[I decided to read this 2022 novel in three sections. As I finished reading each of these I wrote about it before reading on. Spoiler alert: If you read this running commentary, you will find out everything that happens in the book as I read it.]
14 January 2024
Chapters 1-36 (of 106)
I’m enjoying this a lot—it’s rare for me to have to almost force myself to stop reading so that I can write about a section. Weird murder mystery. Hilariously dark social satire. Magic realist fable. It could only have been written by a Black American writer at this point in the 21st Century… which is definitely not a criticism. I love it.
At first, I only really noticed the broad comedy, with the racism and backwardness of Trump’s America simply a given. But it fairly quickly becomes a serious critique of systemic, decades-long failures in law enforcement. A non-American reader can only wonder how quickly an American, particularly a Black American reader would pick up on the names of real people, scattered among the absurd comedy names. Would alert readers have noticed them in the first chapter? The first word? Among the hick-town nicknames and comedy surnames are some real ones. We know about Wheat Bryant from the second page, and the comedy driving accident that got him sacked. Then comes this: ‘Also at the gathering was Granny C’s brother’s youngest boy, Junior Junior. His father, J. W. Milam, was called Junior, and so his son was Junior Junior, never J. Junior, never Junior J., never J. J., but Junior Junior.
Bryant and Milam. Do they ring bells for Black Americans? Whether they do or not, both men are murdered, separately, in the most bizarre and hideous way. The killings take place in Money, a redneck town in Mississippi whose name sounds like a joke, but isn’t. In Chapter 1, Wheat Bryant is dead, his face and body brutally mutilated. Next to him lies the cold body of a Black man, also horribly mutilated, and with the White man’s severed genitalia in his hand. Turn-on-a-dime shifts in tone are common in this book, screwball comedy coming before shocking scenes of violence or deep prejudice—then maybe the scene will prompt a joke. Two Black investigators from the city are good at these. Ed Morgan and Jim Davis are definitely a double-act, wisecracking their way through this backwater. Much later, after one of them has noticed a fire in the distance, we get this:
“Ed,” Jim said, “that fire last night was a cross burning.” “No shit?” the big man said. “You mean like a KKK cross burning?” Jim looked to Jetty for an answer. The sheriff nodded. “I wish I had known,” Jim said. “I forgot to be scared.” “Yeah, that’s too bad,” Jetty said. Jim smiled. “Maybe next time.”
From the start, all this sardonic comedy pushes the reader off-balance. How could a novel that opens so languidly be, at its centre, so deadly serious? We’re in Money’s no doubt fictional ‘suburb,’ Small Change, in a messy-looking yard. ‘It was the home of Wheat Bryant and his wife, Charlene. Wheat was between jobs, was constantly, ever, always between jobs. Charlene was always quick to point out that the word between usually suggested something at either end, two somethings, or destinations, and that Wheat had held only one job in his whole life, so he wasn’t between anything….’ But while we’re finding this out, Wheat’s blood-soaked body is inside, and Charlene has already called the cops.
‘Money, Mississippi’ is another clue. They are the opening words of the novel, and the name, ‘in that persistent Southern tradition of irony’ as the narrator has it, might ring bells. Not for me, obviously. In fact, not until the strange details of the dead Back man’s injuries, and the realisation by one of the outside detectives that he looks exactly like Emmett Till did I begin to understand. The impossible weirdness of what is going on is connected to one of the most notorious racist murders, and subsequent miscarriages of justice, in the postwar history of American racism. Emmett Till was the young Black man from Chicago, visiting a cousin in Mississippi, who was falsely accused of assaulting a White woman. I think it was her brother and his cousin who kidnapped him, tortured him, and mutilated him before killing him and dropping his body into the river. An all-White jury acquitted the men. Much later in life, the woman withdrew her accusation, and the men boasted about having committed the murder.
The case became notorious after Emmett Till’s mother insisted that his body, with its hideously mutilated face, be laid in an open coffin in Chicago. The case was suddenly a cause celebre, and became a marker for the early civil rights movement. Rosa Parks heard Martin Luther King speaking about it, and shortly after became famous herself through her passive resistance to segregation rules….
