Black deaths matter in The Trees by Percival Everett

The Trees by Percival Everett confounds America’s inability to notice the racial violence on which it was founded and it contradicts its main founding principles. The aim of the article is to demonstrate how the writer of the twenty-first century reconstructs America’s racial trauma wishing to expose the truth through the violence of lynching. As the novel is both a detective fiction and a horror fantasy, the article shows that through these genres, the story exceeds white cruelty and black victimhood to understand black agency. The article asserts that the theory Everett presents is that in order to perceive a black body, there must be a white one. In The Trees, an indictment of America’s racial terrorism disguising as police procedural and comedy, Everett provides a satirical narrative answer to Langston Hughes’s question, “What happens to a dream deferred?” Yes, he says, a dream deferred does explode, fall and descend. This witty novel of revenge and reckoning is a narrative condemning racial violence with strokes, and what stands at its core is the idea that Black deaths matter.