THE TREES (2021)
By Percival Everett
Graywolf Press, 305 pages.
★★★★★
“Hoisted on your own petard” means you are a victim of schemes of your own design. In The Trees novelist Percival Everett gives White racists a dose of their own medicine. The title derives from “Strange Fruit,” a famed song about lynching made famous by Billie Holiday. [link here] Among its lyrics:
Southern trees bear a 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
The book opens in Money, Mississippi. If that rings a bell, it’s where 14-year-old Emmett Till was tortured and mutilated in 1955 for allegedly whistling at Carolyn Bryant, a White woman. His bloated body was retrieved from the Tallahatchie River with a cotton gin fan wrapped around his head with barbed wire. An all-White jury took just 67 minutes to acquit Carolyn’s husband Roy and his brother-in-law J. W. Milam, who subsequently bragged of their misdeeds.
Turn about is fair play in Everett’s wicked satire. Carolyn is now a CB-loving grandmother living in redneck squalor in the suburb of Small Change and putters about in an electric cart stolen from Sam’s Club. Her grandson, Junior Junior, is found dead, with his genitals ripped off and in the hand of a dead Black man. Mystery: that Black man was already dead—by many years. It gets weirder. The Rev. Fondle, also Money’s coroner, can’t explain how the Black corpse disappeared from his morgue. Try putting out a Most Wanted poster for that suspect.
Wheat Bryant, a no-account truck driver fired for nearly driving a Piggly Wiggly truck into the river, also shows up dead. Not only is the M.O. the same, he’s lying beside the same dead Black man. The investigation is handed over to the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, which dispatches Ed Morgan, a 6’5” inch/300-pound giant and Jim Davis, smaller and more health-conscious. Both are Black, and local cops practically choke to say “Negro” after beginning to say a different word. Not that Ed and Jim care. They are like vaudeville stand-up comedians having fun working the crowd by insulting it and each other. Their IQ is high; that of Money’s Whites lower than a snake’s belly.
The first two victims are sons of Till’s murderers. Locals wonder if Till has come back for revenge but after still another murder, the corpse doesn’t walk off and it’s not Till. Not that this info gets anyone closer to solving the murders. So what can the KKK do except burn a cross in a ritual so dumb the third K could stand for Klown.
The fruit gets stranger. The FBI sends Agent Herberta Hinds to the scene and she too is Black. Meet Mama Z, a woman who has file cabinets filled with lynching material and claims to be 105-years-old. Her caregiver is a Black waitress who can hold her own in the Ed and Jim stand-up routine. Then the Rev. Fondle dies–the same M.O. for a minister who was also the KKK Kleagle. A couple more Klansmen and Trumpers die, also cuddled beside long-dead Black men bearing their severed equipment.
Before you can say, “revenge is a dish best served cold,” similar murders proliferate: Elaine, AK; Colfax, LA; Omaha, NB; Tulsa, OK; Rosewood, FL; East St, Louis, IL; Chicago, Detroit…. Google those places and “race riots” and you’ll know why. Other murders broaden the color spectrum: Rock Springs, WY; Wounded Knee, SD; Bisbee, AZ…. One of the book’s funniest sections involves a bloviating president of the United States who vows he will personally put a stop to all of this, then hides under his desk and whimpers when his Secretary of the Treasurer is murdered and missing his goolies.
I’ll let you discover if anyone figures out what’s going on. If laughter is the best medicine, The Trees provides a snarky look at righting past injustices and lampooning racists, a Wizard of Oz-like POTUS, good ole’ boys dumber than homemade sin, and other absurdities in these our troubled times. Lurking behind it, though, are implied warnings that the future race war touted by White supremacists might have the desired outcome. Seventy-one years ago the poet Langston Hughes mused about the fate of a dream deferred: “Maybe it just sags like a heavy load/Or does it explode?” Boom!
Rob Weir
* Holiday claimed she cowrote “Strange Fruit.” She did not. It was written by a White Jewish man, Abe Meeropol. He also adopted the sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg after they were executed for spying in 1953 in a highly controversial prosecution.
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