Published by Influx Press / Graywolf Press, 2021, 335 pages.

“Money, Mississippi, looks exactly like it sounds. Named in that persistent Southern tradition of irony and with the attendant tradition of nescience, the name becomes slightly sad, a marker of self-conscious ignorance that might as well be embraced because, let’s face it, it isn’t going away.”

The town of Money, Mississippi, is the scene of two brutal murders. Junior Junior Milam is found dead with a length of barbed wire twisted around his neck. A few feet away is the body of a Black man in a blue suit. It is not clear whether the Black man killed Junior Junior or his body was merely placed there. After the bodies are taken to the morgue, the Black man’s body disappears.

It turns up at the second murder, that of Wheat Bryant, who is killed in much the same way as Junior Junior.

The murders seem to echo the lynching of Emmett Till in Money in 1955, with the body of the Black man bearing an uncanny resemblance to Emmett. The choice of the men murdered is not random either: Wheat Bryant’s mother, whom everyone calls Granny C., is Carolyn Bryant, whose accusation led to Emmett Till’s murder. She was pushed to lie by her brother J.W. Milam (Junior Junior’s father) and her husband Roy Bryant. She later regretted the lie, but it was far too late to save Emmett.

Two Black detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, Ed Morgan and Jim Davis, are sent to Money to investigate. But when copycat murders start happening throughout the country—in some cases, with the body of an Asian man at the murder scene—they are joined by Special Agent Herberta Hind from the FBI.

So what is going on? Are the murders a consequence of the United States’ bloody history of racism?

Ed and Jim turn to Mama Z, a 105-year-old woman who has chronicled every single lynching in the US since 1913, making sure that not a single victim is forgotten, even those whose names are not known. Does she know more than she is telling? And is Gertrude—the waitress at the local diner and Mama Z’s great-granddaughter—somehow involved?

There is a lot of humour in The Trees, which had me laughing out loud (and sometimes wincing at the same time). The Ku Klux Klan in Money—whatever remains of it—has become irrelevant. The members reminisce about their childhoods, eating cake next to burning crosses. “We don’t do nothing now,” one of them complains. “I don’t even know where my hood is.” Nevertheless, they burn a cross, partly to scare off the MBI men. When the local sheriff tells Ed and Jim about it, they are unimpressed. “That was a cross? … I thought it was a car fire or something”, says Jim. “I wish I had known…I forgot to be scared.”

This book is fast-paced and pulls no punches in describing the brutality of the murders and also of the unimaginable violence of the lynchings. Percival Everett drives home the sheer numbers of people lynched by listing their names: not just Black people, but also Asians. Less than one percent of lynchers were ever convicted, and only a fraction of those actually served a sentence. As the notes on the lynching of Mama Z’s father show, no effort was made to hold people accountable for the killings. “No one was interviewed. No suspects were identified. No one was arrested. No one was charged. No one cared.”

Everett has found a new way to write about a very dark period in the history of the US and also about police brutality and racism of the present.

This is a powerful book which I found difficult to put down.