The
Trees, by Percival Everett.
Southern trees bear strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees
The verses of the song
above help Percival Everett walk the fine line between horror and satire with great
success in this novel of the complicated revenge struck by Black people for the
killing – mainly lynching – of Black people for more than a century. His portrayal of the murders of the Good Ole
Boys whose families were responsible for the lynching of 14 year-old Emmet Till
in Mississippi back in the day is chilling, especially for the fact that each
corpse had his testicles removed, clutched in the hand of a dead Black man,
also at the crime scene. The redneck
local Sheriff assumes, as anyone would, that said Black man is the killer, even
though he was shot in the back of the head:
murder/suicide. Wrap this up,
guys.
Except that the killing doesn’t stop: more bodies are found further afield, along
with their presumed Black killer clutching testicles, causing the redneck
Sheriff to suffer the indignity of having to accept assistance from two Black
detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, followed by a
frightening Black woman agent from the FBI – cain’t they even be left to clean
up their own crap?? Apparently not.
In fact, no-one can, for the country is in for a
reckoning: there have been so many hate
crimes and racially based murders that Black spirits are not the only victims
calling ghosts to Rise; Asians are
hearing the call of Genocide, too. How
will it all end, especially when the current leader in the White House (in this
story Donald Trump) gets jammed under his desk and can’t get out, discovering
wads of chewing gum stuck in his hair, a sure sign that his VP had been trying
out the desk for size – while he was Making America Great Again!
Mr Everett paints a frightening, shamefully true picture
of the woeful state of race relations in America, overlaid with superb,
satirical humour from characters who
speak truth in every sentence: every country needs such a chronicler. Even though the truth hurts and is frequently
unpalatable, it’s always preferable to lies. SIX STARS.
