The trees summary

SparkNotes Plus subscription is $4.99/month or $24.99/year as selected above. The free trial period is the first 7 days of your subscription. TO CANCEL YOUR SUBSCRIPTION AND AVOID BEING CHARGED, YOU MUST CANCEL BEFORE THE END OF THE FREE TRIAL PERIOD. You may cancel your subscription on your Subscription and Billing page or contact Customer Support at

P ercival Everett is a seriously playful writer. His 2001 breakthrough novel The setting is a small town called Money, Mississippi, “named in that persistent Southern tradition of irony”. We meet a dysfunctional white family unit with its morose matriarch Granny C, her son Wheat Bryant, and her nephew, Junior Junior. This time it’s the white folks’ turn to be rendered in grotesque caricature, and the actions of this feckless clan are played as broad knockabout, almost like a reverse minstrel show. But an ominous note is struck as Granny C expresses remorse for some past deed: “I wronged that little pickaninny,” she broods. As the tone becomes disturbingly gruesome, a deeper purpose to this cruel humour emerges. Wheat is found dead and brutally disfigured, with the mutilated corpse of a young Black man next to him, which subsequently goes missing. The same thing happens to Junior Junior, with the same disappearing cadaver, and all at once we’re in a horror story. As with the films of Jordan Peele, the paranormal is used to depict the African American experience in extremis, and here supernatural horror and historical reality collide in dreadful revelation. We are presented with a ghostly yet corporeal presence that haunts America’s consciousness. Money, Mississippi is a real place. It was where the 14-year-old Emmett Till was lynched in 1955, after being accused by a white woman of making suggestive remarks. We learn that Granny C is that woman, and the corpse is Emmett, re...

This book is a detective story. It’s also a ghost story, a slow-burn thriller, a supernatural horror story, a history of racial violence, and everything in between. No category adequately describes The Trees . Percival Everett seems to have purposefully written it that way. Now that intersectionality is the name of the literary game, his latest book lives not within one genre but at the junction where genres crash into one another, a pile-up so fiery and explosive that it never fails to fascinate. This should be read as a supreme compliment; no book in recent memory contains such magnificently controlled chaos. Whatever it is, the book takes place in a clearly discernible, real-life area: Money, Mississippi. This Southern backwater was named “in that persistent Southern tradition of irony.” That is, there isn’t much money to be found there. It’s a poor area, strictly segregated, and bereft of any hope for the future. “The name becomes slightly sad,” Everett writes in his characteristically dry prose, “a marker of self-ignorance that might as well be embraced because, let’s face it, it isn’t going away.” Everett never shies away from a joke, despite—or perhaps because of—his morbid subject matter. “It was a long-running joke in Money, Mississippi,” he jests, “that the way to discover who belonged to the Klan was to wait at Russell’s Dry Cleaning and Laundry.” A dark book, but not without humor. What gets the story rolling is this: Wheat Bryant, a white man, shows up dead in...

The novel’s narrator opens by describing her hometown in Pittman County, Kentucky, a place where poverty, teenage pregnancy, and a lack of education determine the life paths of all who live there. A childhood memory of Newt Hardbine’s father getting thrown in the air by an exploding tire scars the narrator, and she vows to leave her hometown as soon as possible. The narrator then shares her name: Marietta. Marietta finishes high school and gets a job at the Pittman County Hospital. One day, Newt Hardbine’s wife comes in with a bullet wound because Newt’s father shot both her and Newt (who died). Marietta becomes even more determined to leave Pittman and saves up money for an old car. As soon as she has the funds, Marietta drives her old car west, renaming herself Taylor after the first town she reaches when she has to stop for gas. Two days later, Taylor runs into an old woman at a bar near Cherokee Nation, Oklahoma. The woman gives Taylor a baby, who she says is in danger. Not long after, Taylor’s car breaks down and Taylor is stuck in Oklahoma. Taylor thinks that it’s fitting that she’s stuck on Cherokee land, given that her great-grandfather was Cherokee. The novel then introduces Lou Ann Ruiz, a woman from Kentucky currently living in Tucson, Arizona. Lou Ann’s husband, Angel, used to work for the rodeo but lost his leg in an injury. This accident, coupled with Lou Ann’s pregnancy, puts a strain on their relationship until Angel leaves Lou Ann on Halloween. Meanwhile, ...

Publication date 2021 Precededby Telephone Followedby Dr. No The Trees is a 2021 novel by American author Set predominantly in the small town of Summary [ ] In Two Black detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, Ed Morgan and Jim Davis, are sent to Money to investigate the situation. Ed and Jim go to a local bar frequented by the Black community of Money where they discover that both Junior and Wheat are relatives of Carolyn Bryant, a White woman who accused the teenage More bodies begin to pile up around the country. Each features one or more White men who have been castrated with the bodies of Black or Asian men beside them. Ed and Jim are able to find the identity of the Black man found at the original crime scene. They trace it to a company that sells bodies for research. They also begin to suspect Gertrude Penstock, a White passing waitress they met in Money, and her 105 year old great-grandmother Mama Z are involved in the original murders. Unbeknown to Ed and Jim this is revealed to be true as Gertrude and a group of like-minded Black individuals had orchestrated the deaths of Wheat and Junior Junior as retaliation for their father's part in murdering Emmett Till. However they are baffled by the other murders. Reports of the other murders reveal that large groups of Black and Asian men who appear impervious to bullets, have started duplicating the murders orchestrated by Mama Z and Gertrude. Writing and development [ ] To write the novel, Everett rese...