The Trees by Percival Everett

Who shoots himself in the
back of the head in a dumpster?

I was very grateful at first to Honorary Doctor and Guggenheim Fellow Everett for the balls-out, nakedly laugh-out-loud funny slapstick police procedural that The Trees sets out to pretend to be, as it was a trying time in that instalment of the Great Davies Bin Fire and I was due a good ROFL. I love the overly-egged and bluntly satirical names (the town is called Money, Mississippi, Cad Fondle is the coroner, Chalk Pellucid is the sheriff*), the Klan members are comically unreconstructed and ignorant, and the dialogue is reminiscent of Erksine Caldwell or Augustus Baldwin Longstreet’s Georgia Scenes (although given his problematic views on slavery and secessionism, to invite this comparison could land me in a bit of water heated by the fire of righteous anger). I even caught a hint of Chester Himes in the two black detectives summoned on what might have been a suicide mission to investigate the growing body count, although that can be put down to recency bias. That their names are eminently forgettable (Ed Morgan and Jim Davis), speaks to Everett’s onomastic use of the foregrounding of names, a little like using the weather as a portent, although they have some of the best dialogue – when asked why they became cops, their reply is along the lines of so that Whitey isn’t the only guy in the room with a gun.

Oh, I’m sorry, I’ve dived straight into the meat of this sandwich without the customary apology for its tardiness. I reckon 17 months is about average these days, but this does mean that this review will be a reverse hamburger of a review, with meat on top and bottom and the starchy layer of apology sandwiched between.

In any event, Everett has form for playing it straight police procedural only to drop the old switcheroo** and subvert expectations, but from the off I had the creeping suspicion, rightly born out, that there was more to this than met the eye – perhaps because of my long admiration of Everett’s body of work, perhaps because of all the foreshadowing of names, but more likely because it was mentioned in dispatches in the Booker Prize awards of 20-whenever-it-came-out. Sneaking past all the guffawing and stealing up with the long sharp blade of social commentary comes the history of lynching in the United States of America compiled by Mama Z, great(?)-grandmother of Dixie, neé Gertrude (because Dixie gets more tips in Money Mississippi), the passing-for-white black waitress at the café, signposted by the fact that it was Emmett Till’s body which was appearing at and disappearing from the crime scenes of mutilated rednecks. I’m not sure the army of lynched black ghosts rampaging across America was wishful thinking or metaphor gone awry, but as an image it is powerfully done, with the academic, Damon Thruff, writing and typing out all the names that Mama Z has noted in her records of racially motivated killings across America and seemingly conjuring the vengeful ghouls (or maybe just giving them agency) as they are noted. He promises to erase them after starting out in pencil but he switches to typewriter ink, perhaps in a change of heart so that this history isn’t easily forgotten or written over, that it can’t be ignored by conservative white Americans who fear their own history, can’t be subject to historical entropy.

And so just to give this flimsy sandwich some stability, I’ll top off with a slice of uncomfortable white male viewpoint-cum-apology. There is no catharsis in this book, no bad-guy-gets-comeuppance, not really, not when the poor white Mississippians who are dying live such meagre, crushing lives that they can only propagate more meanness and misery, and it speaks to the anger that Everett must be drawing upon that America is still as racist as Martin Luther King warned it was back in the 1960s. I’m so white it hurts***, but find I can still laugh at lines like in the film American Fiction (itself based on Erasure by Percival Everett) where Monk’s mother meets Coraline, his love interest, with the words, “I’m happy you’re not white,” to which she replies, “So am I.” Should I find that funny? I find Frank Zappa declaiming that although he’s not black, there are some times he wishes he could say he’s not white to be a little trite but it’s kind-of the same thing (or is it?). However, I can’t say I have no skin in this game (sorry) as I’m a product of my upbringing and all of the cultural influences 80s and 90s Britain, and racism is writ large across most of them. I’m not colour-blind, and I don’t think anyone would want me to profess to be, but the least I can do is to hold to Kurt Vonnegut’s oft-quoted maxim:

Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you've got a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies-God damn it, you've got to be kind.

Will that help things? You know it might, eventually.

 

*It must have been great and hilarious fun coming up with the names - in a past life I spend many glorious and giggly hours in a local pub with a significant other coming up with names for a comic soap opera, e.g. Honnister Cod, the QC, Sonya Shuz the dog-walker, and so on.

**I can’t help but hear the jingle from the always lukewarm Three Bean Salad banter-cast at this point, lighting-up as it does bump day in my otherwise tedious working week. That this highlight is also comprised of three middle-aged white men talking rubbish is an irony, given the context of this footnote, that is not lost on me.

**I have a personal anecdote to share here but I refuse to incriminate myself further.

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