PERCIVAL EVERETT’S THE TREES: WITH STILL BLOOD ON THE LEAVES

Resumo

After the reconstruction era, racism didn’t end but entered a violent phase when the white supremacists began killing African Americans with the fear of losing their power in the South. The era between 19th century and civil rights movement, the South witnessed more than 4700 lynching cases which caused the death of African American victims. The wave of violence and its consequences, injustices against the blacks had been one of the primary topics of literary imagination since then.  It wasn’t only the contemporary writers who witnessed the painful years, but also many artists today still write about the horrors of the past.  Percival Everett’s 2021 novel The Trees is one of the examples which remembers the violence and creates a fictional atmosphere to resist the victimization of African Americans. The novel focuses on a series of homicides in the American South, Mississippi. There is a common situation in all of these homicides: A number of white dead bodies are found with the same African American corpse beside them. However, as the detectives investigate, it is determined that these are not simple crimes. They contain the vengeance of an African American who was lynched years ago. Though, Everett seems to write crime fiction about a small Southern town, the novel focuses on resisting institutionalized racism which still affects today. The remembering of lynching of African American people, writing it in a satirical way and recreating history are all forms of resistance he employs in his novel.