The Least Funny Thing: On Percival Everett's "The Trees"
Percival Everett | The Trees: A Novel | Graywolf Press | 2021 | 288 Pages
The first thing to say about Percival Everett’s latest effort, The Trees: A Novel, is that it’s funny. Laugh-out-loud, make-people-look-at-you-weird-on-public-transport funny. Everett covers everything from slapstick to wordplay to the sort of macabre humor infantrymen would blush at, a feat that becomes even more impressive when considering The Trees is about a series of grisly murders related to America’s long, horrifying history (and present) of lynching people of color.
The book opens with the Bryant family milling around their “dying grass backyard” in the backwater of Money, Mississippi—those versed in American civil rights history will know where this is going. After getting a sense of the squalor the Bryants live in, we discover that the matriarch of the family, Carolyn, is actually the woman whose accusation led to the horrific lynching of Emmett Till in 1955. Carolyn, or Granny C as she’s known to the family, is in a reflective mood, thinking “[a]bout something I wished I hadn’t done… the lie I told all them years back...” While some say the real Carolyn Bryant recanted her accusation in the 2000s, this is disputed. Everett gives her fictionalized version a regretful side.
Later that day the body of Carolyn’s son is found mutilated in a manner similar to that of a lynching victim. More, his testicles have been cut off and placed in the hands of an equally disfigured, unidentified Black body, dressed in a suspicious Depression-era outfit. The Mississippi Bureau of Investigation (MBI) sends two Black detectives, Jim Davis and Ed Morgan, to aid the investigation, much to the chagrin of the very white and very racist local police force. When the body of the unidentified Black man disappears from the morgue and turns up next to another lynched white man, we’re plunged into a whodunnit that seems to have otherworldly implications. Mangled, castrated white bodies continue to pop up in locations as far flung from the American south as New York and Los Angeles, alongside more unidentified Black and Asian corpses holding the aforementioned missing balls. The introduction of Mama Z, a 105-year-old “witch” with a smart mouth who may or may not be hiding something, only strengthens the notion that a godly, moral reckoning of some kind is unfolding. An academic named Damon Thruff and FBI Special Agent Herberta Hind complete the mostly Black cast of characters who butt heads with the white residents of Money as bodies pile up and tensions rise.
American racism is the driving theme of this story, as it is for many of Everett’s other works. In his standout 2001 novel Erasure, he tackles the scourge of liberal racism in publishing, pointing out how writers of color need to produce works that tackle the lived experience (emphasis my own) to be given plaudits. The pompous narrator has written a string of pretentious, overly academic books (potentially stand-ins for Everett’s own low-selling retellings of Greek myths) and finds himself sidelined from the cultural conversation until he writes what can only be described as poverty porn, a la Push by Sapphire. This painfully exploitative narrative is included in its entirety as a novel within Erasure, and in the world of the book it ends up winning a prestigious literary award despite being a joke. In what is possibly Everett’s best-known work, I am Not Sidney Poitier, we see Joycean levels of intertextuality woven with the parodical, self-reflexive insertion of Everett himself into the book as a “Professor of Nonsense.” The Trees, however, isn’t a high-literary effort to skewer the racism of the “white moderate” MLK was warning about in the 60s and that Jordan Peele was still warning people about in 2017. While a smart and highly inventive piece of fiction, this is more of a straightforward read than Everett’s other works. There’s no novel nested within the actual book, for one, and the prose is rhythmic but simple, with chapters short enough to devour in a few minutes. And while The Trees does have fantastical elements that harken back to novels like Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, the narrative is generally grounded in realism (notwithstanding the note of uncanniness that lingers throughout). It is, effectively, a great detective novel of the sort that it seeks to satirize, if you could call what Everett does with the genre satirization. It might be more apt to say Everett uses the often-unliterary construction of the detective novel to drive home his point. Percival Everett is not the sort of writer prone to half-baked implementations of ideas. When he wants to do something in his work, it gets done. In this case that means using the tools and tropes of detective fiction to explore a larger idea about our sense of justice and what it really means.
Detective fiction, generally speaking, means good guys vs. bad. We have a hero, and even though they might have anti-heroic properties they generally chase the bad guy. In this canon, justice is clear and obvious, black and white. In The Trees we aren’t so sure where the moral compass points. Vigilante murders are bad, yes, and due process is important, sure. But what happens when one lives in a world where justice is lopsided, even after years of painful struggle to gain even a modicum of equality? How can one be expected to rely on a system that’s so intrinsically broken it takes modern-day lynchers turning themselves in and providing incontrovertible video evidence of their own crimes to see justice meted out, as happened in the case of Ahmaud Arbery? This is the moral universe in which Everett sets the story, a universe that he is at pains to point out hasn’t changed in a century despite a lot of noise to the contrary. Or, as he succinctly puts it: “The body of [lynching victim] Julius Lynch was claimed by his brother… No one was interviewed. No suspects were identified. No one was arrested. No one was charged. No one cared.”
