Percival Everett’s Deadly Serious Comedy

Percival Everett has one of the best poker faces in contemporary American literature. The author of twenty-two novels, he excels at the unblinking execution of extraordinary conceits. “If I can make you believe it, then it’s fair game,” he once said of his books, which range from elliptical thriller to genre-shattering farce; their narrators include a vengeful romance novelist (“The Water Cure”), a hyperliterate baby (“Glyph”), and a suicidal English professor risen from the dead (“American Desert”). Everett, sixty-four, is so consistently surprising that his agent once begged him to try repeating himself—advice he’s studiously ignored. “I’ve been called a Southern writer, a Western writer, an experimental writer, a mystery writer, and I find it all kind of silly,” he said earlier this year. “I write fiction.”

Beneath his work’s ever-changing surface lies an obsession with the instability of meaning, and with unpredictable shifts of identity. In his short story “The Appropriation of Cultures,” from 1996, a Black guitarist playing at a joint near the University of South Carolina is asked by a group of white fraternity brothers to sing “Dixie.” He obliges with a rendition so genuine that the secessionist anthem becomes his own, shaming the pranksters and eliciting an ovation. Later, he buys a used truck with a Confederate-flag decal, sparking a trend that turns the hateful symbol into an emblem of Black pride. The story ends with the flag’s removal from the state capitol: “There was no ceremony, no notice. One day, it was not there. Look away, look away, look away . . .”

Such commitment to the bit is exemplary of Everett’s fiction. Yet nothing he has written could be sufficient preparation for his latest book, “The Trees” (Graywolf), a murder mystery set in the town of Money, Mississippi. The novel begins, stealthily enough, as a mordant hillbilly comedy, Flannery O’Connor transposed to the age of QAnon. We are introduced to Wheat Bryant, an ex-trucker who lost his job in a viral drunk-driving incident; his faithless wife, Charlene; his cousin Junior Junior Milam; and his mother, Granny C, who zones out on a motorized shopping cart while the family bickers about hogs. The old woman appears to be having a stroke but is actually reflecting on “something I wished I hadn’t done. About the lie I told all them years back on that nigger boy”:

“Oh Lawd,” Charlene said. “We on that again.”
“I wronged that little pickaninny. Like it say in the good book, what goes around comes around.”
“What good book is that?” Charlene asked. “Guns and Ammo?”

Granny C, it turns out, is a fictionalized Carolyn Bryant Donham, whose accusation that Emmett Till had whistled at and grabbed her, at the country store in Money where she worked, instigated the twentieth century’s most notorious lynching. On August 28, 1955, Donham’s husband, Roy Bryant, and her brother-in-law J. W. Milam kidnapped, tortured, and killed the fourteen-year-old boy for violating the color line. The case drew condemnation throughout the world but ended in Bryant and Milam’s acquittal by an all-white jury. (They later confessed to a reporter in exchange for three thousand dollars.) Donham, alleged by some witnesses to have participated in the abduction, went on to live in peaceful anonymity—until 2017, when, in an interview with the historian Timothy Tyson, she admitted to fabricating details of her encounter with Till. The octogenarian “felt tender sorrow” over Till’s fate but offered no apology. Her longevity renewed outrage about the half-century-old crime: Till died at fourteen; his accuser lived to finish her memoirs, which are due to be made public in 2036.

“The Trees” is not much interested in anyone’s tender sorrow. In the opening chapters, Wheat and Junior Junior—invented sons of Till’s killers—are found castrated, and with barbed wire around their necks. Beside each white victim lies a dead Black man in a suit, disfigured as Till was and clutching the white man’s severed testicles like a trophy. Later, Granny C is found dead of shock beside an identical besuited corpse. Similar murders occur elsewhere in the area, and, each time, a spectral body appears, stirring terrified rumors of a “walking dead Negro man.” The killings spread throughout the country; in several Western states, the vanishing corpse seems to be that of an Asian man. Is it the handiwork of a serial killer? A cadre of vigilante assassins? A swarm of vengeful ghosts?

