was back in the pages of Lot 49 where a similar group pop in and out of the story frequently. And both books are full of black comedy. In fact I wondered if Percival Everett had constructed his book based on the definition of 'black comedy' and its near relatives, dark humor, morbid humor, gallows humor, all of which exploit taboo subjects for their effect. But even if the book is a perfect definition of a black comedy and even if it exploits taboos on every other page (laughing at itself as it goes along), there's plenty of underlying seriousness too. The list of names of people who were lynched in the Southern States of the US in the twentieth century erased the lurking smile from my face.
And I fear I will never look at a bunch of cherries with equanimity again. Strange fruit indeed.
April 17, 2022
Welp, I sure didn't have "hysterically funny page-turner about the legacy of lynching" on my 2022 GoodReads Bingo Card.
Love it or hate it, I guarantee you'll never read anything else quite like it. On the surface, it's a deadpan detective story about two Black MBI agents (Mississippi Bureau of Investigation) investigating a series of shocking, grisly murders that seem to be targeting the closest living relatives of the white men who lynched Emmett Till in 1955.
But don't let that fast-paced simplicity fool you. Percival Everett has masterfully constructed a smart, sophisticated, satirical genre mashup that will have you snort-laughing one minute and choking back angry sobs the next.
"History is a motherfucker," one of the novel's main characters observes at one point, and that might as well be the subtitle for this book. Everett doesn't let his readers forget for one second that we aren't even ONE GENERATION removed from the horrific lynchings of Emmett Till and thousands of other Black males just like him. Carolyn Bryant Donham, the white woman whose false accusation against Emmett Till led directly to his horrific murder, remains ALIVE and UNPUNISHED as I write this review in 2022.
Everett's first manuscript of this novel was completed BEFORE George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery. I started reading this within a month of President Biden signing into law the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act, our country's FIRST federal law making lynching a federal hate crime. And just within this past week, we collectively witnessed on the news yet another nauseating video of a young, unarmed Black man (Patrick Lyoya) pinned to the ground and shot point-blank in the back of his head by a white policeman.
Like Faulkner famously said, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."
And every smug conservative pundit and pandering Republican politician attempting to dismiss and downplay America's legacy of racial violence as "ancient history" can go fuck themselves with a pineapple. How do we confront, comprehend, and begin any kind of healing from this national trauma when over half our country's population refuses to acknowledge or even allow their children to learn that these monstrous crimes even happened?
Everett tackles these challenging questions and offers up this slapstick revenge fantasy as a kind of semi-cathartic response. Sure, it's often side-splittingly funny, but there are also many moments of quiet pathos and deep, seething rage.
I thought the pacing started to lag a bit near the end, and I felt a bit conflicted about Everett's choice to reduce all of the racist white characters to stereotypical rednecks and buffoonish cartoons. I mean, I get it. Racism is nothing if not laughably absurd and outrageously stupid. And Everett definitely mines plenty of rich comedic material from these self-declared ambassadors of the "superior" white race. (My personal favorite was the wife who switches from using the actual n-word to politely saying "the n-word" when she learns about her husband's long-hidden African-American ancestry.)
But racism is also insidious and systemic and takes on many forms far more dangerous and deadly than the clownish Tr***p Rally stereotypes paraded across these pages. I think I know what Everett's aiming for here, and it's brilliant, in theory at least. I'm just not entirely convinced it's always the most honest or effective approach.
Love it or hate it, I guarantee you'll never read anything else quite like it. On the surface, it's a deadpan detective story about two Black MBI agents (Mississippi Bureau of Investigation) investigating a series of shocking, grisly murders that seem to be targeting the closest living relatives of the white men who lynched Emmett Till in 1955.
But don't let that fast-paced simplicity fool you. Percival Everett has masterfully constructed a smart, sophisticated, satirical genre mashup that will have you snort-laughing one minute and choking back angry sobs the next.
"History is a motherfucker," one of the novel's main characters observes at one point, and that might as well be the subtitle for this book. Everett doesn't let his readers forget for one second that we aren't even ONE GENERATION removed from the horrific lynchings of Emmett Till and thousands of other Black males just like him. Carolyn Bryant Donham, the white woman whose false accusation against Emmett Till led directly to his horrific murder, remains ALIVE and UNPUNISHED as I write this review in 2022.
Everett's first manuscript of this novel was completed BEFORE George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery. I started reading this within a month of President Biden signing into law the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act, our country's FIRST federal law making lynching a federal hate crime. And just within this past week, we collectively witnessed on the news yet another nauseating video of a young, unarmed Black man (Patrick Lyoya) pinned to the ground and shot point-blank in the back of his head by a white policeman.
Like Faulkner famously said, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."
And every smug conservative pundit and pandering Republican politician attempting to dismiss and downplay America's legacy of racial violence as "ancient history" can go fuck themselves with a pineapple. How do we confront, comprehend, and begin any kind of healing from this national trauma when over half our country's population refuses to acknowledge or even allow their children to learn that these monstrous crimes even happened?