In other words, Everett has chosen one of the most high-profile events in Civil Rights history for his magic realist fable. But, not being American, I was unaware of the connection until the two outside investigators started talking about it in Chapter 26. All the talk of lynchings, and the everyday racism of the Whites in 21st Century Money, aren’t just easy clichés for Everett make use of. He is holding them up and scrutinising them—and it seems as though his agenda is to make the reader do the same. I said it was serious novel… but it’s also laugh-out-loud funny. Everett has taken a now established genre of Black American writing—I think Toni Morrison’s 1985 Beloved was the first time that most general readers encountered it—and added his own spin. He certainly caught me off guard.
Some details before I read on. After the first murder we get to know the comedy incompetence of the local police, and the unaccountable disappearance of the Black corpse from the morgue. Had he really been dead, they wonder—he definitely had—but are powerless to persuade the powers that be in the city that they don’t need any help. The agents arrive, and we get to know them and their double-act banter before encountering the local sheriff’s astonishment that they’ve sent two Blacks to Money, of all places. And then Junior Junior is murdered. His grandmother, Granny C, is actually Carolyn Bryant, the woman who had brought the original allegation, and she sees the Black man’s corpse which is again next to the White man’s, holding his severed genitals. She goes into a kind of cataleptic shock—she knows exactly who the Black man is. But she can’t say a word, and this time the Black body disappears from the pathologist’s van while he’s driving it to the morgue.
The two agents are at a loss, but they are helped by a Black woman who could pass for White, ‘Dixie,’ real name Gertrude. She’s the waitress in the local Dinah (prop. Delores somebody, a terrible speller), and she’s as quick with the wisecracks as Ed and Jim. She takes them to meet her great-grandmother, Mama Z, who seems to know everything… but mostly, she knows about the terrible history of murders of Blacks by Whites. She chronicles lynchings—and, as far as she’s concerned, the shooting of a Black man by a White cop is simply to be added to the tally.
What’s going on? The Whites in the town are almost as shocked as Granny C, and the almost moribund local KKK branch makes a play of going into action. Its grand wizard (or whatever) is the ageing pathologist we’ve met, the reverend doctor Fondle. Everybody knows who these idiots are, but they’re tolerated because they’re harmless. Except, following some comedy procedural nonsense leading to Fondle’s re-election, they decide to set up a burning cross. It impresses nobody—Everett adds a few details of how poorly made and unfit for purpose it is—but it’s early days yet. A lot has already happened, and there’s a long way to go yet.
Chapters 37-71
A long way to go. Like, all the way to Chicago, to meet Damon Thruff. He’s a high-flying assistant professor who, by the age of only 27, is such a prolific producer of books and other publications that his university is embarrassed by his all-round brilliance. They hide him away in some anonymous office with the instruction to refrain from writing for a year. And have you guessed yet? This erudite, courteous academic is Black. And when his friend Gertrude—yes, that Gertrude—phones to invite him to Money, Mississippi to sample the weirdness down there, he’s happy to go. And, as though ready for a little more travel, the narrative now takes us to California, Minnesota, back to Chicago…. Have I forgotten anywhere? It kind of doesn’t matter, because murders just like the one in Money are happening all over the place. The FBI now have secure possession of the body that had kept disappearing in Mississippi, so it’s other long-dead Black or Asian men who are discovered holding the victims’ genitalia, a different corpse in each state. To quote the whole of Chapter 71, which is where I’ve chosen to take a break, ‘Ho to Hind: “What the hell is going on?”’ Who Ho? Who Hind? I’ll get back to them.
Before (or after—who’s checking?) the first non-Mississippi murder there’s another in Money. It follows the same pattern, but the narrative doesn’t. We’re not taken to a crime scene, but witness it from the inside out. The reverend doctor Fondle—probably not a real reverend, and definitely not a real doctor—imagines he sees a Black face behind him in the mirror. Except he isn’t imagining it. Then we get an insight, as far as Everett can recreate it for us, into what one of those horrible murders is like for the victim. OK. But what is more interesting is that the good reverend has just been thinking about the way his father once killed a black man on the street, just because he could. Which makes him, like the other victims, the son of… etc.
