Percival Everett (2022) The Trees

The Trees by Percival Everett was shortlisted for The Booker Prize 2022. I take it Percival Everett is a black man. Critical Theory suggests you should shut the fuck up and just read the book. It doesn’t matter if the writer is pink or orange or gay or transgender. What matters is the text. It inhabits a world free-floating above the artist where great works of art exist. A bit like heaven, but without The Booker Prize.

Percival Everett, like me, believes that the moron’s moron and 45^th American President is an insult to common humanity. Payback for Obama.

Chapter 102, (don’t worry this book tends to have short chapters), for example, gives the moron’s moron voice. Well voice as critical text.

‘Breaking News

The President of the United States

Five hundred years ago, my people tell me, and they’re good people, they know a lot and they like me because I know a lot, they tell me that back then, the folks from Europe rescued the Africans from each other. As I understand it, African kings were selling their own children to other kings, and we went sent our navy, the best navy in the world to save them. We have for the past two years been worried about the criminals and drug dealers and rapists sneaking across our southern borders and I have made great strides, more than any other president in history to plug the gaps, and we built a fence, didn’t we?

…Our good policemen are out there on the front lines, doing battle, and I’ve got their backs. I’ve given them the only raise they’ve got in twenty years, so they love me and I love them. I do. You’ve never seen anything like it. But these niggers have gone off the rails and off the reservations, and they’ve got to be stopped. I will do it for you, but I want your support.

…I did not say the word nigger. I would never say the n-word. I’m the least racist person you will ever meet. Some fake news source are going to tell you I used the word nigger.’

What’s the moron’s moron got to do with the murder of racist arseholes in Money, Mississippi? It’s all in the Goddam, as Nina Simone sung in Mississippi Goddam. 300 years of genocide making a comeback tour. Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit not so strange when you have a branch of KKK on every street corner and burning a white cross of non-Jewish, white, Jesus on every uppity nigger’s lawn. Like the moron’s moron, I didn’t say nigger. A strange fact (although there are no such things as facts) Teddy Roosevelt was a great believer in lynching black rapists who threatened white motherhood. The moron’s moron might not have been the only member of the KKK elected President. JFK was immune, of course, because he was Catholic. Others suspect, especially those from the Southern states, where racism is regarded as a virtue and self-evident truth, written into the First Amendment. But nobody is moron as the moron’s moron, not even George W. Bush junior, would come out and say so.  

Goddam tell us about the book, you liberal, white pussy, you might well be shouting. Pretty simple plot if you’ve watched Scooby Doo. The ghost of Emmet Till, the fourteen-year-old abducted and beaten almost to death, before he was lynched and drowned, is said to have come back and reaping revenge on the forefathers (and foremothers) of those that killed him. But things get out of hand, the ghost killings grows arms and legs. A team of black cops and FBI are sent to find out what happened in Money.

The big question is, where do their allegiances lie, with skin in the game, in a system that favours the rich, and routinely punishes the poor black man as a given? Read on.