Everett tackles these challenging questions and offers up this slapstick revenge fantasy as a kind of semi-cathartic response. Sure, it's often side-splittingly funny, but there are also many moments of quiet pathos and deep, seething rage.
I thought the pacing started to lag a bit near the end, and I felt a bit conflicted about Everett's choice to reduce all of the racist white characters to stereotypical rednecks and buffoonish cartoons. I mean, I get it. Racism is nothing if not laughably absurd and outrageously stupid. And Everett definitely mines plenty of rich comedic material from these self-declared ambassadors of the "superior" white race. (My personal favorite was the wife who switches from using the actual n-word to politely saying "the n-word" when she learns about her husband's long-hidden African-American ancestry.)
But racism is also insidious and systemic and takes on many forms far more dangerous and deadly than the clownish Tr***p Rally stereotypes paraded across these pages. I think I know what Everett's aiming for here, and it's brilliant, in theory at least. I'm just not entirely convinced it's always the most honest or effective approach.
July 11, 2022
“The Trees” is written with racial slurs….. an important reminder of the devastating—prejudice — horrific victimized history.
It’s also written with laugh-out-loud-humor…..
but let’s not kid ourselves…the oppression in this country and throughout the world —is no joke.
Author Percival Everett’s
brutal-satire-funny bone-brilliance of conveying racism, police brutality, violence, in a context of whodunnit — was both haunting and hilarious.
The narrative hinges on a series of confounding and gruesome murders in the town on Money, Mississippi, site of the 1955 murder of 14
year old Emmett Till— the most infamous lynching, an atrocity in the United States.
Kidnapped, tortured, lynched, and dumped into the Tallahatchie River.
We meet two Black men detectives who investigate the crimes.
The people of Money are very much aware that the outside world considers them backward hillbillies.
“Junior Junior’s widow, Daisy, pulled into the yard of Wheat and Charlene Bryant. She was crying when Charlene came out to greet her”.
“Where is Junior Junior with those pigs? Charlene asked. Then she saw the tears. What’s wrong with you?
Did that lowlife, cock-suckin, ball of a shit bastard hit you again? I swear I’m gonna kick that boy’s lily-white ass”.
“Daisy shooed the children around to the back of the house. It ain’t that, Charlene. He’s dead, she said”.
“Who’s dead? Charlene asked?”
“Granny C rolled onto the porch and her inside-the -house wheelchair. Wheat what is behind her”.
“Hey, Granny C. Hey, Wheat, Daisy said”.
“Who’s dead, Daisy? Charlene asked again”.
“Junior Junior. Junior is dead, kilt by a nigger in our own home. Junior Junior done passed on”.
“Have mercy, Wheat said”.
“What happened, chile? Granny C asked?”
“Oh, Granny C, it was awful, just awful”.
News of Junior Junior Milam’s death spread like disease across the country.
“Oh Wheat, what the fuck happened in there? She said. Kneeling like she was on the porch, somebody might have thought she was praying, she imagined, but she was talking to Wheat, even though he was dead. He probably heard her just as well when he was alive. Did that Negro man kill you? Did you kill him? Did you know him? Oh why did he have your nuts and his hand? That’s what I really want to know. Were you secretly funny and he was your lover? I won’t judge you, just let me know. That possibility makes you a much more interestin’ person. I wish I’d known that side of you. Granny C looked like she knowed that man when they toted him out. She all froze up now. Did she know you was gay? She never let on iffen she did”.
“Somebody said there was a Black wizard or ghost running loose around town, she said”.
“It appears so”.
“What? His lack of irony confused her”.
“You don’t mind if I say this is a fucked-up town”.
“It would be weird if you didn’t say it, she said”.
“Before he could say Lawdy, before he could say Jessssssussss, before he could say nigger, a length of barbed wire was wrapped twice around his thick, froglike neck”.
The trees is set in 2018, The same year The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Alabama opened its doors.
“Less than 1 percent lynchers or ever convicted of a crime. Only a fraction of those ever served a sentence. Teddy Roosevelt claimed the main cause of lunching was Black men raping White women. You know what? That didn’t happen”.
“Why do you think White people are afraid of that?”
“Who knows. Sexual inadequacy maybe. An amplification of their own desire to rape, which they did. Mama Z puffed out smoke. But I think rape was just an excuse”.
“You think Whites are just afraid of Black men?”
“I think it’s a sport”.
So……
with whodunnit, horror, humor, and brilliant insight —‘The Trees’ was a fast - hard- to- put- down compelling powerhouse novel. ….
Funny…. but dead serious!!!
*Thank you, Andy…for reminding me that — yes— I needed to read this!
All 70 year old white men and women should too!
It’s also written with laugh-out-loud-humor…..
but let’s not kid ourselves…the oppression in this country and throughout the world —is no joke.