Is this the first murder when the ersatz Emmett Till doesn’t make an appearance? Or is this his final bow before the FBI lock him away properly? Whatever, that’s what he turns out to be, ersatz. DNA tests are run on him, and he isn’t Till. And he’s much more recently deceased—before his first appearance at a crime scene in Money, but not 60 years before. Eventually, his body is traced back to a company in Chicago—yes, there again—specialising in supplying corpses for medical schools. We can tell how seriously Everett’s narrator is taking this when we read the company’s name—Acme Cadaver Supply. Beep-beep. Oh, and the English pathologist who tells them about it is called Helvetica Quip. She kept her maiden name because she didn’t like her husband’s surname. Helvetica New ‘sounds like a font.’ Umm.
I’m suspecting that Everett’s motive for the bathos is as a kind of Gotcha! signal to the reader. He’s saying, admit it, you thought this was magic realism. Well, it isn’t. Somebody is setting up these grisly little tableaux, and while these investigators with their comedy names might not live in our universe, theirs doesn’t have dead bodies reappearing magically at revenge murder scenes after 60-odd years. There are perpetrators… and the fact that the investigators, all Black, might have a lot of sympathy for them doesn’t stop them in their pursuit of real, living killers. Apparently. We might not know how the corpses always disappear, to reappear at one or more new crime scenes but, well, maybe there’s a rational explanation for that as well. Maybe.
I’m hedging my bets, obviously. But it doesn’t really matter, because all this stuff isn’t what Everett is really interested in. We kind of know that already, but in these middle chapters it becomes more explicit. The almost unimaginable scale of lynchings and other racist murders in the 20th Century—never mind before that—is brought home to us, particularly in what is perhaps the only chapter in the book so far that doesn’t contain a single joke. It’s Chapter 64, and it’s about remembering the dead. Or, more exactly, it’s about remembering the murdered. Page after page of names, with a brief pause while one character asks another what he’s doing. ‘“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?’
I’ll come back to that because, some way beyond the half-way point, it’s a reminder of what the mysterious perpetrators of these murders are doing. They are making people remember.
Meanwhile… maybe I was wrong to suggest Everett isn’t interested in the stuff of his crime plot. I should concentrate on what’s happening, it’s complicated enough, and how he presents it. For a start, Morgan and Davis—I’m wondering if there’s any significance in the pairing of the names, like Mason and Dixon—are soon too small for the FBI’s liking. The big guns are called in, notably Herberta Hind from Washington. (She has one of the comedy names I mentioned, because her parents always called her Herbie. Which reminds me of Officers Ho and Chi, leading to an immortal exchange as they introduce themselves to another investigator in California. ‘Ho.’ ‘Chi.’ I’ll leave you to guess the other man’s name.) She’s another Black, and she’s big and powerful enough to make the Mississippi men feel sidelined. But she gets them to work with her, or for her, and soon they are on their way to California and Chicago.
We know about the emerging pattern of new murders now, but one of the agents goes to ask a few questions at Acme Cadaver Supply. Where a new connection is established. It seems there was a mysterious disappearance of a consignment of dead bodies two months before, and it has never turned up. The driver was a White who seemed to want to be Black, one Chester Hobsinger. And guess what. At the best restaurant in the Black suburb of Money, the only White man is Chester Hobnobber. These aren’t so much comedy names as patently invented.
Meanwhile… Gertrude had introduced her academically-minded friend from the north to Chester, among other interesting people. And there’s something going on that she wants Damon Thruff to know about. There is some project under way that they talk about cryptically, involving some or all of them. At the restaurant, a kind of hub for the community, twenty people practise various martial arts. They know Gertrude, and one of them asks her, ‘So, are we making a splash out there?’ I mentioned before that Gertrude can pass as White although, as one of the agents assured the other when they first met her in the Dinah, she’s definitely Black. Maybe her job is to bring news from the White world. Whatever, her answer to the question is yes.
Damon, mystified, is just about to receive some heavy-duty consciousness raising. He’s written academic studies, including one on racial violence. He’s talking to Mama Z, who has read it. She seems to have read everything on the subject, and she doesn’t sound impressed. ‘“It’s very . . .”—she searched for the word—“scholastic.… [It’s] interesting, because you were able to construct three hundred and seven pages on such a topic without an ounce of outrage.”’ There’s the rub. Mama Z’s father was murdered when she was a child, and for years now she has been compiling records, kept in twenty-odd filing cabinets, of all the racist killings since 1913, the year she was born.