Into this maelstrom Everett hurls three Black detectives: Ed Morgan, a gentle giant with a young family; Jim Davis, a wisecracking bachelor; and Herberta Hind, a misanthropic professional who joined the F.B.I. to spite her radical parents. (Jim and Ed work for the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, often to their embarrassment: “That’s some crazy shit to yell out. MBI! Fucking ridiculous.”) Received with fear and prejudice by the town’s white citizens, the trio feels distinctly ambivalent about the case, which they initially treat as a dark joke. “Maybe it’s some kind of Black ninja,” Jim says. “Jamal Lee swinging lengths of barbed wire in Money, Mississippi.”

The detectives zero in on what seems like a conspiracy involving a soul-food restaurant (with a secret dojo) and a centenarian root doctor, Mama Z, who keeps records of every lynching in America. The stage is set for a Black-cop ex machina à la “In the Heat of the Night,” “BlacKkKlansman,” or the 2021 New York mayoral election. But the detectives quickly find themselves in the wrong genre of justice. What begins as a macabre sendup of the unreconstructed South culminates in a more unsettling and possibly supernatural wave of vengeance, as the killings assume the dimensions of an Old Testament plague:

Some called it a throng. A reporter on the scene used the word horde. A minister of an AME church in Jefferson County, Mississippi, called it a congregation . . . and like a tornado it would destroy one life and leave the one beside it unscathed. It made a noise. A moan that filled the air. Rise, it said, Rise. It left towns torn apart. Families grieved. Families assessed their histories. It was weather. Rise. It was a cloud. It was a front, a front of dead air.

The unresolved legacy of lynching might seem like a surprising choice of theme for the cool, analytic, and resolutely idiosyncratic Percival Everett. Brought up in a family of doctors and dentists, in Columbia, South Carolina, he studied the philosophy of language in graduate school, drifting from the dissection of invented dialogue into full-blown fiction organically. He wrote his début novel, “Suder” (1983)—the story of a baseball player’s madcap odyssey after a humiliating slump—as a master’s student in creative writing at Brown, where he met the great literary trickster Robert Coover. Everett, too, established himself as an author of terse and wily postmodern fiction, drawing on such influences as Lewis Carroll, Chester Himes, Zora Neale Hurston, and, especially, Laurence Sterne, whose “Tristram Shandy” remains a model for his playfully withholding work.

A character named Percival Everett makes opaque cameos in several of his novels but offers few keys to his creator’s life. Publicity-avoidant—he told audiences on his one book tour, for his twelfth novel, “Erasure” (2001), that he was there only because he needed money for a new roof—Everett likes to downplay his literary vocation. He routinely describes fiction as a sideline to hands-on pursuits like fly-fishing, wood carving, ranching, and training animals, especially horses, whom he credits with teaching him to write. Everett himself teaches English at the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife, Danzy Senna, a novelist and a fellow U.S.C. faculty member. Yet he’s reluctant to admit that he has anything to teach. He speaks of writing fiction as a Zen-like process of unlearning, each novel leaving him more aware of his ignorance than the last. As he once said, “My goal is to know nothing, and my friends tell me I’m well on my way.”

His protagonists, too, are buffeted by destabilizing revelations—crises of identity that double as crises of genre. In “American Desert” (2004), the jolt of being resurrected forces Ted Street to reëvaluate a broken marriage, even as Christian fundamentalists try to conscript him into millenarian schemes. Baby Ralph, the narrator of “Glyph” (2014), terrifies adults with his mastery of language—especially his father, an insecure post-structuralist academic—upending several disciplines by writing prodigiously yet refusing to speak. (“I was a baby fat with words, but I made no sound,” he reflects.) The novel is a characteristically Everett mixture of deadpan wit, slapstick accident, and serious philosophical inquiry, often conducted by famous figures cribbed from reality: Hurston, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and an inexplicably heterosexual Roland Barthes.

An Oprah Winfrey stand-in makes an appearance in “Erasure,” Everett’s best-known work, which ridicules the pressure on Black writers to publish “authentic” testimonials of urban poverty. Thelonious Ellison, a frustrated author of rarefied experimental fiction, is caring for his Alzheimer’s-stricken mother when he learns about “We’s Lives in Da Ghetto,” a runaway best-seller by a Black Oberlin graduate. Ellison is so enraged that he writes a pseudonymous parody, titled “My Pafology” (later simply “Fuck”), which is included as a novel within the novel. To his astonishment, it becomes a best-seller—an irony compounded by the breakout success of “Erasure.”