Author Percival Everett’s
brutal-satire-funny bone-brilliance of conveying racism, police brutality, violence, in a context of whodunnit — was both haunting and hilarious.
The narrative hinges on a series of confounding and gruesome murders in the town on Money, Mississippi, site of the 1955 murder of 14
year old Emmett Till— the most infamous lynching, an atrocity in the United States.
Kidnapped, tortured, lynched, and dumped into the Tallahatchie River.
We meet two Black men detectives who investigate the crimes.
The people of Money are very much aware that the outside world considers them backward hillbillies.
“Junior Junior’s widow, Daisy, pulled into the yard of Wheat and Charlene Bryant. She was crying when Charlene came out to greet her”.
“Where is Junior Junior with those pigs? Charlene asked. Then she saw the tears. What’s wrong with you?
Did that lowlife, cock-suckin, ball of a shit bastard hit you again? I swear I’m gonna kick that boy’s lily-white ass”.
“Daisy shooed the children around to the back of the house. It ain’t that, Charlene. He’s dead, she said”.
“Who’s dead? Charlene asked?”
“Granny C rolled onto the porch and her inside-the -house wheelchair. Wheat what is behind her”.
“Hey, Granny C. Hey, Wheat, Daisy said”.
“Who’s dead, Daisy? Charlene asked again”.
“Junior Junior. Junior is dead, kilt by a nigger in our own home. Junior Junior done passed on”.
“Have mercy, Wheat said”.
“What happened, chile? Granny C asked?”
“Oh, Granny C, it was awful, just awful”.
News of Junior Junior Milam’s death spread like disease across the country.
“Oh Wheat, what the fuck happened in there? She said. Kneeling like she was on the porch, somebody might have thought she was praying, she imagined, but she was talking to Wheat, even though he was dead. He probably heard her just as well when he was alive. Did that Negro man kill you? Did you kill him? Did you know him? Oh why did he have your nuts and his hand? That’s what I really want to know. Were you secretly funny and he was your lover? I won’t judge you, just let me know. That possibility makes you a much more interestin’ person. I wish I’d known that side of you. Granny C looked like she knowed that man when they toted him out. She all froze up now. Did she know you was gay? She never let on iffen she did”.
“Somebody said there was a Black wizard or ghost running loose around town, she said”.
“It appears so”.
“What? His lack of irony confused her”.
“You don’t mind if I say this is a fucked-up town”.
“It would be weird if you didn’t say it, she said”.
“Before he could say Lawdy, before he could say Jessssssussss, before he could say nigger, a length of barbed wire was wrapped twice around his thick, froglike neck”.
The trees is set in 2018, The same year The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Alabama opened its doors.
“Less than 1 percent lynchers or ever convicted of a crime. Only a fraction of those ever served a sentence. Teddy Roosevelt claimed the main cause of lunching was Black men raping White women. You know what? That didn’t happen”.
“Why do you think White people are afraid of that?”
“Who knows. Sexual inadequacy maybe. An amplification of their own desire to rape, which they did. Mama Z puffed out smoke. But I think rape was just an excuse”.
“You think Whites are just afraid of Black men?”
“I think it’s a sport”.
So……
with whodunnit, horror, humor, and brilliant insight —‘The Trees’ was a fast - hard- to- put- down compelling powerhouse novel. ….
Funny…. but dead serious!!!
*Thank you, Andy…for reminding me that — yes— I needed to read this!
All 70 year old white men and women should too!
August 17, 2022
Hell I don't know for sure I'm reviewing this sucker with the new system.
It was good. Read it.
It was good. Read it.
March 29, 2024
An obliquely funny and playful detective story. Emmett Till seems to return from the dead to punish the offspring of those who lynched him. The book is especially rich if you've read Philip Dray's superb By The Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America, but such background reading is by no means necessary. I suspect, however, that this book served as source material for author Everett. Elegantly plotted. Tonally, too, it's a marvel of consistency, especially Everett's mastery of a colorful southern vernacular. The overall mystery — a race war with supernatural implications — is tremendous fun. My favorite parts may be when the white "peckerwoods" are shown in the extremity of their racist ignorance. Author Everett makes fun of our whitest fears. Superb.
October 14, 2021
Percival Everett writes books that absolutely need to be written, and although my introduction to him was his dramatic novel So Much Blue, I somehow intuited the inside zaniness married to a skydiver’s sense of adventure and a philosopher’s wisdom and fearless vision of truth because my head exploded on first contact: “This is it!” screamed my hair follicles. “This is who I’ve been looking for.” And I hadn’t even read I Am Not Sidney Poitier, Glyph, or the incredibly prescient God’s Country, all of which made me scream with laughter and almost roll off my couch in joy and agony.
Reading The Trees after reading a lot of Everett’s 30+ books allows you to secretly smack your lips, knowing some of the precursors to this new one. Almost immediately I thought I knew what was coming because I’d read American Desert, and the ending to one of my favorite Everett books, the aforementioned God’s Country, has echoes of this new book and almost seems to demand that it happen eventually. And now it’s here.
