This month’s review is by Richard Bellikoff
The Trees
By Percival Everett
After decades of critical acclaim for his writing, Percival Everett finally hit the jackpot, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel James. Since I never judge a book by its cover or a writer’s work by just one book, I decided to read more of Everett’s novels, starting with The Trees. The setting is an actual town, Money, Mississippi, which, according to Everett, was named “in that persistent Southern tradition of irony.” It’s poverty-stricken and segregated. “It was a long-running joke in Money, Mississippi,” Everett writes, “that the way to discover who belonged to the Klan was to wait at Russell’s Dry Cleaning and Laundry.” The local coronercovers up racist murders. His assistant describes one of them: “He typed suicide on the cause of death line. Who shoots himself in the back of the head in a dumpster?”
Amid this volatile stew of racial tension and violence, a particularly brutal murder occurs. A local white man is found dead in his bathroom. “A long length of rusty barbed wire was wrapped several times around his neck,” Everett writes. His arm was bent behind his back “at an impossible angle.” An eye was “gouged out or carved out and lay next to his thigh, looking up at him.” His testicles were cut off. Lying beside him was the body of a dead black man, with the victim’s testicles in his hand. When several more equally gruesome murders of white men take place, the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation in Hattiesburg sends Jim Davis and Ed Morgan to Money to solve them. Jim and Ed are black men who say they became detectives “so that Whitey wouldn’t be the only one in the room with a gun.” They describe Money as “chock-full of know-nothing peckerwoods stuck in the prewar nineteenth century and living proof that inbreeding does not lead to extinction.” Money’s sheriff sneers at the big city cops: “Slicker than snot on a doorknob. Smart-asses. Think we’re just rubes.”
In a Hattiesburg night club, a singer performs a song made famous by Billie Holliday that describes lynching in Southern towns like Money.
Southern trees bear strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees
In fact, Money was the site of the notorious 1955 lynching of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old from Chicago visiting relatives for the summer, who was accused of flirting with a white woman. His white killers were acquitted by an all-white jury.
In counterpoint to all the homicidal violence, Everett creates some amusing character names. The coroner is named Reverend Doctor Cad Fondle. The murder victims include Junior Junior and McDonald McDonald. There’s a medical examiner called Helvetica Quip, a sheriff named Chalk Pellucid, a detective called Wesley Snipes (“no relation and white”) and a dog with no name at all (Its owner explains, “I don’t like names”).
With copycat murders proliferating across the USA, the story hurtles toward a surrealistic conclusion. This novel is a literal page-turner, with very short chapters, 108 of them in just over 300 pages. One chapter contains nothing but a list of the names of lynching victims, as if to pay tribute to them. Stylistically, the book is a genre-defying blend of police procedural, dark comedy, revenge fantasy and supernatural horror. A lesser writer than Everett could never have pulled this off. I’m eager to read more of his voluminous literary output.
CALL # STATUS: FIC EVERETT