Another cat-and-mouse game with stereotypes unfolds in Everett’s hilarious “I Am Not Sidney Poitier” (2009), a picaresque story of a wealthy Black orphan with a fatefully strange name. Not Sidney Poitier, as he is called, is raised by servants on the estate of Ted Turner, the founder of CNN, because his late mother made a generous investment in a predecessor of the network. Unencumbered by family, necessity, or identity, he sets off on a series of adventures that riff on his eponym’s films. The actor’s cipher-like versatility—a dignified emissary of Black America in every role—provides endless material for parody: Not Sidney escapes from prison shackled to another inmate (“The Defiant Ones”), dates a light-skinned girl from a colorist family (“Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner”), and fixes a roof for a commune of religious women (“Lilies of the Field”). Yet a darker theme of self-surrender runs throughout. During an extended allusion to “In the Heat of the Night,” Not Sidney is asked to examine what appears to be his own dead body at an Alabama police station:

As we stepped out of the makeshift morgue, I thought that if that body in the chest was Not Sidney Poitier, then I was not Not Sidney Poitier and that by all I knew of double negatives, I was therefore Sidney Poitier.

Corpses are omnipresent in Everett’s fiction, their disruptive energies catalyzing important revelations. In his comic novels, they often fall prey to cultists, body snatchers, and creepy morticians, serving as carnivalesque reminders of the self’s plasticity. In his thrillers, mostly set in the American West, they become traces of atrocities that might otherwise remain invisible: torture, toxic pollution, massacres, femicide. Novels such as“Watershed” (1996), “Wounded” (2005), “The Water Cure” (2007), and “Assumption” (2011) feature loners whose rugged isolation—usually involving a lot of fly-fishing—is interrupted by encounters with the dead, who lure them into deeper currents of violence.

The deaths of children loom large, especially in Everett’s previous two novels, both of which make the shock of mortality the basis of formal experiments. “So Much Blue” (2017), a painter’s story, unfolds in three parallel time lines centered on nested secrets: an extramarital affair, an immense blue masterpiece locked in a barn, and the traumatic memory of a little girl’s death in war-torn El Salvador. “Telephone” (2020), which was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, is split even more dramatically. The story of a middle-aged geologist’s struggle with his teen-age daughter’s terminal genetic disorder, it was issued in three nearly indistinguishable editions with separate endings. The novel’s epigraph, from Søren Kierkegaard, suggests the world’s bleakest choose-your-own-adventure: “Do it or do not do it—you will regret both.” But the geologist’s inevitable loss is also strangely freeing; with nothing left to fear, he attempts a mad act of heroism in the rural Southwest, drawn by an anonymous note that reads “Please Help Us.”

Death issues a more terrifying summons in Everett’s gripping “The Body of Martin Aguilera” (1997), a compact work set in the canyons of northern New Mexico. A retired professor discovers his neighbor dead at home. Soon after he reports the apparent killing, the body vanishes—only to reappear, seemingly drowned, in a nearby river. The professor suspects foul play, and his investigation reveals a vast ecological crime. Everything depends on his ability to overcome fear and repulsion as he fights to secure the body. In a pivotal scene, he attends a clandestine funeral where members of a lay Catholic brotherhood, the Penitentes, scourge themselves as they process around a putrefying dead man. In a violent culture afraid of mortality, the willingness to be intimate with death can be a form of vigilance.

“The Trees,” Everett’s longest book yet, synthesizes many of these abiding preoccupations: race and media, symbols and appropriation, and, especially, the unsettling power of corpses to shock and reorient the living. The novel can be read as a grisly fable about whose murder counts in the public imagination—reprising the question that Emmett Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, confronted in 1955: How do you make America notice Black death?

The lynched body originally functioned as a weapon of white-supremacist terror. Strung up from trees or bridges and photographed for macabre postcards, victims were transformed into banners for the cause that had taken their lives. But in 1955 Till-Mobley made the historic decision to hold an open-casket viewing of her maimed son, galvanizing millions against segregation and lynching. She reappropriated her son’s death from his killers, who had intended it as an act of intimidation, and turned it into an act of defiance, inviting press photographers and crowds of strangers to, in her words, “let the world see what I’ve seen.”