To compare Everett’s work to anybody else’s is pointless. So instead, here’s a scene that conveys what I love here and in his earlier funny novels (no setup necessary):
This is a hilarious and devastating book that in some sense has been 400+ years in the making, and finally, finally it is here, courtesy of Mr. Everett.
In The Trees Percival Everett chooses to rotate all his comedy and tragedy cylinders at the same time. And he’s so good, using all or part of what he’s got can be a choice. And in 2021, he has chosen to give us everything he’s got. The United States needs this book. The world needs this book.
* * *
What Percival Everett has written about, an inevitable rising up and destruction by those who have suffered without justice, is and has been in the air for years. And writers pick these things up. I’ve written an as-yet unpublished novel which is my take. And recently I’ve read others: The Mermaid of Black Conch by Monique Roffey, and nonfiction The Reckoning: Our Nation’s Trauma and Finding a Way to Heal by Mary Trump. And I’m sure there are many more books coming. The muses are screaming and the poets and writers are listening—following their “orders from headquarters” and sounding the alarm.
Reading The Trees after reading a lot of Everett’s 30+ books allows you to secretly smack your lips, knowing some of the precursors to this new one. Almost immediately I thought I knew what was coming because I’d read American Desert, and the ending to one of my favorite Everett books, the aforementioned God’s Country, has echoes of this new book and almost seems to demand that it happen eventually. And now it’s here.
To compare Everett’s work to anybody else’s is pointless. So instead, here’s a scene that conveys what I love here and in his earlier funny novels (no setup necessary):
The Doctor Reverend Cad Fondle was sitting in his living room with his wife, Fancel. Fancel was a big woman, big enough that she hardly ever moved from her corduroy recliner, which was stuck in recline. There was a half a meat lover’s pizza and two beers on the foldout tray between her recliner and her husband’s. They were watching television, switching back and forth between Fox News and professional wrestling.
“They’s right,” Fancel said. “That Obamacare don’t work worth a hill of puppy shit. We done bought in, causin’ we had to, and I ain’t lost nary a pound.”
Fondle took long pull on his beer. “Well, the country’s done with that experiment. Smart-ass uppity sumbitch. You know he thinks he’s better’n us.”
“That Hannity is cute,” Fancel said. “If I could get my hand anywhere near my vajayjay, I’d rub me one out just watchin’ him.”
“You can’t reach it, so shut up.”
“How did the cross burning go the other night?” Fancel asked.
“It’s called a lightin’, a cross lightin’. It ain’t right to burn a symbol of our Lawd Jesus H. Christ. I would think you knowed that by now.”
Fancel sighed. “What’s the H for?”
“What?”
“The H in Jesus H. Christ, what’s it for?” She picked up some pepperoni from a crease in her house dress.
Fondle paused to regard her with his head cocked. “Why, it stands for, um, heaven, that’s right.”
“Jesus Heaven Christ? That don’t make good sense.”
“What would make sense to you?” Fondle asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Herschel, maybe.”
“Why?”
“It’s a nice name and it’s a name. Heaven ain’t no name.”
“It’s the name of a place, so it’s a name. In fact, the place is named after our Lord,” Fondle said, his eyes narrowed.
“Why ain’t the place just called Jesus or Jesusburg?”
“Shut up and eat.” (126-127)
This is a hilarious and devastating book that in some sense has been 400+ years in the making, and finally, finally it is here, courtesy of Mr. Everett.
In The Trees Percival Everett chooses to rotate all his comedy and tragedy cylinders at the same time. And he’s so good, using all or part of what he’s got can be a choice. And in 2021, he has chosen to give us everything he’s got. The United States needs this book. The world needs this book.
* * *
What Percival Everett has written about, an inevitable rising up and destruction by those who have suffered without justice, is and has been in the air for years. And writers pick these things up. I’ve written an as-yet unpublished novel which is my take. And recently I’ve read others: The Mermaid of Black Conch by Monique Roffey, and nonfiction The Reckoning: Our Nation’s Trauma and Finding a Way to Heal by Mary Trump. And I’m sure there are many more books coming. The muses are screaming and the poets and writers are listening—following their “orders from headquarters” and sounding the alarm.
June 17, 2024
5★
“It was a long-running joke in Money, Mississippi, that the way to discover who belonged to the Klan was to wait at Russell’s Dry Cleaning and Laundry.”
Money, MI, is a real place, but I don’t know if there’s really an area referred to as Small Change and roads named Dime Drive and Nickel Street, or not. But the names of the people are hilarious inventions that sound like good ol’ boys or hillbilly nicknames to me.
There’s the reverend Cad Fondle and his wife, Fancel, Hickory Stonewall Spit, Pick L. Dill, Hot Mama Yeller, and more.
