Big Trouble In Little America – Percival Everett's 'The Trees'
A novel that explores (and explodes) the ways in which we (don't) talk about racism
The Trees is an extremely readable novel: funny, insightful and pained. Percival Everett takes a light touch approach in his prose through a commitment to snappy dialogue and limited descriptions encompassed in a short and sharp 200 pages.
What first appears as simplicity is testament to the assured hand of an experienced writer (of 21 novels?!) who knows when and where to break the rules and how to indulge literary tropes and conventions that bear their own ounce of hard truth. Seemingly a picaresque murder-mystery, The Trees reveals a complex game of the novel as testament, soon becoming a race-revenge war masquerading as a zombie apocalypse of victims returned from the grave, while providing a brisk but pointed account of the (continued) history of lynching in America. Everett manages to balance the weight of his interest without labouring under the form of the fully footnoted non-fiction history book.
The Trees is revealed through a series of surreal murders where white murder victims (former murderers themselves) are found viciously strangled to the point of decapitation, and with their balls ripped-off alongside a black corpse which mysteriously disappears only to return at the next crime scene (a cute nod is given in this Picador edition’s cover design).
The Trees adopts the present-day setting of the town Money, Mississippi, where Emmet Till was beaten and lynched in 1955, with Till’s murder as its metaphor. Till was accused by a young white girl, Carolyn Bryant Donham, of whistling or making an inappropriate comment to her, that so angered her brother and father that they hunted Till down and brutally killed. This incident of crying wolf sparks the entire narrative of The Trees and in interview Everett makes the point that despite pressure from the FBI and other legal agencies, Till’s mother chose to have an open casket at her son’s funeral to show the horrific acts inspired by racism. Carolyn Bryant Donham later recanted her accusation, though it was too late for his murderers to be punished. She died in 2023, one year after the publication of The Trees.
As Everett notes in another book (I’m currently reading 2024’s retelling of Huckelberry Finn, James, written from the perspective of ‘Jim’ the slave) black people are always promised deliverance upon death in accordance with their own White-skewed version of Christianity, though punishment for their ‘masters’ and persecutors is never included in that spiritual trade-off.
Instead of being hamstrung by the manners of the comedic or even satirical novel which manages the risk of possible offence to the reader, Everett goes on the full offensive with The Trees. Employing every trope of the buddy detective movie, but making the good guys black, instead of the white saviours of a film like Mississippi Burning. These black cops experience their own form of self-loathing at being on the wrong side of (with) the establishment, contrasted against often hysterical cliches of slack-jawed, deep south law enforcement who know their faults and can only abide by them as the way of being they understand. Everyone white is either an overt or barely concealed racist, constantly dropping the N-word, clumsily replacing it with the straight description “the black man” or “person”, and sometimes self-consciously adding a “no offense” disclaimer, becoming apologists without the will or know-how to change, they simply take the edge off of the truth in order to survive.
Read more about the song in this Vanity Fair piece
This deep satire embeds a constant push and pull of racial tensions that everyone knows is there and tries to ignore, obfuscate or repair–though it still remains throughout, like a wound, like a scar, we are immersed in repetition of the murders, echoing the ongoing series of lynchings from the early 20th century and on into the 21st.
(In a BBC interview Everett mentions that at the former headquarters of the NAACP in New York, there used to be a flag raised outside which noted another lynching had taken place, it has recently been revived with the new caption “A man was lynched by police yesterday”)
Everett claims not to see humour in his writing, so much as an exposure of the cruel ironies found in a world dominated by humans doing inhuman things. The Trees takes aim at this situation in pointed moments of reflection. Everett includes the lyrics to the song ‘Strange Fruit’, often sung by Billie Holliday, and adds in the side quest of young academic researcher who visiting Money is introduced to a vast archive of filing cabinets, cataloguing every lynching in America since 1913. Choosing to write them out by hand in pencil, and then to erase them (erasure a continued dramatic and thematic hinge in Everett’s writing) as if to give them life again and so doing grant them final rest.
Again in interview, Everett argues out that the present day ku klux klan exists by other names, at one point alluding to the Republican Party as the biggest chapter of them all (thereby condemning half of the American population). In The Trees he glances in on the panicked, fear-driven knee-jerk klan groups across the country responding to trail of murders as a point of action. He portrays these hobbyist-rascists and their pisswater occult-ish Christianity as stupid, disorganised and riven by internal bickering. The one insight he allows them is that their perceived threat through strength in numbers is also their weakness; spread all across the United States of America, they are unable to organise themselves into anything approaching unilateral action.
Everett makes the pointed claim to include police killings in this list, noting by the names (some repeated) that all of the lynched men were alike and yet unique, with the majority being black citizens it also includes Chinese and Italian people who had come to America as immigrants, they shared the experience of difference and racism in common. Reading through the list which Everret threatened had been much longer in the original draft, I recognised the name of Trayvon Martin not too far from the end, who is mentioned in Frank Ocean track ‘Nikes’ from the 2016 album Blonde: “RIP Trayvon—that nigger looked just like me”].
In Everett’s common fashion of breaking out of form and resisting genre, we enter into a meta-fictional device where the names are listed in the book (some anonymous/un-named) for the reader to choose to read through for several pages. It begins earnest and open-minded, but becomes tedious, troubling; you become a captive reader, and like the academic character, we experience the aching sense of seeing same crime being committed over and over to a point of exhaustion, left to wonder where/when/if will it end. What might seem an indulgence is also a kind of endurance test and Everett’s own form of conscious memoriam – putting atrocity at the heart of a popular work of fiction and again at the centre of American life.