In one scene, the lyrics to “Strange Fruit” appear in their entirety, suggesting we don’t need more narratives about how harrowing America’s race problem is when it’s been documented so plainly for decades. This is also implied by Mama Z’s life’s work: collecting the details of every lynching in America since 1913—a litany of unfortunate Black victims, unidentified bodies, and Italian and Chinese laborers.
The forthrightness of The Trees’ prose also works on other levels. Beyond a nod to the stripped back, factual style of detective fiction that mirrors the technical language of policing, it’s also a reminder of the flagrant nature of lynching; how despite the publicness of the brutality hardly anyone is ever convicted, let alone tried.
This condition gets to the heart of the novel, and speaks to why Everett chooses conventions of the detective genre to tell this story: in real life, bad guys do get away with it, and that’s usually because good guys aren’t actually all that good in the first place. Systemic issues remain even if the system itself is pumped full of people who’ve traditionally been its victims, as we see in Everett’s cast of ethnic minority officers (the contradiction of Black police in a country where police evolved from slave patrols is also made explicit at numerous points in the novel).
But the thing is, Everett’s use of the detective genre to explore this subject matter is also a bit of a joke. Despite noir elements, there is very little ambiguity in the message being conveyed. It’s a mystery without real mystery. This is where The Trees excels. There is minimal moralizing, yet we are left in no doubt as to who the bad guys are. The villain isn’t the murderer(s). Nor is it the Black law enforcement officers we’re embedded with, who jauntily claim the reason they joined the force was so “whitey wasn’t the only one in the room with a gun” but are infuriatingly impartial when it comes to the bigotry of white characters. It’s not even these comically racist white folk, from the Mississippians we spend the most time with to those spread to the coasts of whom we only get a glimpse.
The real villain, clearly, is the racism that’s not only rooted in American life but perpetuated by cultural forces to this day. The kind of pervasive racism that means Americans treat things like lynchings and police shootings (which Mama Z “classes as lynchings”) as if they were an academic matter. An inevitability instead of an aberration, as if they weren’t white America’s biggest shame, a shame they refuse to discuss. We want to believe simple, cold facts can change people’s minds, as Damon Thruff originally seems to (Thruff, a serious-minded academic, may be a stand-in for Everett, the former’s character development representing the latter’s growing rage at the mainstream acceptance of American racism, the peak of which is the publication of this book). When Mama Z drily points out Thruff has written so much on the subject of lynching without showing sufficient anger, he responds, “One hopes that dispassionate, scientific work will generate proper outrage.” Yet, as we see in all facets of life nowadays, narrative is more important than fact anyway, an outcome Everett hammers home during the haunting end of the book, where Thruff has been seemingly converted to Mama Z’s mystical brand of justice after constantly rereading the names of the lynching victims. In one thoroughly depressing chapter Everett repeats this list verbatim, including names like Michael Brown, a gesture that once again underlines the thesis: America is just as racist as it always has been.
What The Trees gets at is white America’s biggest fear: that they’ll be treated like they’ve treated everyone else. Everett is undoubtedly aware that the racist thought leaders of the new American Right tend to throw out accusations toward people of color drawn directly from the exact history of what white people have done to Black and brown people, both in America and globally, actions that carry on to this day: the likening of people of color and immigrants to “hoards” carrying disease is linked to white people conquering the new world by decimating native populations with sickness; the idea that people of color, especially Black Americans, are somehow dangerous is directly related to white people’s own long history of lynching, raping, and enslaving; the notion that whiteness should be preserved is a reaction to white settlers destroying Native and slave cultures, first through violence and disease, then the cultural genocide of residential schools and ghettoization.
Everett is calling out a growing subset of white, conservative Americans who are afraid to look at their own history because they might discover that everything they’re afraid of actually isn’t alien: it’s in their blood, and it’s in them. This Joycean conception of historical entropy is something Everett has touched upon in other of his works, but never expressed as explicitly as he does here through the literal dragging up of dead bodies of color.
Despite all the rage simmering beneath its even-handed prose, The Trees isn’t just anti-white polemic. By bringing us into the world of the poor white racist, Everett shows us how miserable circumstances lead to miserable outcomes everywhere. He is pointing out that, despite the ideology of wealthy white bankers whose only experience of the wild is a choreographed hunting trip on daddy’s dime, the world is not an actual jungle. People do not naturally turn on each other or automatically react with fear and hate, but only do so because they are products of a system that manipulates them into doing so.
With that said, Everett does not absolve white racists of sin either. Far from it, they get their comeuppance in the book, whether that’s in a dive bar in the middle of nowhere or the Oval Office. But there’s no real catharsis to this, and there’s even the suggestion that unleashing all the pain and hurt Black America rightfully feels won’t do much but will justify further white barbarism. But Everett isn’t seeking to come to a solution. He doesn’t think it’s up to Black people to do that. When it comes down to it, The Trees: A Novel is simply calling it like it is. And that’s the least funny thing about the book.