This is some wild, crazy, funny, grisly black humour that begins in Money, Mississippi, where Sheriff Red Jetty is called to a crime scene that makes no sense. There are two dead bodies, one white, one black, and the white man’s testicles seem to have been torn off and are in the hands of the dead black man.
A locked-room mystery like no others – except for the rest that seem to follow. The same black body appears at another crime scene, having disappeared (been stolen?) from the morgue – but how? When?
When an old woman gets a look at the black body as it’s being taken from the house, she freaks out. And so she should. She had some serious history to do with the lynching of this person many, many years ago. How is it possible he’s here now?
The State gets involved.
“ ‘I’m Special Detective Jim Davis and this is Special Detective Ed Morgan. We’re from the MBI.’
‘Special detectives,’ Jetty repeated.
‘And that’s not just because we’re Black,’ Jim said. ‘Though plenty true because we are.’ ”
The Sheriff sends Deputy Sheriff Deloy Digby to keep an eye on them but try not to be seen.
“ ‘Why are you calling me?’ Jetty asked.
‘I just seen the subjects exitin’ the house. They just got into their van. They ain’t seen me. I’m parked across the road.’
‘Are there any other cars parked around you?’
‘No, but don’t worry,’ Delroy said.
‘Pray tell why not’
‘They couldn’t see me cause I was makin’ like I was readin’ the newspaper.’
Jetty sighed. ‘Delroy, when’s the last time you actually saw somebody readin’ a newspaper?’
‘I dunno.’
‘Just stay with them,’ the sheriff said. ‘Don’t call back.’ ”
Meanwhile, the MBI detectives (Mississippi Bureau of Investigation), Ed and Jim, have befriended a waitress, Gertrude Penstock who wears a nametag saying Dixie (Dixies get more tips), who leads them to Mama Z, a mysterious old (102) lady.
[Incidentally, "penstock" means a pipe or something that transfers water. A conduit, you might say.]
Gertrude went to college with now Professor Damon Nathan Thruff, whom she calls on for help sorting through a lot of historical files.
[I found a definition that says “thruff” can mean a long stone connecting both ends of a stone wall. I would love to see a list of all the curious name references, but I digress.]
The murders continue, as bloody as ever.
“There was blood everywhere. His head was all clobbered in. I mean all caved in like a cantaloupe what you done drove over with a tractor.”
And the investigation takes both grim and funny turns. Back to the Deputy Sheriff who, as asked, doesn’t call Sheriff Jetty back, but appears at his house the next morning after his all-night stakeout.
“ ‘What is it, Delroy?’ the sheriff finally spoke.
‘I followed them boys to the juke joint in the Bottom. I sat outside for an hour and I fell asleep. When I woke up the place was closed, and this note was on my windshield.’ He handed a piece of paper to Jetty.
Jetty read it aloud. ‘We’ll be at the motel if you need us.’
‘Sorry, Sheriff.’”
As similar murders, some on a grander scale, take place around the country, the politicians start roaring, the Ku Klux Klan tries to remember how to build crosses that don’t collapse, and society is disbelieving.
I have purposely not quoted the gruesome scenes (well, one), but there are plenty, and the numbers are growing as the book closes.
It is awful and awesome, terrifying and terrific, outrageous and outstanding. (I know - nobody really needed me to say that, but I couldn’t resist.)
The humour in no way diminishes the significance of the history. The writing, style, story, everything made this a worthy Booker Shortlist nomination in 2022.
The trees are those of the song “Strange Fruit”, which TIME Magazine called the Song of the Century in 1999.
https://time.com/archive/6737430/the-...
You can see Billie Holliday sing it here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DGY9...
Here’s some history of the song.
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmast...
And here are the lyrics
A great read.
“It was a long-running joke in Money, Mississippi, that the way to discover who belonged to the Klan was to wait at Russell’s Dry Cleaning and Laundry.”
Money, MI, is a real place, but I don’t know if there’s really an area referred to as Small Change and roads named Dime Drive and Nickel Street, or not. But the names of the people are hilarious inventions that sound like good ol’ boys or hillbilly nicknames to me.
There’s the reverend Cad Fondle and his wife, Fancel, Hickory Stonewall Spit, Pick L. Dill, Hot Mama Yeller, and more.
This is some wild, crazy, funny, grisly black humour that begins in Money, Mississippi, where Sheriff Red Jetty is called to a crime scene that makes no sense. There are two dead bodies, one white, one black, and the white man’s testicles seem to have been torn off and are in the hands of the dead black man.
A locked-room mystery like no others – except for the rest that seem to follow. The same black body appears at another crime scene, having disappeared (been stolen?) from the morgue – but how? When?
When an old woman gets a look at the black body as it’s being taken from the house, she freaks out. And so she should. She had some serious history to do with the lynching of this person many, many years ago. How is it possible he’s here now?
The State gets involved.
“ ‘I’m Special Detective Jim Davis and this is Special Detective Ed Morgan. We’re from the MBI.’
