tl;dr
What's going on with names in The Trees?
Deets
Percival Everett's The Trees ends as Damon Thruff is typing out a list of 7,006 victims of racial violence:
"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?"
Everett, Perceval. The Trees. Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2021. ch. 108, p. 308.
The action of the novel makes clear that names have a totemic power, in much the same way that the #SayHerName movement relies on foregrounding the names of Black women victims of violence as a way to humanize them and mobilize protest effectively. A previous chapter consists almost entirely of the names Damon is then writing, rather than typing, out: Philando Castile, Choo Bah Quot, James Byrd, Jr., and hundreds of others.
Yet the characters in the novel's historical present have names that are memorable for entirely different reasons: they are wickedly, even shockingly, funny. For example, here is how police officers Hal Chi and Daryl Ho introduce themselves to a colleague from a neighboring county who shares their ethnicity:
"You won't be here for long," a deputy sheriff said. "You the guys from Orange County?"
"Ho."
"Chi."
"Minh. Riverside Sheriff's Department." The woman shook their hands.
ibid., ch. 70, p. 211.
This exchange is taken at face value by the participants. But other characters explicitly thematize their names:
"And everybody calls you just Dill. Do you have a first name?"
Dill nodded, sheepishly. "It's Pick. My middle name is Leon."
"Pick L. Dill? Okay, I see."
Dill chuckled slightly. "School was tough."
"I'll bet."
ibid., ch. 62, p. 180.
Another character, the light-skinned Gertrude Penstock who is often taken for White, uses a nickname:
Jim looked at the waitress's name tag: Dixie. "For some reason I don't think that's your name."
"And you'd be right," she said. "Dixies get better tips than Gertrudes."
ibid., ch. 13, p. 39.
The characters who populate the book have or go by outlandish names: Hot Mama Yeller, Hickory Spit, Junior Junior, McDonald McDonald ("no relation to the restaurant," ch. 53, p. 154), Cad Fondle, and so on. One, Helvetica Quip, has chosen to retain her own last name after marrying Ferris New:
"Helvetica New," she would say, "sounds like the name of a font. If I'm going to be named after a font, it's going to be Oriya Sangam or something with some exotic flare [sic]."
ibid., ch. 41, p. 124.
To belabor the point: she shares her name with a typeface and makes a quip about it.
Aside from the historical characters such as Carolyn Bryant, practically every character has a unique and memorable name, in some cases (such as with Mama Z) with obvious symbolic intent. However, the African American detectives who are the main characters have entirely forgettable names: Ed Morgan and Jim Davis. That their names are unremarkable is itself remarked upon, albeit indirectly. Ed Morgan is asking Pick L. Dill about a White deputy who Dill says murdered a Black man:
"The deputy's name?"
"Mustard or Ketchum? I remember it reminded me of a condiment. Mayo, that was it, Mayo. Don't remember his first name. If I ever knew it."
"He still around?"
"Gone for a long time."
"The victim, what was his name?"
"Garth Johnson. I remember because I thought, Garth, that sounds like a White name, even though I know there ain't such things as White and Black names, but you know what I mean."
"I guess."
"Like if a White guy had the name LaMarcus, you'd remember that, right?"
"I guess I would."
ibid., ch. 62, p. 181–182.
What is the thematic relevance of this onomastic play? To what purpose does Everett foreground the names of his characters? Why are some characters self-conscious about their names, while others deliberately adopt laughable monikers without a trace of irony? Why are some names portentous, others deliberately bland, with their blandness itself becoming a matter of comment? Has Everett gone on record about the names he gives his characters? Have reviewers, scholars, or critics commented on this aspect of the novel?
