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| Categories | Thrillers & Suspense |
| Author | Percival Everett |
| Publisher | Graywolf Press (September 21, 2021) |
| Language | English |
| Paperback | 288 pages |
| Item Weight | 2.31 pounds |
| Dimensions |
5.5 x 0.9 x 8.2 inches |
I. Book introduction
The Trees is a 2021 novel by American author Percival Everett, published by Graywolf Press. Set predominantly in the small town of Money, Mississippi, the novel follows a series of murders that seem to follow identical patterns.
An uncanny literary thriller addressing the painful legacy of lynching in the US, by the author of Telephone
Percival Everett’s The Trees is a page-turner that opens with a series of brutal murders in the rural town of Money, Mississippi. When a pair of detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation arrive, they meet expected resistance from the local sheriff, his deputy, the coroner, and a string of racist White townsfolk. The murders present a puzzle, for at each crime scene there is a second dead body: that of a man who resembles Emmett Till.
The detectives suspect that these are killings of retribution, but soon discover that eerily similar murders are taking place all over the country. Something truly strange is afoot. As the bodies pile up, the MBI detectives seek answers from a local root doctor who has been documenting every lynching in the country for years, uncovering a history that refuses to be buried. In this bold, provocative book, Everett takes direct aim at racism and police violence, and does so in a fast-paced style that ensures the reader can’t look away. The Trees is an enormously powerful novel of lasting importance from an author with his finger on America’s pulse.
Summary
In Money, Mississippi, a white man called Junior Junior is found dead in his own home with the body of an unknown Black man beside him. When the bodies are taken to the morgue, it is soon discovered that the body of the unknown Black man has disappeared. The body is found again in the home of Junior Junior’s cousin, Wheat, who has also been murdered. Shortly after, the body of the Black man disappears again.
Two Black detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, Ed Morgan and Jim Davis, are sent to Money to investigate the situation. Ed and Jim go to a local bar frequented by the Black community of Money where they discover that both Junior and Wheat are relatives of Carolyn Bryant, a white woman who accused the teenage Emmett Till of making sexual advances at her leading to his lynching and death. Ed and Jim believe that the disappearing body bears a striking resemblance to Emmett Till’s battered body.
More bodies begin to pile up around the country. Each features one or more white men who have been castrated with the bodies of Black or Asian men beside them. Ed and Jim are able to find the identity of the Black man found at the original crime scene. They trace it to a company that sells bodies for research. They also begin to suspect Gertrude Penstock, a white-passing waitress they met in Money, and her 105 year old great-grandmother Mama Z are involved in the original murders.
Unbeknown to Ed and Jim, this is revealed to be true as Gertrude and a group of like-minded Black individuals had orchestrated the deaths of Wheat and Junior Junior as retaliation for their fathers’ part in murdering Emmett Till. However they are baffled by the other murders.
Reports of the other murders reveal that large groups of Black and Asian men who appear impervious to bullets, have started duplicating the murders orchestrated by Mama Z and Gertrude.
About the Author (Percival Everett)
Percival Everett (Percival Leonard Everett II, born December 22, 1956) is an American writer and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. He has described himself as “pathologically ironic” and has played around with numerous genres such as western fiction, mysteries, thrillers, satire and philosophical fiction. His books are often satirical, aimed at exploring race and identity issues in the United States.
He is best known for his novels Erasure (2001), I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009), and The Trees (2021), which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. His 2024 novel James, also a finalist for the Booker Prize, won the Kirkus Prize and the National Book Award for Fiction.
Erasure was adapted as the film American Fiction (2023), written and directed by Cord Jefferson, starring Jeffrey Wright, Sterling K. Brown, and Leslie Uggams.
II. Reviewer: The Trees by Percival Everett
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1. ADINA reviews for The Trees
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.
2. DAVID reviews for The Trees
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.
3. RON CHARLES reviews for The Trees
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.
4. D B. reviews for The Trees
ugh. couldn’t put it down
Trees, by Percival Everett, is rough stuff. The story of victims of white supremacy in the US getting even begins with Emmett Till and branches off from there to include many other black, Chinese, and indigenous revenge seekers. Of course, there’s lots because there have been so many white lynch mobs in one place or another.
The names Everett gives his characters lends a curious air of humor to this otherwise claustrophobically hate filled novel. I particularly liked Herberta Hind, whose nickname Herbie gives us Herbie Hind. But there’s also the moment Ho and Chi meet Minh, and others I’ll have to think about.
Everett is truly a wonderful writer and story teller, but I think I preferred James.
5. FRANCIS SEMAZZI reviews for The Trees
Hilarious
I was saying to my self as I was reading this book and laughing at the same time about all the crime scenes. It was always the same a evil dead white man next to a dead black man with the nuts of the the dead white man next to him in his hands. The plot was very funny and hilarious. When it happen in the White House that was the last straw. But the white supremacist, didn’t know who to kill. They just thought black people were involved in some way. I love the characters of the two MBI agents and the woman FBI agent. She was a hard one. They all had amazing chemistry. The ending was beautiful the agents didn’t want it to stop when they found out who was responsible but decided it should still go on so that black people would get the revenge they deserved.
6. IVBELL reviews for The Trees
Amazing
What if someone rose up and exacted vengeance for the lynchings that have taken place over the last 100 years or so? And what if the ones to investigate were from the same race that suffered so many of those deaths? And what if the ones always talking about a race war found themselves in the middle of one? This book is a mystery and a satire and a social commentary and also highly entertaining. I’m still thinking about the ending. Maybe we need to see all those who are dead to arise at the call of their name. Their numbers, no longer just one or two here or there, but in the hundreds, will perhaps help us all realize what a horror it all is.