Less well known than the funeral is Till-Mobley’s struggle to recover her son’s body. Mississippi authorities were rushing to bury it when news of his death reached her, in Chicago. After they finally agreed to surrender the body, they sent it in a sealed casket, with instructions that it never be opened. Later, Till-Mobley had to fight for her son’s body in court, where his killers’ attorneys argued that it was too decomposed for reliable identification. Till was probably still alive, they suggested, conspiratorially speculating that the N.A.A.C.P. had staged the lynching.

In “The Trees,” this bad-faith defense returns with vengeful irony, as staged Black cadavers appear at the scene of each murder in Money. What in 1955 was a calculated blindness about lynching becomes not a proof of power but a sign of weakness: the body that Mississippi once refused to recognize comes back as a terror its citizens cannot understand. Everett envisages the town as stalked by sinister allusions, shadows of the pervasive past. Billboards encourage visitors to “pull a catfish out of the Little Tallahatchie! They’s good eating!” (It was a boy checking catfish nets in the river who discovered Till’s body.) When Charlene Bryant is asked if she can identify the man at the scene of her husband’s murder, she replies, “His own Black mama couldn’t have knowed him.”

The slip is characteristic of a novel that uses humor less to provoke laughter than to eviscerate false innocence—funny, yes, but mostly in the maddening way that it was funny when the cops who arrested Dylann Roof treated him to Burger King. Everett’s scathing portrayal of Money’s self-protective amnesia has an affinity with the artist Kerry James Marshall’s “Heirlooms and Accessories,” a triptych of prints depicting lockets that contain black-and-white photographs of different smiling white women. Though each may be someone’s beloved grandmother, the portraits are excerpted from a 1930 photograph of a lynching; every individual is an “accessory” to murder. The killings in “The Trees” represent an even more striking attempt to return focus to the culprits. One suspect in the murders explains, “If that Griffin book had been Lynched Like Me, America might have looked up from dinner or baseball.”

There’s a certain self-referential exhaustion to the novel’s killings, which can be understood as a kind of despairing joke: for the country to really care about dead Black people, they’d have to be found next to white ones. And even if the repressed violence of American history did erupt, few would recognize it for what it was. Everett’s townspeople concoct copious theories about the killings—mass delusion, a race war, satanic assassins capable of faking death—but hardly anyone draws the connection to Emmett Till. When the killings reach the White House, a Trump-like President cowers under the Resolute desk and wonders if Ben Carson might be to blame.

The satire’s ultimate target is America’s inability to make cultural sense of atrocities that it has never fully acknowledged, much less atoned for. Its persistent flights from the obvious evoke the evasions of our era, as the unprecedented visibility of racist killings gives rise to new strains of misdirection, exploitation, and apathy. In one memorable scene, Jim tracks the vanishing corpses to a warehouse in Chicago, the aptly named Acme Cadaver Company. The bathetic tableau recalls the video for Childish Gambino’s “This Is America,” a vision of mass entertainment laundering mass death:

It was like a cleaner’s facility, except instead of shirts, blouses, and jackets, corpses, women and men, slid by on suspended rails. Farther away, through the center of the room, naked cadavers glided along, head to toe, on a conveyer belt. The music of the Jackson Five blared. A-B-C. One two three. Chicago Bears and Bulls banners hung from the ceiling some twenty feet above them. . . . The music changed to Marvin Gaye. What was going on?

“The Trees” is an almost disconcertingly smooth narrative, the short chapters dealt as quickly as cards. Gruesome scenes and hardboiled detective banter alternate with comic vignettes (F.B.I. antics, an online white-supremacist meeting) and stark meditations on what one character describes as the slow “genocide” of American lynching. The mystery itself is tightly constructed and suspensefully paced—until, as in Everett’s other novels, a chasm opens between form and content. The tension, in this case, lies between the open-and-shut conventions of the crime novel and the immensity of Everett’s subject.

Nobody feels this more keenly than the trio of detectives, who are constantly stymied by being “Black and blue.” The white residents of Money hate them out of prejudice; the Black ones distrust them as cops. “You’re from the F.B.I.,” Mama Z tells Herberta when questioned about her archives. Herberta says, “I’m also a Black woman.” Mama Z replies, “So you see my problem.” The discomfort between the two mirrors the divisions of last summer’s uprising, when many protesters found themselves on the other side of cordons and curfews enforced by Black officers and mayors. In one uncanny moment, the detectives arrive at a bar in Money’s Black neighborhood just as a young woman with a Mohawk begins a haunting performance of “Strange Fruit.” The scene quietly undercuts any presumption of racial solidarity, as the watching officers realize that they’ve been shut out of a community secret.