‘Special detectives,’ Jetty repeated.
‘And that’s not just because we’re Black,’ Jim said. ‘Though plenty true because we are.’ ”
The Sheriff sends Deputy Sheriff Deloy Digby to keep an eye on them but try not to be seen.
“ ‘Why are you calling me?’ Jetty asked.
‘I just seen the subjects exitin’ the house. They just got into their van. They ain’t seen me. I’m parked across the road.’
‘Are there any other cars parked around you?’
‘No, but don’t worry,’ Delroy said.
‘Pray tell why not’
‘They couldn’t see me cause I was makin’ like I was readin’ the newspaper.’
Jetty sighed. ‘Delroy, when’s the last time you actually saw somebody readin’ a newspaper?’
‘I dunno.’
‘Just stay with them,’ the sheriff said. ‘Don’t call back.’ ”
Meanwhile, the MBI detectives (Mississippi Bureau of Investigation), Ed and Jim, have befriended a waitress, Gertrude Penstock who wears a nametag saying Dixie (Dixies get more tips), who leads them to Mama Z, a mysterious old (102) lady.
[Incidentally, "penstock" means a pipe or something that transfers water. A conduit, you might say.]
Gertrude went to college with now Professor Damon Nathan Thruff, whom she calls on for help sorting through a lot of historical files.
[I found a definition that says “thruff” can mean a long stone connecting both ends of a stone wall. I would love to see a list of all the curious name references, but I digress.]
The murders continue, as bloody as ever.
“There was blood everywhere. His head was all clobbered in. I mean all caved in like a cantaloupe what you done drove over with a tractor.”
And the investigation takes both grim and funny turns. Back to the Deputy Sheriff who, as asked, doesn’t call Sheriff Jetty back, but appears at his house the next morning after his all-night stakeout.
“ ‘What is it, Delroy?’ the sheriff finally spoke.
‘I followed them boys to the juke joint in the Bottom. I sat outside for an hour and I fell asleep. When I woke up the place was closed, and this note was on my windshield.’ He handed a piece of paper to Jetty.
Jetty read it aloud. ‘We’ll be at the motel if you need us.’
‘Sorry, Sheriff.’”
As similar murders, some on a grander scale, take place around the country, the politicians start roaring, the Ku Klux Klan tries to remember how to build crosses that don’t collapse, and society is disbelieving.
I have purposely not quoted the gruesome scenes (well, one), but there are plenty, and the numbers are growing as the book closes.
It is awful and awesome, terrifying and terrific, outrageous and outstanding. (I know - nobody really needed me to say that, but I couldn’t resist.)
The humour in no way diminishes the significance of the history. The writing, style, story, everything made this a worthy Booker Shortlist nomination in 2022.
The trees are those of the song “Strange Fruit”, which TIME Magazine called the Song of the Century in 1999.
https://time.com/archive/6737430/the-...
You can see Billie Holliday sing it here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DGY9...
Here’s some history of the song.
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmast...
And here are the lyrics
A great read.
February 5, 2023
Money, Mississippi. Sins of the father may never have played a bigger role, nor the secrets that everyone knows. ...she was old. That's been known to kill a person. The author has a lot of fun with names. I give you Hickory Spit, for one, first name shortened to "Hick", of course. The tongue-in-cheek remarks elicited plenty of unladylike snorts from me, and resulted in a couple of side-eyes from my husband. The special detectives from the MS State Police were priceless with their back and forth banter. Another reviewer mentioned it bringing Joe Lansdale's Hap & Leonard to mind, and I agree. Make no mistake, the humor, dark though it may be, is going to help with this sobering look at racism and Pure D ignorance that is on full display here. I'll not wade any deeper into this, as there are some fine reviews already posted. Read those and decide.
September 23, 2022
Booker Prize Shortlist 2022 and in my opinion a 'must read'.
“Goddamnit, I hate murder more than just about anything,” said Sheriff Red Jetty. “It can just ruin a day.”
"Oh Lordy, Lordy" that was a superbly written and darkly humorous novel. It is a satirical study of the drawn out genocide of people of colour in the US and uses the murder of Emmett Till as its anchor. This is the first novel in which I have been deeply disturbed one moment and laughing out loud the next. Make no mistake this is a hard hitting novel that looks at racial discrimination and violence towards people of colour. We get to know the small minded and backward thinking community of Money, Mississippi, as they grapple with the horrific murders of two of its white community members. The murder scenes are gruesome and spark fears of an upcoming race war. This is an absolutely brilliant, relevant and insightful novel and I thoroughly recommend the incredibly entertaining and well read audiobook.
“Goddamnit, I hate murder more than just about anything,” said Sheriff Red Jetty. “It can just ruin a day.”
