The Trees by Percival Everett
Summary by Reading Group Choices:
Percival Everett’s The Trees is a page-turner that opens with a series of brutal murders in the rural town of Money, Mississippi. When a pair of detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation arrive, they meet expected resistance from the local sheriff, his deputy, the coroner, and a string of racist White townsfolk. The murders present a puzzle, for at each crime scene there is a second dead body: that of a man who resembles Emmett Till.
The detectives suspect that these are killings of retribution, but soon discover that eerily similar murders are taking place all over the country. Something truly strange is afoot. As the bodies pile up, the MBI detectives seek answers from a local root doctor who has been documenting every lynching in the country for years, uncovering a history that refuses to be buried. In this bold, provocative book, Everett takes direct aim at racism and police violence, and does so in fast-paced style that ensures the reader can’t look away. The Trees is an enormously powerful novel of lasting importance from an author with his finger on America’s pulse.
A Better Book Club Discussion Questions about The Trees:
1. The Trees has been called by book reviewers an indictment of America's racial terrorism masquerading as a police procedural and slapstick comedy (Mary Corey, Feb 3, 2022, Los Angeles Review of Books); a direct aim at racism and police violence that does not look away (Good Reads, Sept 21, 2021); a heavy dose of pulp fiction with a biting sense of humor (LonesomeReader.com June 2022); a deep dive into the miasma of racist stereotypes held towards and among multiple groups that is both absurd and produces plenty of chills (PublishersWeekly.com September 2021).
What words would you use to describe this book? What thoughts, feelings, emotions did the book evoke for you? Did you know anything about the 1955 abduction, torture and lynching of 14 year old Emmett Till before you read this book?
2. The plot of The Trees is set in motion when Junior Junior Milam is found murdered — mutilated and castrated — alongside the body of a young Black man, who resembles Emmett Till. Milam is the son-in-law of Granny C, who turns out to be Carolyn Bryant. In 1955, Bryant was the white woman who accused Emmett Till of flirting and wolf-whistling at her in her family's grocery store, which later led to Till’s brutal murder by Bryant's husband, Roy, and his half brother, J.W. Milam. In a review of the book, Carole Bell of NPR stated, "The killing of Till left a mark on the national psyche. But details fade, so that both the pettiness of Till's alleged violations of racial etiquette and the obscene brutality of the crime may no longer be widely known. No work of art will ever right justice denied, but The Trees does a spectacular job of resurrection, beginning with a mordant echo of Bryant's recanting:"
It has been sixty seven years since the murder of Emmett Till, and while the author does include certain facts about Till's murder in The Trees, he made a choice to wrap the brutal details of Till's death in a blanket of historical fiction, caricatures, dark humor and an apology for the murder from Carolyn Bryant that never happened.
Why do you think an author might choose to tell a historical story of this magnitude in a fictional way? Do you agree with Carol Bell of NPR that The Trees does a spectacular job of resurrecting interest in Till's story, or do you think the book is trying to do too many things? Who is the books intended audience? Do you think that intended audience understands the satire in the story and knows what is truth and what is fiction?
3. The inside joke of The Trees is the white Establishment, reduced by Everett’s figurative language and puns to a redneck laughing stock. The initial focus is on the Bryant family, members of whom were responsible for Till’s death and their dialogue is rendered in pidgin English, their naming conventions the stuff of slapstick: “Also at the gathering was Granny C’s brother’s youngest boy, Junior Junior. His father, J.W. Milam, was called Junior, and so his son was Junior Junior, never J. Junior, never Junior J., never J.J., but Junior Junior. The older, called Just Junior after the birth of his son, had died of ‘the cancer’ as Granny C called it. …”
What is the relationship between stereotype and history? How do power dynamics change the impact and meaning of stereotypes?
Reviewer Mary Cory wondered "...we laugh and turn the page as one dumb, lazy, criminally inclined white person after another turns up dead. It's entertainment, and yet we regard their death as fictional sport. But isn't it a little like those white folks who for generations gathered merrily around the castrated carcasses of hanging/burning Black people?" What are your thoughts on this complex reversal of actual events?
Do you feel the use of reverse stereotyping effective in this book, or does it potentially cloud or muddy the present day discussions around important issues such as race and policing currently going on in this country?