Everett’s novel seems to look askance even at itself. When Damon Thruff, a young Black professor specializing in the history of lynching, arrives in Money to assist Mama Z, she tells him that she’s read his work and finds it unfeeling: “You were able to construct three hundred and seven pages on such a topic without an ounce of outrage.” The figure is curiously close to the number of pages in “The Trees,” implicitly questioning not only Damon’s sang-froid but Everett’s. Novels about the legacy of racist violence often strive to voice buried emotion. Bernice L. McFadden’s “Gathering of Waters” (2012), another novel about Emmett Till, is elegiacally narrated by the collective consciousness of Money. Jesmyn Ward’s “Sing, Unburied, Sing” (2017), also set in Mississippi, grieves for victims of the state’s Parchman Farm penitentiary through the lyrical narration of ghosts.

“The Trees,” by contrast, is as cold and matter-of-fact as Mama Z’s lynching archive, where the drawers are “like those in a morgue.” Uncharacteristically for Everett, who is known for cerebral narrators, the novel surveys a wide cast from an indifferent third-person remove. Sometimes Everett appears reluctant to commit his attention, or to decide between drawing caricatures and fleshing out human quandaries. Is this the story of Granny C’s agonized comeuppance? Mama Z’s patient revenge? The alienation of Jim, Ed, and Herberta, as they pursue vigilantes with whom they quietly sympathize? No character is allowed quite enough presence to say. But denying readers a surrogate is also a strategy, turning the moral crisis back onto us, unresolved.

To make art about lynching is an increasingly fraught endeavor. Since Mamie Till-Mobley’s decision to “let the world see,” the pendulum has swung back to a suspicion that many representations of anti-Black violence risk offering up their subjects to a mob’s eyes. When the artist Dana Schutz, who is white, exhibited her painting of Emmett Till’s mangled face in the 2017 Whitney Biennial, protesters demanded its removal and encouraged her to destroy it. At the time, the debate was largely about who should be entitled to such an image, and whether that line ought to be drawn on the basis of race. Schutz’s defenders frequently pointed out that Henry Taylor, a Black artist, had a painting of Philando Castile’s killing in the same show.

Now, though, scrutiny has fallen on such representations regardless of who creates them. The bereaved relatives of police-killing victims have begun to challenge Black artists and activists for adapting, and even profiting from, images of their dead loved ones. Many writers, especially of the Afropessimist school, argue that Black trauma has been hijacked by narratives of redemption, as names like George Floyd and Breonna Taylor cease to refer to individuals and become—by a kind of necromancy—avatars of others’ political ideals. “Dead is the new Black,” as one of Everett’s suspects quips.

“The Trees,” in its rigorous denial of sentiment, shuts down such catharsis—as if to say that funeral oratory is inappropriate when so many victims have yet to be counted. As Damon, the scholar, begins working in Mama Z’s archives, he is most disturbed by lynching’s effacement of individuality:

The crime, the practice, the religion of it, was becoming more pernicious as he realized that the similarity of their deaths had caused these men and women to be at once erased and coalesced like one piece, like one body. They were all number and no number at all, many and one, a symptom, a sign.

Suddenly, he feels compelled to write down each victim’s name in pencil and erase it. From Emmett Till to Alton Sterling, the list occupies an entire chapter.

The focus shifts from Everett’s characters to the phenomenon of lynching in all its geographic breadth, intangible influence, and individual particularity. Beyond the South, there are revenge killings in Rock Springs, Wyoming, where dozens of Chinese miners were massacred, in 1885; in Carbon County, Utah, where a Black coal miner was hanged from a cottonwood tree, in 1925; and in Duluth, Minnesota, where an unemployed man fondly reflects on his grandfather’s role in the town’s lynching of three Black men, in 1920. (He wishes someone would do the same to the “fucking Hispanics” who took his job.) The novel makes good on its title’s promise, as the trees of a particular mystery recede into the forest of an ongoing crime. ♦