Mind Picker: The Trees

Southern trees bear strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root

The Trees is a horror/satire/revenge fantasy (my local library has it filed in the Mystery section) that goes a long way towards illustrating the banality of evil (and that that “banality” is subject to one’s point-of-view): If you have a problem with the frequent, grisly murder of racist white men in this book, I hope you have a bigger problem with the history of frequent, grisly murder of innocent Black men; pulled from their homes by hooded thugs, beaten, lynched, and left for dead without consequence for the perpetrators (and as one character states that police shootings should be considered the modern lynching, that history persists). The inkiest of black comedies — like a fantastical mashup of Jordan Peele’s Get Out and Paul Beatty’s The Sellout — author Percival Everett peoples this novel with foul-mouthed, bumbling white people and patient and intelligent Black folks, and it all feels justified and cathartic; a schadenfreude-laced fantasy of karmic justice in a world that tends to lack justice for people of colour. The first half of this novel got my heart pounding (short chapters and incredible circumstances certainly help), and the insertion of a list of names of real-life victims of lynchings threw cold water (in the best and most appropriate way) on whatever “enjoyment” I was getting out of the absurdities, but as much as I wanted to love this whole thing, I felt there was a lack of payoff in the end; my interest fizzled as the circumstances exploded (and if this is meant to be, as my library suggests, a mystery, the solution wasn’t novelistically satisfying). I would give this three and a half stars and am rounding up because I love that this exists; I just wish I had connected better with it.

Money, Mississippi, looks exactly like it sounds. Named in that persistent Southern tradition of irony and with the attendant tradition of nescience, the name becomes slightly sad, a marker of self-conscious ignorance that might as well be embraced because, let’s face it, it isn’t going away.

Money, Mississippi is best known as the site of the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till: a fourteen-year-old African-American boy whose murder was widely publicised and would become a unifying catalyst for the Civil Rights Movement (no one would ever be brought to justice for his death). The Trees is set in the town of Money in 2018, and when a series of gruesome murders (with impossible settings and otherworldly circumstances involved), seem beyond the powers of the local redneck Sheriff and his Deputies to solve, two Black Special Detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation (the MBI) are sent in to investigate. Eventually joined by another Black agent from the FBI, the three African-Americans will discern the connection to Till’s unavenged death, even if they can’t initially figure out who’s doing the killing or how to prevent more murders. And that’s all I want to say about the plot (except to note that the people who die probably had it coming; good riddance to bad rubbish.)

Most of the humour and colour in The Trees comes from the interactions between a wide-ranging cast of characters, and unusually for me, most of what I marked as noteworthy was dialogue. Just a sampling (with, hopefully, the least offensive language.)

Old Granny C. providing foreshadowing in conversation with her yellow halter-topped daughter-in-law (known in the CB world as Hot Mama Yeller):

“I wronged that little pickaninny. Like it say in the good book, what goes around, comes around.”

“What good book is that?” Charlene asked. “Guns and Ammo?”

The Sheriff when he learns that the MBI would like to partner with “local law enforcement”:

“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.”

MBI agent to his boss when asked what he knows about Money, Mississippi:

“It’s chock-full of know-nothing peckerwoods stuck in the prewar nineteenth century and living proof that inbreeding does not lead to extinction.”

One MBI agent to another, warning against flirting with a local waitress:

“She could have some crazy-ass husband or boyfriend. You know, a stupid redneck with a gun.”

“That’s redundant.”

The local morgue assistant, who’s had “some college”:

“I was a creative writing major at Auburn. Poetry. I always wanted to be a Beat poet. Wrong generation. Now I stick dead people in drawers. I suppose it’s the same thing once you get down to it."

A local at the first KKK meeting they’ve had in a while:

”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.”

Along with the absurd interactions and dialogue, I noted that character names become more and more self-consciously bizarre as the story proceeds: We have Herbeta Hind, Chester Hobnobber, and Helvetica Quip; doubled names like Junior Junior, Mister Mister, and McDonald McDonald (“no relation to the restaurant”); and names that make you think, “Why would an author go there?”, like Wesley Snipes (“no relation and White”) or Pick L. Dill (“school was tough”). But when a character (a Black academic invited to Money to bear witness to what’s going on) is shown a roomful of dossiers on every lynching the 105-year-old Mama Z has collected since 1913 (more than seven thousand names), he can’t help himself but write out those names in longhand, explaining:

“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?”

And that passage did make me gasp with recognition at what Everett had been playing at with his made up names and it made me pay more attention to the real names that he lists — including everyone from Emmett Till, to several “unnamed male”s, to names we would all recognise from recent history — because, at its heart, this is not so much a work of fiction as a mental reckoning for actual events.

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.

I appreciated The Trees as an act of witnessing more than I loved it as a literary work, but again, I am grateful that it exists and think that it should be read by all.