The Trees

“Mr. Mayor, this here is the sovereign state of Mississippi. There ain’t no law enforcement, there’s just rednecks like me paid by rednecks like you.”

In this quote, Sheriff Jetty humorously reveals what Everett sees as a serious issue. Law enforcement in Mississippi is run by mostly white people. Before the distrust of law enforcement by Black characters is revealed, Money is established as a metaphorically lawless place due to its socio-economic status. Sheriff Jetty’s use of the word “redneck” is an act of reclamation tinged with pride.

“Ed and Jim were not officially partners, but they were often paired because they were both difficult for others to work with. They actually liked each other, though it was unclear if either liked anyone else. More important, they trusted each other.”

The reader is presented with the expectation that there is something unlikeable about both Ed and Jim, but these unlikeable traits are never revealed, implying that others do not wish to work with them because they are Black. Ed and Jim’s trust and partnership while surrounded by white racists is an important dynamic in this novel.

“This ain’t the city. Hell, this ain’t even the twenty-first century. It’s barely the twentieth, if you know what I mean.”

This description of Money, Mississippi, characterizes the cultural attitude of the town and captures its backward appearance. Throughout the novel, Everett will describe the people, place, and culture of Money as though this novel were set in the early 20th century. This temporal juxtaposition highlights the lack of progress in racial liberation in America.

“I think we’re all suffering from mass hysteria around here. You see, there weren’t no Black man at either crime scene. We’re just so afraid of Black people in this county that we see them everywhere.”

In this quote, Deputy Sheriff Jethro accurately assesses the ways in which racism, fear, and hatred intertwine. Jethro is upfront about the widespread racism in Money, which thrives off fear that turns into hatred. The white people of Mississippi are afraid of Black people because they fear their righteous anger, indignation, and inevitable revenge for all the wrong that white people have done to their community throughout the United States’ history.

“Well, honey, your daddy was just brutally murdered. That kinda messed her up. You know your daddy was her son. Me? I’m upset too, but ain’t nobody worrying over me. It’s fucked up.”

Everett uses dark comedy to make fun of serious and taboo subjects like brutal murders. Charlene’s serious yet flippant tone makes the situation absurd and humorous, a recurring humorous use of tone throughout the murders.

“Long time ago. It was their daddies who killed Emmett Till back in the fifties.”

The revelation of the murder victims’ connection to Till is the first connecting thread in the whodunnit mystery. The use of Emmett Till throughout the novel grounds readers in reality and creates a bridge between the fictional events of the novel and the wider socio-political climate of the United States.

“There was another mother in Chicago who had buried her child, and Carolyn Bryant knew all too well that she herself was to blame for that loss. She felt the emptiness of her house change, perhaps starting with an odor, a sickly sweet smell.”

Toward the end of her life, Carolyn Bryant (Granny C) reckons with her guilt for falsely accusing Emmett Till. Now that she has been a mother herself, she can empathize with the pain she brought on Emmett Till’s mother. Granny C wants to atone for her past but such atonement is too far gone in her old age.

“‘That don’t matter none,’ she said. ‘The dead cain’t tell no time, cain’t read no calendars. They ain’t got calendar watches, is what I’m sayin’. He who digs a pit will fall into it, and he who rolls a stone, it will come back on him.’”

This quote foreshadows the zombie reawakening of lynching victims. Everett subverts that notion of death’s finality to suggest that the ramifications of the dead come back to the living because the stories dead stay with the living. Carolyn is haunted by the death of Till, while Mama Z’s entire lynching record exists because of her father’s death.

“Death is never a stranger. That’s why we fear it.”

Mama Z personifies death and makes it an intimately familiar friend. Her lynching records attest to the familiarity of death among the Black community, while the white community of America descends into chaos and talk of a race war after only a few dozen deaths. The difference in the relationship to death between these two communities suggests that white Americans try to hide from the consequences of death, particularly the death they visit on Black people.

“His last thought, if he was capable of one, might have been that those other brown people were onto something with that notion of karma. Whatever, there was no time to ask his Lawd God Jesus Almighty for forgiveness.”

Everett uses dark humor to criticize the hypocrisy of self-professed religious Southerners. Reverend Fondle presents himself as a religious man yet is denied a final prayer to God because of the karma visited upon him, suggesting he is less godly than he presents himself to be.

“‘Your book is very interesting,’ Mama Z said, ‘because you were able to construct three hundred and seven pages on such a topic without an ounce of outrage.’”

Damon is both an insider and an outsider to the events in Money. As a Black man, he is directly affected by the racism in this novel. But as an academic who lives outside of small Southern towns, he doesn’t live in fear of racist violence. Racism for Damon is more abstract; he finds racism through his academic research. Mama Z’s criticism of Damon’s work represents her own anger over the injustice that she has lived through. Damon represents a more detached and reformist way of fighting back through recording and analyzing data on racism without sentiment. Mama Z encourages young people to lean into outrage as a means of resistance and change.

“However, 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.”

The victims of lynching are dehumanized both by the act itself and the broader practice. Humans are equated to a “symptom” and a “sign.” Their stories meld into one because it is the same story every time, stripping their humanity further after the dehumanizing act of lynching.

“I don’t believe in a god, Mr. Thruff. You can’t sit here in this room, touch all of these folders, read all of these pages, and believe in a god. I do, however, and I’m certain you do too, believe in the devil.”