"Oh Lordy, Lordy" that was a superbly written and darkly humorous novel. It is a satirical study of the drawn out genocide of people of colour in the US and uses the murder of Emmett Till as its anchor. This is the first novel in which I have been deeply disturbed one moment and laughing out loud the next. Make no mistake this is a hard hitting novel that looks at racial discrimination and violence towards people of colour. We get to know the small minded and backward thinking community of Money, Mississippi, as they grapple with the horrific murders of two of its white community members. The murder scenes are gruesome and spark fears of an upcoming race war. This is an absolutely brilliant, relevant and insightful novel and I thoroughly recommend the incredibly entertaining and well read audiobook.
Read
October 3, 2022I'm not much of a mystery guy. I know they're popular as all get-out, not just with books but on television and in the movies. Whodunnit? Truth be told, I don't much care. The genre comes across like a game to me. Intricately built to be just as intricately figured out. And bully for the reader if he or she steps over every red herring and figures it out. The challenge never much spoke to me.
I'm a bit amused, then, that I was so taken with this book. It is, in essence, a murder mystery. OK, a whole lotta murder mysteries. Always a white redneck, one or more, many connected somehow to the murder of Emmett Till. And always a been-dead-for-ages black body at the scene of the crimes, too, his hand holding the white dudes' semi-precious inheritances. As character after character (investigator after investigator) say in the book, in so many letters: "WTF?"
Truth be told, I inhaled this narrative despite the murders and despite the mystery. I read it for the dialogue. Just funny as hell, some of it, the sort of thing you chuckle out loud over (and I'm not one to chuckle out loud over books). If Everett wins a Booker (it's shortlisted), it'll be because of the wit.
No, that's not true. He's helped by the subject matter as well. Ironically in a book of such humor, it is a serious subject indeed -- the historical lynching of Black men in America. A key sequence on the matter appears some 2/3rds into the book:
"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."
Those are the words of Mama Z, a 105-year-old Black woman whose own daddy was lynched in 1913.
Strange, isn't it? So much humor in a book designed to make such a deadly serious point. But it works. And the reader suspends his disbelief to let it work. How can these murders be pulled off so successfully, given the logistics? In truth, they cannot.
But in the creative mind of the author, they are a fitting revenge. A way to right deep wrongs. A reckoning America would rather not look at, so put away those mirrors so people can get on with their lives and continue to chant, "USA! USA!" and, of course (sigh), "Make America Great Again."
And yes, Virginia, if you're wondering, those very words appear in this book.
Did I mention irony?
I'm a bit amused, then, that I was so taken with this book. It is, in essence, a murder mystery. OK, a whole lotta murder mysteries. Always a white redneck, one or more, many connected somehow to the murder of Emmett Till. And always a been-dead-for-ages black body at the scene of the crimes, too, his hand holding the white dudes' semi-precious inheritances. As character after character (investigator after investigator) say in the book, in so many letters: "WTF?"
Truth be told, I inhaled this narrative despite the murders and despite the mystery. I read it for the dialogue. Just funny as hell, some of it, the sort of thing you chuckle out loud over (and I'm not one to chuckle out loud over books). If Everett wins a Booker (it's shortlisted), it'll be because of the wit.
No, that's not true. He's helped by the subject matter as well. Ironically in a book of such humor, it is a serious subject indeed -- the historical lynching of Black men in America. A key sequence on the matter appears some 2/3rds into the book:
"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."
Those are the words of Mama Z, a 105-year-old Black woman whose own daddy was lynched in 1913.
Strange, isn't it? So much humor in a book designed to make such a deadly serious point. But it works. And the reader suspends his disbelief to let it work. How can these murders be pulled off so successfully, given the logistics? In truth, they cannot.
But in the creative mind of the author, they are a fitting revenge. A way to right deep wrongs. A reckoning America would rather not look at, so put away those mirrors so people can get on with their lives and continue to chant, "USA! USA!" and, of course (sigh), "Make America Great Again."
And yes, Virginia, if you're wondering, those very words appear in this book.
Did I mention irony?
September 8, 2022
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 BOOKER PRIZE
3.5, rounded slightly up. This is the second novel I've read by Everett (after last year's Telephone), and I enjoyed this one slightly less. It moves like a thriller, appropriating narrative elements of the true-crime genre, and the pages and short chapters flew by at supersonic speed. The first third was brilliantly executed, and I couldn't stop myself from laughing out loud, but the momentum ebbed and dissipated soon thereafter as the body count mounted exponentially.
This is a bizarre hybrid of a novel that interrogates profoundly and shockingly serious subject matter-- the long history of lynching and police violence in structurally racist America-- with a bleakly satirical and playfully ironic tone. Everett imparts the vibe of a Tarantino/Coen Brothers film with puerile jokes, archly ironic dialogue, goofily-named characters, and stylized violence.
Crimes of retributive justice begin in the backwater of Money, Mississippi, the scene of Emmett Till's 1955 lynching: the descendants of Till's murderers are found strangled to death with barbed wire and castrated, their testicles in the hands of a Black cadaver. Two Black cops are dispatched from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation to solve these ever-metastasizing cases, confronted at every turn by a racist sheriff and his goober deputies, and the unspoken everydayness of violence against Black bodies.
