The Trees

The Trees by Percival Everett is a literary novel that utilizes tropes from the genres of mystery and historical fiction. The novel is divided into 108 short chapters whose length helps Everett build the tension and urgency of the plot. The Trees follows a string of murders of white people in Money, Mississippi, that imitate the real life lynching of Emmett Till, a young Black boy, in the 1950s. Two Black detectives are brought in to investigate, and these strange murders spread across the country while the people of Money, Mississippi, refuse to confront the endemic racism of the United States, past and present. Everett uses satire, humor, and mystery to explore themes such as the Endemic and Institutionalized Racism in America, Justice Versus Revenge, and The Importance of Documenting History.

The Trees was published by Graywolf Press in 2021. The Trees was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2022. Percival Everett is the author of 22 novels. He has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and is a Guggenheim Fellow (2015).

This guide uses the 2021 Graywolf Press Kindle edition of The Trees.

Note on the text: This edition of The Trees omits chapter numbers 74 and 104, although all the content is complete. This guide reflects that discrepancy.

Content Warning: This guide discusses the use of racial slurs, racial violence, racial hatred, lynchings, and other forms of racist behavior. Depictions of violence in this novel are graphic. This guide quotes and obscures the author’s use of the n-word.

Plot Summary

Money, Mississippi, is a tiny town famous for a huge crime. In 1955, a young Black boy named Emmett Till from Chicago was visiting relatives. He was accused of flirtatious behavior toward a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, by Bryant herself. Carolyn’s husband and brother abducted Emmett Till, murdered him, and mutilated his body. The lynching of Emmett Till became a nation-wide news story when his mother allowed major news publications to publish photographs of Till’s body at his funeral. Till’s murderers were acquitted, despite there being no doubt about their crimes. The murder is an infamous example of racial violence in America and pushed a new level of discourse for the civil rights movement.

In 21st century Money, Mississippi, the majority-white residents remain racist. Sheriff Jetty and his officers Digby, Jethro, and Brady, respond to two bizarre murders. Junior Junior, Carolyn Bryant’s nephew, is murdered in the back of his home. His body is bloodied, his neck is enveloped by barbed wire, and his scrotum has been removed. The body of a dead Black man, whom no one recognizes or can identify, is also found at the scene. The police bring the bodies to the town’s coroner, Reverend Fondle. The body of the unidentified Black man vanishes without a trace. Shortly after, Wheat, Bryant’s son, is found dead in his bathroom in an identical scene as his cousin Junior Junior, including the reappearance of the same dead Black man whose body was present at the scene of Junior Junior’s death. The Mississippi Bureau of Investigations (MBI) sends two Black detectives, Ed Morgan and Jim Davis, to help investigate the crimes.

The racism in Money affects Ed and Jim. The people of Money, including the police, are resistant to Ed and Jim’s assistance because they are Black. The case becomes even more confusing when Junior Junior’s relative is found similarly murdered in Chicago, and when Bryant dies of fright when she sees a dead Black man in her bedroom.

Many theories abound, and the white people of Money immediately jump to the idea that a Black demon is terrorizing their community. To learn more about the town, Ed and Jim ask Gertrude, the waitress at the local diner, for help in finding someone in town who can give them some history. Gertrude introduces them to Mama Z, an elderly woman who has been recording lynchings all her life.

Copycat murders crop up in California, Wyoming, and other states. All over the United States, police are responding to murdered white men, whose scrotums have been removed, with barbed wire around their neck, and are accompanied by an unknown Black body or an unidentified Asian body. Because of this escalation, the FBI sends a Black woman agent to assist in Money named Herbie. Mama Z is immediately suspicious of Herbie and rejects the idea that Black people should be a part of majority-white institutions of law enforcement for purposes of representation. To Mama Z, women like Herbie are traitors.

Jim follows a lead to the Acme Cadaver Company of Chicago. This company is in the business of selling unclaimed corpses to researchers around the country. The company confirms that a truck carrying 21 of their cadavers disappeared somewhere close to Mississippi, driven by a man named Chester. As the murders continue throughout the country, the scale of the murders increases to mob murders. Even politicians are targeted in the White House. No one can figure out how the murderers can appear and disappear so quickly. Law enforcement is having a difficult time with the mobs, who appear and disappear quickly, who don’t succumb to bullets, and who look like corpses themselves.

Meanwhile, Gertrude has invited her friend Damon to Money. Damon is a highly esteemed academic, and Gertrude wants him to record what’s happening in Money. He is impressed by the scale of Mama Z’s lynching records and starts writing out the names of the lynching victims to humanize them.

Ed, Jim, and Herbie find Chester near Money, at a restaurant also by Gertrude. They arrest Chester on suspicion of involvement in the murders, who gives them an address to a house his organization uses. There, Jim questions Gertrude, who confesses that she and her organization used the cadavers and murdered Junior Junior, Wheat, and the man in Chicago. She insists that they only wanted revenge for Emmett Till’s murder. Granny C’s death was an inadvertent consequence of trying to scare her. Gertrude and her organization are not involved in the murders going on all around the country.

Ed, Jim, and Herbie confront Mama Z, whom Gertrude connects to the murders. Damon is typing out the names of the lynching victims, and Mama Z asks the detectives if she should get Damon to stop, suggesting that Damon is also involved in the murders sweeping the country. The novel ends without a resolution to the detectives’ confrontation of Mama Z.