Percival Everett has a way with words and he can use them in a kind of delicious dark humor that’s fun to read. That’s a good thing because this book could be painful otherwise. It’s a racial allegory grounded in history, shrouded in mystery, and dripping with blood. An incendiary device you don’t want to put down.
The book is set in the backwater town of Money, Mississippi. It was in Money,in 1955, that 14-year old Emmett Till, a Black boy visiting relatives from Chicago, was kidnapped, tortured, lynched and dumped in the Tallahatchie River. His mother, Mamie Till, insisted on an open casket despite her son’s horrific injuries so the world could see what had been done to her son. A month later his killers were acquitted.
The book opens with a gruesome murder and then another. Though no one recognizes it at first, the series of new killings that begin in Money soon after are callbacks to the murder of Emmett Till. The first two target people related to the original crime, the grown and loutish sons of the killers, both kin to the woman at the center of the alleged incident. But that’s not what draws the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation to the scene. The MBI sends two Black detectives, Jim Davis and Ed Morgan, to investigate because a Black man found at the scene of the first crime and thought dead disappeared from the morgue and reemerged at the site of the second. The two crime scenes are similarly horrific, with some elements mimicking what happened in 1955. And then the exact same thing happens a third time.
In older stories of the South, Black characters are one-dimensional folk, often illiterate, entirely reliant on white largesse or mercy. In “The Trees,” it’s the Black characters who must deal with simple white folk barely distinguishable from brutes. Their Lost Cause, their Virgil Caine tragedies and their “economic anxiety” are erased. They are simply stupid, their violence lacking any rational veneer — never mind their sense of superiority.
The language is self-consciously old-fashioned in a modern, stylized way. Their epithets are mixed with language more at home in 1955 than today — so not just “nigger” but also “boy,” “colored” and “Negro.” But those throwbacks are also interspersed with reminders of the present. Unabashed rednecks roam around in red caps, racial epithets spilling from their mouths like milk from a cow, and grumblings about “fake news.”
The people of Money are very much aware that the outside world considers them to be backward hillbillies. And so do Ed and Jim, who report that Money is “chock-full of know-nothing peckerwoods stuck in the prewar nineteenth century and living proof that inbreeding does not lead to extinction.”
But dark wordplay and local color are ultimately a sideshow to the bigger project. Despite the absurdist touches, the novel is deadly serious and reverential in its explication of the legacy of lynching in all forms and places and devotes time and space to honoring the dead. Whether by coincidence or intent, The Trees is set in 2018, the same year that The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Alabama opened its doors. With a highwire combination of whodunnit, horror, humor and razor blade sharp insight The Trees is a fitting tribute of a novel: Hard to put down and impossible to forget.
The Trees was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize, Winner of the 2022 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, Finalist for the 2022 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and Longlisted for the 2022 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. It is a great book written by a master novelist. Go and read it. You will enjoy it and you will learn something.
This book is in some ways a Western. It is set in the American West in the 19th century among the rough and tumble of that era and place. But there are no horseback riders and shootups. Instead, Zhang has trained her gaze on an area of American history that has gone largely unnoticed in westerns, even revisionist ones: the Chinese immigrants who built railroads and worked in mines — only to be met with racist persecution when they tried to assimilate into American life.
It’s the story of a Chinese teenager named Daiyu. Daiyu’s eponym is Lin Daiyu, a tragic figure of legend who dies spitting blood after the family of her beloved tricks him into marrying someone else. Daiyu’s parents flee when she is 12, pursued by the soldiers of the Qing Dynasty because they have been sheltering rebels. She is left in care of her grandmother who, to keep her safe, disguises her as a boy and sends her to Zhifu – a city by the ocean. There she sweeps floors for a master calligrapher whose teachings form the spiritual and intellectual core of this novel. Calligraphy becomes a vocation for Daiyu. “Now, with a live, beating brush in hand,” Zhang writes, “I felt different pieces of my being sliding into place, as if I had just unlocked an extraordinary secret about myself.”
Daiyu is kidnapped by a stranger, held captive and forced to learn English. She is then smuggled on a cargo ship to San Francisco and sold into prostitution at age 14. At the brothel, Daiyu, now called ‘Peony’ begins to understand her new reality –
the brutality, the greed, the profound disrespect for women; the reality of slavery. As she waits to be “chosen” by a customer of the brothel, she adds up her growing awareness:
“’Now I am beginning to understand that tragedy makes things beautiful,’ Daiyu says, looking at her captivity through the lens of calligraphy. ‘I trace the character for man in my palm. Man: a field and a plow, the plow a symbol of power. . . . Whoever this man is will be the one entering me, and he will also be the one who takes everything away. I could mourn the loss of my girlhood now, but I do not let myself. Mourning it would be giving power to whoever takes it.
“’Man, without power, he is just a piece of arable land.’”
By conspiring with the mixed-race son of a wealthy white man — a boy with as little interest in taking Daiyu’s virginity as she has in yielding it — she manages to escape the brothel and the Hip Yee tong which owns it before she is violated. The two flee together to Boise, Idaho. But on her first night in Boise she is raped. She abandons her companion and lives as a man for the rest of the novel, binding her breasts and going by the name of Jacob Li. She finds refuge working for a pair of Chinese shopkeepers in Pierce, Idaho.
While living and working in Pierce she encounters her love, Nelson Wong – an American born son of a Chinese father. However her love is stifled by Wong’s belief that she is male. But ratcheting racism, cultural differences and the need for a scapegoat lead to a disaster – laws are passed disenfranchising Chinese and violence ensues. “I am beginning to realize that in this place called Idaho, which they call the West, being Chinese can be something like a disease,” Daiyu narrates. “I am something they cannot fathom. I am something they fear. We all are.”
Four Treasures of the Sky is a New York Times Notable Book and a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice. It’s an easy read – Zhang is a gifted writer. Give it a try.
MORE TO COME
I’m still not caught up but I’ll get there soon!
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