The Trees

Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses racial violence, racial hatred, lynchings, and other forms of racist behavior.

The Trees is a novel that explores the long-lasting ramifications of America’s history with lynchings and Jim Crow laws. Jim Crow laws were state and local laws that legalized segregation based on race. They were enforced as a reaction to the emancipation of enslaved peoples in 1863. Jim Crow laws allowed for states and towns to use arbitrary but abusive laws to keep the Black community poor, imprisoned, and in fear, much like under enslavement. These laws denied African Americans the right to vote, hold certain forms of employment and government positions, live in certain areas, and attend certain schools. Jim Crow laws gave white Americans the power to accuse Black people of almost anything.

The Jim Crow era Southern United States experienced frequent lynchings. Lynching refers to the extrajudicial and illegal murders of people from communities of color. Lynching was a form of stochastic terrorism used to frighten Black people away from fighting for their civil rights. Lynching typically involved hanging from trees. Lynching was such a part of American culture that some towns even held public lynching parties and featured graphic lynching photographs on postcards. Though not legal, the white people who committed lynchings were not held accountable by a law enforcement system controlled by white people.

NAACP journalists like Walter White investigated and published news about lynching that highlighted these attacks on the Black community. The civil rights movement (1954-1968) directly addressed the many forms of oppression the Black community faced in America. The civil rights movement made huge strides in abolishing the popularity of terrorist actions like lynching and the systems of segregation that supported lynching. Lynching did not become formally and federally illegal in the United States until 2022 with the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, an amendment to the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act.

Those in the Black community were not the only victims of lynching. In Everett’s novel, he includes the history of lynching and racial violence against Asian Americans and migrants from the Asian continent, such as Chinese people, who faced violent segregation and racial hatred when they moved to America, mostly in the 1800s, to build railroads and mines in the West.

Lynching’s legacy continues within the American judiciary and penal systems. Many Americans recognize police brutality as a new, contemporary form of lynching. Black people die at unprecedented rates at the hands of police officers, often for offenses as minor as selling cigarettes without a permit. Like lynching victims, these victims are executed extra-judicially. Police officers rarely see consequences due to the legal concept of qualified immunity, which absolves police officers of many of their actions. Modern-day lynchings continue outside of the legal system as well, such as in the cases of Ahmaud Arbery in 2020 and Jordan Neely in 2023.

Everett views lynching as a key part of American history that persists today. The descendants of lynching still live with the indignity of the act, such as Mama Z, whose father’s death certificate covers up the lynching that killed him. Everett subverts the history of lynching by having his Black characters murder lynchers and their descendants through stylized lynchings.