Mama Z’s relationship with God, or lack thereof, symbolizes how much dehumanization she’s witnessed as a Black woman in America. Mama Z’s experiences have left her unable to believe in a benevolent deity; she is only certain that there is a malevolent force in the world.

“Babies are smarter than us. It seems they’re always trying to kill themselves. That’s why we have to watch them every second, so they don’t swallow nickels or drink weed killer or eat Tylenol like candy. Then we get stupid and want to live.”

This quote emphasizes Mama Z’s disillusionment with life. She readily acknowledges that her life, like other people of color, has been marked by pain because of racist hatred. The innocence of babies is reversed into a disturbing and prescient metaphor about the meaninglessness of human life under racism.

“When I write the names they become real, not just statistics. When I write the names they become real again. It’s almost like they get a few more seconds here. Do you know what I mean? I would never be able to make up this many names. The names have to be real. They have to be real. Don’t they?”

Damon’s use of repetition signals the distress he feels at the overwhelming humanity of the plethora of lynching victims. What were statistics before are now thousands of innocent dead people. Damon brings the dead symbolically back to life by empathizing with them, which brings them literally back to life to express their rage.

“They’re dead! Dead. Dead. Dead. Sacrilegious? Ain’t no souls down there, just arms and legs, hands, heads and elbows, tongues, testicles and nipples, ears and eyeballs. You need an eyeball, we ship you a fucking eyeball. It don’t come with a nameplate or a testimonial. You just get an eyeball.”

This quote is an exemplar of Everett’s use of dark humor to simultaneously criticize and humorize the taboo. Popularly, society thinks of a dead body as something to respect, honor, mourn, and create a ceremony in which to bid it goodbye. The Acme Cadaver Company of Chicago proves that often this is just a façade; people care about the dignity of the body only if they can afford to and only if they care about that person. Some bodies, particularly bodies of people of color, are seen as disposable commodities to profit from.

“‘Unknown Male is a name,’ the old woman said. ‘In a way, it’s more of a name than any of the others. A little more than life was taken from them.’”

Many of the lynching victims throughout US history are unidentified. In some cases, the victim may have been a visitor to the town in which they were murdered, as in the infamous sundown towns. In other cases, the victim’s body was so disfigured that there was no way of identifying them. Mama Z alludes to the taking of their names, without directly saying such, to highlight the great loss left behind when these victims were robbed of their names.

“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.”

This quote is lyrics from the 1937 Billie Holiday song “Strange Fruit,” an homage to lynching victims frequently left on trees. The “strange fruit” is a metaphor for the disfigured body of the lynching victim. Like fruit, the bodies were numerous and public. Everett’s inclusion of lyrics from this song directly ties The Trees to the lynching trees of the past and the artistic expression of people who lived when tree-hangings were still common.

“‘That makes you an n-word, Red,’ she said, as if she’d found a new conscience about her language.”

In this darkly funny moment, Sheriff Jetty’s wife suddenly rethinks her use of the n-word because she discovers that her husband has Black family members and is therefore himself Black. This new hesitation exposes that she knows using the n-word is wrong, but she did it anyways when she believed she was not connected to Black people. Only when racism might affect her own family does she hesitate. This self-centered way of dealing with race is one of the problems in Money, Mississippi, that perpetuates racism.

“‘I’ll say it again,’ Jim said. ‘The woman is a hundred years old. She’s old and she’s cagey and she’s a bit of a smart-ass, but hell, she’s earned it. And that thing she wears—just being red, black, and green doesn’t make it a Black Power scarf.’”

Mama Z is an ideal leader for the murders because few people would suspect an old woman of such organized crimes. Jim falls under that spell. The tropes and expectations about old women allow Mama Z to foment a revolution without suspicion. Her Black Power scarf evokes the symbolism of Pan-Africanism and honors the history of Black culture. Black represents resilience, red represents the blood of innocent Black lives, and yellow symbolizes optimism and equality.

“We understand, all of us, that the actions of a few members of any group are not and should not be an indictment of an entire group. That said, all of these killers are Black men who have no regard for human life.”

This quote directly echoes modern-day debate around the actions of police while exposing racial biases in politicians The governor claims that a group should not be judged by individuals, much like proponents of the police claim that institutionalized racism within the police force is the result of “bad apple” actors. Yet the mayor also fixates on the killers all being Black men, returning the focus to their group identity.

“Finally, that Black boy dropped to his knees, blood spillin’ from the corners of his mouth, and he said, ‘I’m gonna die now, for a while. But I’ll be back. We’ll all be back.”

The victim of a lynching promises vengeance. This last cry for vengeance before his death is an omen for the inevitable revenge communities of color will enact on their white oppressors. This quote epitomizes the fear of haunting and retributive justice that lurks in the white community of Money.

“Everybody talks about genocides around the world, but when the killing is slow and spread over a hundred years, no one notices. Where there are no mass graves, no one notices. American outrage is always for show. It has a shelf life.”

Gertrude uses metaphor to turn American outrage into a commodity on a shelf, rendering it inauthentic and ineffective. Gertrude envisions the legacy of racism in America as a long and slow genocide; without the flashy appeal of mass graves, it acts as a poor commodity to generate outrage. Everett’s use of metaphor to commodify outrage is commentary on the consumerist-oriented culture of America and its inability to deal with deep, authentic historical wounds.