What if the dead don’t have to stay dead? How do we deal with tragedy so vast, and so systematic, so enshrined in our institutions? Percival Everett’s novel The Trees responds to that question by positing a world in which the past won’t stay buried. In Money, Mississippi (a place I had to look up to verify it’s reality, despite its imaginary qualities in this novel) the local cops are faced with a series of strange murders. This fictional version of Money is home to Carolyn […]

The title “The Trees” most immediately references two ideas in this book. First, the family trees of white Southerners who suddenly find their crimes and their families’ crimes coming back to haunt them and even kill them. The second of course is as a symbol of lynching. In the novel we begin with a white family discussing the murder of one of their kin who is found dead and bound in barbed wire, his testicles cut off, and next to the body of a Black […]