Percival Everett's The Trees
William Faulkner: "The past is never dead. It's not even past." Percival Everett: "History is a motherfucker."
The Trees is a lot of things. It’s a comedy, written in the style of Carl Hiaasen if Carl Hiaasen started caring about racial trauma the way he cares about the environment. It’s a police procedural, with the kinds of quick cuts that are more typical for television than the novel. It’s also a revenge story: the author knows it, the characters know it, and before too many deaths have occurred you know it too:
“You know the old story about the vulture? Man walks into town and sees a vulture land on a statue not five feet from him. The vulture looks right at him. He eats him some lunch and comes out and the bird is gone. He leaves town and his car breaks down on the road. He looks up and there’s that turkey buzzard, starin’ right at him. He say, ‘How come you followed me to town and now here you is?’
“The vulture looks him up and down and says, ‘I didn’t follow you. I just happened to be in town. I was on my way to this spot to wait for you.’”
That vulture is Percival Everett. He’s waiting for you because he wants you, his readers, to wake up from your collective amnesia about the racial violence that pervades American history.
A lot of human history is like the sun: it’s too painful to look at directly for very long, we can only linger upon it in some kind of reflected form. In Werner Herzog’s documentary, Grizzly Man, Herzog listens to his subject being mauled to death. Instead of hearing the audio themselves, the viewing audience sees only Herzog’s reaction to it. The photograph above is something of the same thing. It shows Emmitt Till’s mother at her son’s open casket. Photographs of his badly damaged face exist; I can’t bear to look at them for long. It’s hard enough to bear witness to his mother’s pain.
Percival Everett doesn’t want you to look away. He places the body of an almost Emmitt Till at each of the crime scenes, he describes the shattered face over and over again. He’s seen the photograph, and he wants you to know it too, even if you never see it with your own eyes. Everett wants you to know about the history of lynching in America, but he always wants you to feel this history. Here’s his thesis, the rationale for this strange novel, as it appears about halfway through:
“What do you know about lynching"?” Mama Z asked.
“Some. I wrote a book about racial violence.”
“I know,” the old woman said. “I have a copy in the house. It’s very …”—she searched for the word—”scholastic.”
“I think you’re saying that like it’s a bad thing.”
Mama Z shrugged.
Damon looked at Gertrude, as if for clarification, only to see her shrug as well. “Scholastic,” he repeated.
“Don’t take it the wrong way,” Gertrude said.
“Your book is very interesting,” Mama Z said, “because you were able to construct three hundred and seven pages on such a topic without an ounce of outrage.”
The trick Everett plays in The Trees is that you’re not outraged—at least I wasn’t—not at first. Everett allows you to shield your eyes for a while. There’s plenty of humor. His investigators are fun and personable; they crack jokes. The murder victims are deplorable caricatures, the kind of people you don’t miss after they’re gone.
Then the story expands outwards from Mississippi. You learn that lynchings happened outside of the south. You learn that African-Americans weren’t the only targets. You’re confronted with a memorial wall of a chapter that is just a list of names of people who were lynched. Another chapter ends with a long list of places where lynchings occurred.
The revenge killings multiply as rabbits do. The white characters in this novel have an almost Tourettic inability to stop using the N-word; their lack of redeeming qualities means that none will be redeemed. As Everett kills them off over and over again, I found myself feeling increasingly uncomfortable about the novel’s message. Was Everett’s goal to simply depict a race war with a touch of magical realism? What happened to nonviolence, to Martin Luther King Jr., to “an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind?” I’d found the following passage hilarious early in the novel, but now it felt like Everett was describing himself, how had traded his literary garb for that of the mortician:
“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.”
It wasn’t until the end of the book that I realized that Everett had got me exactly where he wanted me. I’d started reading The Trees with what Mama Z would call a “scholastic” attitude: I already know about the long history of racial terror in America, there’s nothing in this book that’s going to shock me. But by the end of the novel I felt upset, and about what, exactly? Everett didn’t kill any real people—the final scene reminds us that he’s simply putting words on paper—but he forced me to shift from a comfortable, numb sadness to shock and anger.
I didn’t intend to read two of Everett’s novels back-to-back; I’d reserved both at the library and they showed up the same week. The Trees helped me understand why Everett tried to rewrite Huck Finn and why it didn’t quite work: Everett is at his best when concocting outrageous situations that make us think differently about the past. He’s not as interested in subtle characterization. So much of the action and setting in James already exists from Huck Finn, so the lack of character depth stands out, but in The Trees he has the complete freedom of an antic god. It shouldn’t work to write about a funny page-turner about a historical evil, but somehow it does.