Several Attempts at Understanding Percival Everett
Toward the end of Percival Everett’s 2021 novel The Trees, about a series of murders in present-day Money, Mississippi, the small town where 13-year-old Emmet Till was brutally lynched in 1955, a list of Black Americans who died by lynching is read aloud by an academic who is researching the origins of racial violence. The list, compiled by a local mystic, is only partial, but it is long and overwhelming. It contains many victims whose names remain unknown. One of the names on the list is David Walker, along with his wife and four small children, who are nameless. Walker and his family were murdered in front of their Kentucky home on October 3, 1908, by 50 members of the racist vigilante group the Night Riders, which accused Walker of swearing at a white woman. The lynching was well-documented, but the names of Walker’s wife and children are never mentioned.
After the publication of The Trees, a reader from Tennessee wrote to Everett to tell him that David Walker’s wife was named Annie. Everett reflected on what this correction meant to him during his acceptance speech after winning the PEN/Jean Stein Award for his 2023 novel Dr. No. “Now when I do the reading, I say David Walker, Annie Walker, David and Annie Walker’s four children,” he said. “I would never have learned that, it would never have meant anything to me, if I hadn’t written about it. And that changed my life.”
When I spoke with Everett recently, I asked him about the importance of that moment and he told me, “Not to downplay it, but as an artist from this culture, you have to hang on to those little moments. That’s sad to say.” We were speaking a few weeks ahead of the release of his latest novel, James. I have read roughly half of Everett’s 35 published works and I was, to put it mildly, nervous to be speaking with the man behind the books. I knew from the dozens of other interviews I had read with him that Everett doesn’t love doing press. “I wonder why?” he joked to me.
Speaking over the phone, not having body language or cues to read, didn’t make our interview any easier. Maya Binyam, in her recent New Yorker profile of Everett, described feeling “like a lawyer at an unsuccessful deposition” during their initial interview. At the end of my interview, Everett apologized, noting that he is aware that he makes for a difficult interview subject.
Everett doesn’t often validate specific interpretations or theories of his work. The fact that this work often manages to be simultaneously hilarious, ambiguous, deeply moving, and filled with a kind of muted anger at America complicates efforts to interpret either it or Everett’s politics. When he is in the humor to indulge interpretations, he will often entertain a potential reading by saying that it’s not what he intended, but, as far as he is concerned, the process of meaning-making, insofar as it can be said to be a duty, belongs to the reader alone—and it is the reader alone, through their engagement
