On zombies and racial reconciliation

A review of Percival Everett's novel, The Trees

So I promised to review a book published by a small press every month and then March disappeared with no review. So here’s what should have been March’s review—The Trees, by Percival Everett, published by Graywolf Press. Here are January and February’s reviews if you want to catch up:

January: Dear Edna Sloane by Amy Shearn

February: About Grace by Barbara Shoup

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The Trees by Percival Everett is the second novel I’ve read in which Emmett Till isn’t quite dead. In Lewis Nordan’s novel, Wolf Whistle, Emmett Till’s disembodied eye goes on seeing things long after he’s dead. In The Trees, Till and other Black and Asian men who were lynched come back from the dead to seek vengeance against their murderers and the descendants of their murderers. At least in these novels, Emmett Till never really dies. His ghost goes on haunting us, the big unfinished promise of this country. Or the ugly sin our whole nation is built on.

It is, of course, a metaphor for the way in which our history won’t leave us alone. And also in The Trees, a question. If the lynched dead rose from their graves, what would they want? Why not vengeance? When you get to the ten-page list of the names of men who have been lynched since 1913, it’s hard not to cheer on a little eye-for-an-eye. The list is so long and it’s probably still not complete. As one of the characters asks, is genocide carried out slowly over decades any less a genocide?

The Trees is a satire. The characters have ridiculous names like Doctor Revered Fondle and Junior Junior. It takes place in Money, Mississippi, the town where Emmett Till was lynched, but the smaller town outside of Money is, of course, named Small Change. Eventually, an army of dead Black men descend on the White House while our illustrious leader is giving a speech about how he would never say the n-word, as he says the n-word repeatedly. Everett nails Trump-speak perfectly. And is it satisfying to imagine a group of murderous, un-dead Black men descending on the White House? Yes, yes, it is satisfying.

The Trees is a satire that raises the question, what do we owe to our history? What do we owe Emmett Till or Philando Castile or George Floyd or any of the other countless names on those lists? What would justice look like? Is justice even possible?

Often when I talk to my students about what it will take to make our world better—less racist, less sexist, less homophobic, less ableist, less transphobic—their answer is death. We just have to wait for the bad old people to die. The Boomers, I guess, even though the Boomers were also the ones who were on the front lines of all those social movements that moved history forward. Turns out history can be moved backward, too.

My students don’t want to actively kill the old people. Or at least they don’t admit that to me. Maybe I’m one of the old people who need to die and so they’re just being polite. Or maybe they’re being canny, keeping their plots to themselves for now.

I read another book recently which imagines a sort of racial rapture. One day, all the white people walk into bodies of water and drown themselves. Of course, my first question was, who are the white people? Race doesn’t have any biological basis. Race is the very realest thing and simultaneously, it’s totally made up. This is part of what makes it so dangerous—you can make up almost anything. Any group can be turned into the bad guys/the demons/less-than-human. It’s also a source of great hope. If we made race up, surely, somehow, we can un-make it.

I read The Trees and other novels as a white person and so, of course, I play that eternal game of Whiteness, asking myself would I be on the list? Would I be killed? Would I walk into the water and drown? In other words, am I a good white person or not? Would the army of the lynched come for me and my family? Am I innocent?

This is, of course, the eternal quest that the identity of Whiteness is built upon. The search for innocence. It’s one of those strange ironies of American life. Because, of course, if you’re obsessed with being seen as innocent, it’s because you’re deeply worried that you might be guilty. People who believe that they’re innocent probably don’t spend much time thinking about it. If you don’t feel Emmett Till’s spooky eyeball watching you from the grave, what do you care about innocence?

Also, it’s so fucking childish. Babies are innocent, I guess. The rest of us are plugged into systems which we cooperate with or resist to varying degrees. Innocence is a mythical finish line. If I can prove I’m innocent, then I no longer have to worry about my own complicity. But the only finish line is death. The rest is just the hard day-to-day work of figuring out how to be a little bit less of the problem and a little bit more of the solution. That work never ends. The only prize is the knowledge that you’re hopefully doing your part. So much less satisfying than being innocent, isn’t it?

I liked The Trees. It was funny. I could feel Everett at play in his writing. It doesn’t read to me like a novel written by someone who’s from the South. At least not the South that I know. That’s okay.

The novel ends with a character who is, I think we’re supposed to believe, behind the army of avenging dead people. She asks another character, “Shall I stop him?” As in, should she stop white people from being murdered? As in, should she stop this act of vengeance? Or justice? Should she stop it or let it keep going? What’s the right thing to do? She asks the question several times and no one answers.

I don’t have an answer, either. I know that race is a thing that we created. It’s not even a concept that’s particularly old, dating about to the period of European colonization, so say, 500 years, give or take? I also know it’s one of the deadliest ideas we’ve ever come up with. Can we let go of it, given that it’s become such an essential part of who we are in the United States? I don’t know. I have to believe it’s possible, even if I don’t know how to get there. It’s a bloody path that landed us here. It remains to be seen if the path out is bloody, too.