CW: lots of gore and descriptions of historical lynchings
Percival Everett is another one of those incredibly prolific authors, and I’m frankly a bit embarrassed by how few of his works I’ve read. Given that this is the second one that I’ve enjoyed, I think I’ll turn to his back catalogue whenever I’ve got a bit of a gap to fill.
I was under the impression that this book was about murderous trees, specifically that the trees used to lynch Black people (the book focuses on 1913-present, but in general) decide enough is enough and start to murder the white people responsible. It’s not that, if anyone else has that weird takeaway? No idea where it came from. But it’s not not about that idea, in the abstract.
In Money, Mississippi (yes, indeed, I did sing the M-I-SS-I-SS-I-PP-I), the incredibly racist and incompetent sheriff’s department are up in arms when a series of two murders are committed with similar characteristics: the victims have barbed wire around their necks, were beaten thoroughly, and then had their testicles cut off. Said genitalia are nearby, in the hands of the corpse of a Black man who is definitely 100% also dead, except that he vanishes from the morgue. Confused and a bit humiliated, special detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation are dispatched to figure out what’s going on, why the Black corpse looked like Emmett Till, and if there’s any connection to a rash of similar murders going on across the country.
I’m actually not certain if the ‘answer’ to the mystery is all that relevant (). What’s more interesting, I think, is what you want to have happen. There are all sorts of terrible characters in the book (surprise, most of them are white racists) and not all of them end up dead. Does inherited KKK-ism and racism linked to lynching outrank racism come by on one’s own and promulgated via being law enforcement? There are also lots of Black characters in the book, and they have differing views on what should be done about the unaddressed history of racial lynching terrorism in the country, from revenge to apathy to beating them at their own game. It’s almost like a pick our own story except the adventure is systemic racism.
The entire vibe is also like, dunno, BlacKkKlansman? Get Out? Django Unchained? I haven’t watched any of these, but imagine like…modern day Blaxploitation vibes, everyone wearing highly stylized 70s outfits and color blocking and overacting caricatures but on purpose. E.g., bits where heads of various factions of white supremacists meet on Zoom and realize they’ve got giant arsenals of ammo but, like, ten white warriors apiece will make you actually laugh out loud. The description of the self-identifying rednecks of Money, Mississippi sound like something that would be satirized by the main character of Erasure (which I have not read, but I did watch the film adaptation American Fiction)–hilarious in the extreme because they are written in the extreme.