7. J. S. RUSSELL reviews for The Trees
Parody on indifference to racial genocide
Story begins with the murder of the three white people who killed Emmit Till as if that satisfies the crime of the racial hatred involved. But the author is talking about the fact that all the lynchings that occurred in the country without a smidgen of prosecution for those murderers. And there is still no sense of shame or guilt or willingness for reparations for all of the lynchings.
8. BEATA reviews for The Trees
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.
9. MELKI reviews for The Trees
“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.”
10. USHASHI reviews for The Trees
Shortlisted for Booker Prize 2022
The Trees is an audacious piece of literature. I would not have imagined humor (albeit the dark variety) to be the chosen genre for a story about the history of lynching in America. But Everett has done just that, with a perfect amount of horror and detective mystery brewed into it. And what a marvelous job he has done!
The Trees is primarily set in Money, Mississippi, the place where Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black boy, was brutally lynched after being accused of flirting with a white woman. Emmett Till became a face of the civil rights movement in the US, but his murderers were never convicted. The Trees is a revenge fantasy. The story starts with a brutal murder of a white man whose body is found beside another dead black person. It’s followed by another murder of a white man, beside whom the body of the same black man is found. Thus starts the murder mystery which keeps getting complex as more similar murder scenes show up across the country. Three black detectives, from state police and the FBI, take charge of the case, much to the dismay of the white police of the town Money and the story follows their investigation. We see a 105 years old lady who kept a record of all 7006 lynchings that took place since her birth, we see the white folks of the town who are quite stereotypical and fodder for most of the humor (I believe as an antidote to all the stereotyping of black characters in literature), we also see white supremacist groups preparing for a race war. This book will make you laugh in one sentence and horrified in the next. Everett has dedicated one full chapter to just listing the names of all the victims of lynching, and it hits hard. This book takes control of the narrative on racial tension and injustice. It builds a conflict between what’s moral and what’s justice and the ending will leave you wondering what comes next in this world Everett created.
For a book on such a difficult topic and with so much graphic violence, it is a surprisingly easy read. The chapters are short, the dialogues quick and entertaining and yet it’s filled with haunting and heartbreaking moments.
4.5 stars. Highly recommended.
III. The Trees Quotes by Percival Everett
The best book quotes from The Trees by Percival Everett
“Long time ago. It was their daddies who killed Emmett Till back in the fifties,” Hayes said.”
“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.”
“Unknown Male is a name,” the old woman said. “In a way, it’s more of a name than any of the others. A little more than life was taken from them.”
“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.”
“You should know I consider police shootings to be lynchings”
“History is a motherfucker,”
“People should know, understand that not all Thursdays are the same.”
“So, you think somebody took his body?”
“Dead people don’t walk,” Jim said.
“Except for Jesus,” Safer said.”“Death is never a stranger. That’s why we fear it.”
“Like it say in the good book, what goes around comes around”.
“What good book is that?” Charlene asked. “Guns and Ammo?”“Babies are smarter than us. It seems they’re always trying to kill themselves. That’s why we have to watch them every second, so they don’t swallow nickels or drink weed killer or eat Tylenol like candy. Then we get stupid and want to live.”
“-She could have some crazy ass husband or boyfriend. You know, a stupid redneck with a gun.
-That’s redundant.”“What’s your dog’s name?” “Oh, he ain’t got no name.” “Why’s that?” “I don’t like names,” the man said, looking down at his pet. “How do you call it?” Jim asked. “Call it?”
“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.” “Why do you think White people are so 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 sport.” 73 Sheriff Red Jetty sat in a booth in the back of the Dinah.”
“Jim and Ed picked up Gertrude at the Dinah after the lunch rush, such as it was. She sat in the middle of the rear seat and leaned forward.
“Sit back and fasten your belt,” Ed said.
“So you’re the one with kids,” she said.”“No creo en ningún Dios. Es imposible sentarse aquí, tocar todas estas carpetas, leer todas las páginas y seguir creyendo en un dios.”
“Si queréis conocer un sitio, tenéis que hablar con su historia.”
“What can you tell me about Money, Mississippi?” “Well, it’s chock-full of know-nothing peckerwoods stuck in the prewar nineteenth century and living proof that inbreeding does not lead to extinction,” Jim said. “No”
“What a fuckin’ mess. A goddamn clusterfuck”.
“Chief, is clusterfuck one word or two?” Jethro asked.
“What?”
“Never mind”.
“Get back to the goddamn station”.
“Yessir”.”“It’s just a motel. That’s what it is. That’s all it is,” Ed said. “People should rent out that very room and sleep in that very bed and step through that very door and stand on that balcony and realize what happened there. People should know, understand that not all Thursdays are the same.”
“And they used to have cross burnin’s a lot more and family picnics and softball games and all such,’ said Donald. ‘I remember eatin’ cake next to that glowing cross. I loved my mama’s cake.’ ‘Yeah,’ several voiced their agreement. ‘We don’t do nothin’ now,’ a man complained. ‘I don’t even know where my hood is. I don’t even own a rope.”
“Goddamnit, I hate murder more than just about anything,” said Sheriff Red Jetty. “It can just ruin a day.”
“Money, Mississippi, looks exactly like it sounds.
Shall I stop him?”
Excerpted from The Trees by Percival Everett
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