4. Everett upends the black racial stereotypes prevalent in the Jim Crow era south by presenting the reader with a "white trash" cast of characters featuring Hot Mama Yeller and a parade of lazy, countrified, hapless dumb-clucks that represents the Black gaze on steroids (Mary Corey, LA Book Review) and places center stage Jim Davis and Ed Morgan, two highly educated Black members of the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, sent to aide the racist hillbilly sheriff, Red Jetty and his equally racist deputy yokels, Delroy Digby and Braden Brady in solving the murders.
The Trees is explicitly concerned with anti-Black police violence yet has Black investigators as main characters. How does the author portray the tensions between policing and Blackness? Why do you think the author chose to place them in positions of authority during a time when that would have been virtually impossible?
5. According to a 2019 study by the sentenceproject.org, black Americans are incarcerated at a rate nearly 5 times that of white Americans and in 12 states more than half the prison population is black (Alabama, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Mississippi, New Jersey, North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia) and Black Americans are 3 times more likely to be killed by police than White Americans (this study was done before the killing of George Floyd by police officer Derrick Chauvin) which resulted in the Black Lives Matter movement and a renewed spotlight on racism and policing in this country.
Herbetta "Herbie" Hind is sent in to assist Davis and Morgan and they talk about why they became cops and Davis says, "So Whitey wouldn't be the only one in the room with a gun." In light of these recent statistics regarding black incarceration in America, why are Davis' words important not only to the story, but to Everett's point about the current state of racism and policing in America?
6. Chester Hobsinger and Gertrude Penstock are mixed race and White-passing.
How does this shape them and their roles in the book? How are they perceived by other characters and in what ways does this help or hinder them in meeting their goals?
7. The KKK stages a cross burning that goes wrong and mostly unnoticed.
What does this say about the relationship between stupidity and violence, incompetence and innocence? How does that relationship change what is perceived as a threat?
8. What is the significance of Bluegum’s, the dojo, and Black self-defense in The Trees?
9. At the heart of The Trees is a massive archive of victims of anti-Black violence, many unnamed.
What is the book saying about the relationship between memory and justice?
10. Meanwhile, multiple Black characters in the book have origin stories rooted in lynching.
How do you think racist violence and racism shape families? What do you think is included and omitted from family history and are future generations accountable for these omissions?
11. The Trees is specifically concerned with America’s anti-Blackness, yet it names the sites of violence that represent other marginalized identities as well.
How do these types of violence relate? Do you think American anti-Blackness unique?
12. Damon Thruf begins by writing the name of every lynching victim in pencil with the goal to later erase them and “set them free.” At the end of the novel, he is typing them instead.
What do you think has changed?
13. The Trees is full of satire at every turn, some of it very crude and shocking.
How does humor diffuse or sharpen emotional responses to difficult material, historical or otherwise? Is racism and stereotyping in any form, ever a laughing matter?
14. In The Trees, Everett portrays the President as a bumbling, ignorant, self-absorbed buffoon and it is no secret that the President in his story is based on his stereotype of former President, Donald J. Trump.
While Everett throws some serious satirical shade at America's 45th President, it has been 67 years since Emmett Till's death and there have been 13 Presidents: Eisenhower (Republican), Kennedy (Democrat), Johnson (Democrat), Nixon (Republican), Ford (Republican), Carter (Democrat), Reagan (Republican), Bush (Republican), Clinton (Democrat), Bush Jr. (Republican), Obama (Democrat), Trump (Republican) and currently Biden (Democrat),all who were elected to protect and uphold the civil rights of ALL Americans and yet issues of white supremacy, systemic racism and unfair policing continue to plague every Presidential administration, regardless of party. What has to happen in America for this sad narrative to change?
15. In an interview with NPR, Percival Everett stated that there was a key reason he wrote The Trees: "I did not allow his (Till's) body to remain lying in someone else's blood and instead wrote a piece dedicated to him, of sorts-granting him the justice that today's modern world so deeply seeks on equality and justice, planting his case at the center."
Do you feel the story worked as Everett intended? A Mississippi grand jury in August 9, 2022 declined to indict Carolyn Bryant on charges of kidnapping and manslaughter, based on the finding of an unserved warrant in the original 1955 case. The Reverend Wheeler Parker, Jr. Emmett Till's cousin and the last living witness to Till's August 28, 1955 abduction said that the decision was predictable as hundreds of years of anti-Black systems guaranteed those who killed Till will never be held accountable. Again, do you feel the story worked as Everett intended?
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/09/us/emmett-till-murder-grand-jury.html?smid=url-share
Great job, Anne!
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