This novel by Percival Everett, published in 2022 in the United States (and covered with awards) has just been translated into French under the title Châtiment.
The French weekly Le Canard Enchaîné devotes a warm review to it (March 13, 2024), as a counterpoint to the review of a novel by Richard Wright, without ever, however, mentioning what jumped out at me: the link with Himes.
Indeed, in chapter 8 of the novel, a couple of black inspectors from the MBI (Mississippi Bureau of Investigation) appear. Jim Davis and Ed Morgan remind us of Gravedigger and Ed Coffin: same friendship between the two men, same relaxation, same distance from their theoretical mission. The fundamental difference is that they are police officers in Mississippi and that they are confronted with local police officers (sheriffs) whose racism is consubstantial. We can even notice the resemblance with the late appearance of the two police officers, in A Rage in Harlem / For Love of Imabelle. We will measure the distance traveled since Himes's story and his improbable invention of two black police officers, powerful and resolute, in the Harlem of the 1950s. Alongside Jim Davis and Ed Morgan, we also find a black FBI agent and Asian police officers from California, all aware of their origin and their identity.
The evocation of Himes can also be read in the plot. Like Plan B, the last, unfinished novel in the Harlem cycle, The Trees recounts a scheme conceived by a mind of exceptional foresight and resolution, which exceeds its author's intention and degenerates into an uncontrollable war between races. Next to all the white victims, murdered and castrated, is the body of a young black man, lynched a few decades earlier, probably Emmet Tyll, lynched by the Ku Klux Klan in 1955.
A must read!
I found this passage in Gene Seymour's article in the newspaper THE NATION. The title of the article: Chester Himes's Harlem Noirs.
RépondreSupprimer"Percival Everett cites Himes as an influence on his vast, impudently eclectic body of work, which includes not only James, last year’s best-selling revisionist take on Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but mystery-horror burlesques like 2021’s The Trees and slightly bent contemporary westerns like 2007’s Wounded and 2011’s Assumption."