Damon is bemused at first, then mesmerised by what he finds in the cabinet drawers. He feverishly reads them at random, one after the other, for hours. When Mama Z returns he’s astonished it’s daybreak. He finds the report of her father’s lynching: ‘The cause of death was determined to be a self-inflicted knife wound to the neck.’ It’s a sign of the deliberately bizarre aesthetic of this book that Mama Z’s father’s surname is Lynch. But whatever it is, along with all the others he’s read about, it’s changing Damon’s way of doing things. He’s the one, of course, who has written the names as he discovers them, just the names, not only to give them life again but for another reason. Mama Z asks him why he’s writing the names in pencil. ‘“When I’m done, I’m going to erase every name, set them free.” “Carry on, child,” the old woman said.’
Seems like a good point to think about reading the rest of it.
Chapters 72-106—to the end
Did we realise that Damon has a magic power? Of course we didn’t. How were we supposed to know, after the magic realist genre was set up only to be debunked in the middle third, that Everett was going to go for a new genre altogether? It’s that American favourite, the zombie apocalypse. It’s all a bit mystifying at first… and then it isn’t. In the very final sentences of the novel, we find out that Damon’s comforting little conceit, that he can give some life back to the dead, is literally true. All the time since he started writing their names, he’s been raising the dead. This is quite a thing—and nobody realises. By the time it’s become clear, right at the end, we’ve kind of guessed. And anyone reading this now will also have guessed that Everett is playing a whole new game now. Goodbye, magic realism, hello Walking Dead.
But is it any good? For me, up to a point. But once the original retribution murders have taken place—i.e. the first two in Money, plus Granny C’s aggravated coronary—all the others are perpetrated by real corpses. The methods are identical, in all their grisly detail, to those used by Gertrude’s co-conspirators. So it’s no surprise that everybody assumes each one is part of a greater plan, and it’s only when Gertrude finds herself implicitly confessing to Jim that she mentions the possibility of copycat murders. Except, this late on in the novel, individual killings have been replaced by mind-boggling mass murder. Shuffling crowds of earth-covered corpses, Black or Asian, make their indestructible, inexorable way through a White Supremacist meeting or even a small town. They only ignore the lucky few whose fathers weren’t guilty of a killing—and it’s always a minority, if any at all.
By now, the novel has become something of a wish-fulfilling fantasy. Wouldn’t it be great if…? Well, maybe—if it’s OK for the sons to be murdered for their father’s crimes. Sure, those sons are mired in the attitudes of the1950s—or, as someone says, the 1850s. Sure, some of them would still be lynching Blacks if they could get away with it. And sure, come to think of it, Everett’s narrative isn’t encouraging us to shed any tears about the victims. They’re all dreadful people or, more precisely, dreadful White men. But whatever we might be thinking, nothing is stopping the growing crowds of the dead, and their groaning cry, ‘Rise….’
What happens in this final third of the novel? I’ve covered it, really, aside from little scenes from Confederacy life. Like one time when Hind sees police lights in the rear-view mirror of her shiny rented Cadillac and tells the others they’ll have some fun with the cop following them. Which they do. Or the KKK-style group who have a meeting about how they have far more weapons than people to fire them—only to be wiped out by a shuffling crowd who leave their testicles all over. Or the ancient FBI chief, chosen especially by the President, leading a meeting down a gun-happy rabbit-hole—only to be et cetera. There’s also an ever-more racist speech on TV, given by the same President, which would have been more fun to read if it wasn’t so likely he might be back by the end of the year.
And… I’m tempted to leave it there. The novel ends with Damon sitting at an old-school typewriter.
‘“He’s typing names,” Mama Z said. “One name at a time. One name at a time. Every name.” “Names,” Ed said. “Shall I stop him?” Mama Z asked. Jim looked at Ed, then Hind. Gertrude was clearly confused. They were confused, yet not. “Shall I stop him?” the old woman asked again. Outside, in the distance, through the night air, the muffled cry came through, Rise. Rise.
“Shall I stop him?”’
We can read it for you wholesale 