But about halfway through, the police procedural chapters became repetitive, as the same crime spreads virally across America, targeting cities and small towns where Black and Chinese citizens had been lynched. (One of the novel's most powerful chapters contains a lengthy list of hundreds names of lynching victims, as does the book cover: the literary equivalent of the lynching memorial in Montgomery, Alabama)
Everett gets stuck in a rut of endlessly telling the same on-the-nose joke about the banality of white racism, and the farce became mired in schtick, rather than leveraging absurdity to launch readers into a higher allegorical dimension. That's where I think Jordan Peele's masterpiece Get Out succeeded in expanding the horror genre, and Everett's The Trees slightly missed the mark.
3.5, rounded slightly up. This is the second novel I've read by Everett (after last year's Telephone), and I enjoyed this one slightly less. It moves like a thriller, appropriating narrative elements of the true-crime genre, and the pages and short chapters flew by at supersonic speed. The first third was brilliantly executed, and I couldn't stop myself from laughing out loud, but the momentum ebbed and dissipated soon thereafter as the body count mounted exponentially.
This is a bizarre hybrid of a novel that interrogates profoundly and shockingly serious subject matter-- the long history of lynching and police violence in structurally racist America-- with a bleakly satirical and playfully ironic tone. Everett imparts the vibe of a Tarantino/Coen Brothers film with puerile jokes, archly ironic dialogue, goofily-named characters, and stylized violence.
Crimes of retributive justice begin in the backwater of Money, Mississippi, the scene of Emmett Till's 1955 lynching: the descendants of Till's murderers are found strangled to death with barbed wire and castrated, their testicles in the hands of a Black cadaver. Two Black cops are dispatched from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation to solve these ever-metastasizing cases, confronted at every turn by a racist sheriff and his goober deputies, and the unspoken everydayness of violence against Black bodies.
But about halfway through, the police procedural chapters became repetitive, as the same crime spreads virally across America, targeting cities and small towns where Black and Chinese citizens had been lynched. (One of the novel's most powerful chapters contains a lengthy list of hundreds names of lynching victims, as does the book cover: the literary equivalent of the lynching memorial in Montgomery, Alabama)
Everett gets stuck in a rut of endlessly telling the same on-the-nose joke about the banality of white racism, and the farce became mired in schtick, rather than leveraging absurdity to launch readers into a higher allegorical dimension. That's where I think Jordan Peele's masterpiece Get Out succeeded in expanding the horror genre, and Everett's The Trees slightly missed the mark.
January 31, 2023
"I'm gonna die now, for a while. But I'll be back. We'll all be back."
Look out! It's reparations to the max when long dead lynching victims return to exact revenge on the descendants of the men who killed them.
"The dead can't tell no time, can't read no calendars."
This odd mix of mystery, crime thriller, horror novel, and horrific history lesson worked for me. It was also, strange to say, the funniest book about systemic racism I've ever read.
Mr. Mayor, this here is the sovereign state of Mississippi. There ain't no law enforcement, there's just rednecks like me paid by rednecks like you."
In his sobering read, sprinkled with dark humor, Everett offers up page after page of the names of lynching victims. Try reading them aloud, and try not to cry.
Less than 1 percent of lynchers were ever convicted of a crime.
I'm guessing not everyone will feel as I did about this book, but I've honestly never read anything like it, and it'll be a long while before I forget it.
"Everybody talks about genocides around the world, but when the killing is slow and spread over a hundred years, no one notices."
Look out! It's reparations to the max when long dead lynching victims return to exact revenge on the descendants of the men who killed them.
"The dead can't tell no time, can't read no calendars."
This odd mix of mystery, crime thriller, horror novel, and horrific history lesson worked for me. It was also, strange to say, the funniest book about systemic racism I've ever read.
Mr. Mayor, this here is the sovereign state of Mississippi. There ain't no law enforcement, there's just rednecks like me paid by rednecks like you."
In his sobering read, sprinkled with dark humor, Everett offers up page after page of the names of lynching victims. Try reading them aloud, and try not to cry.
Less than 1 percent of lynchers were ever convicted of a crime.
I'm guessing not everyone will feel as I did about this book, but I've honestly never read anything like it, and it'll be a long while before I forget it.
"Everybody talks about genocides around the world, but when the killing is slow and spread over a hundred years, no one notices."
Read
May 18, 2023Good lord. A brutal and astonishing book about US racism, corruption, the rotten heart of the South, police violence, and most of all the vile genocide that is lynching and the combination of inhumanity and utter cowardice that underpins it. It's satirical, sometimes thumpingly so (the Trump speech is epic), and very funny, though the humour is dark as the inside of a dog, and utterly gut-wrenching. Absolutely extraordinary, and an absolute must-read.
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