Milam kidnapped, tortured, and killed the fourteen-year-old boy for violating the color line. On August 28, 1955, Donham’s husband, Roy Bryant, and her brother-in-law J. W. Granny C, it turns out, is a fictionalized Carolyn Bryant Donham, whose accusation that Emmett Till had whistled at and grabbed her, at the country store in Money where she worked, instigated the twentieth century’s most notorious lynching. Like it say in the good book, what goes around comes around.” “What good book is that?” Charlene asked. “We on that again.” “I wronged that little pickaninny. The story ends with the flag’s removal from the state capitol: “There was no ceremony, no notice. Later, he buys a used truck with a Confederate-flag decal, sparking a trend that turns the hateful symbol into an emblem of Black pride.
In his short story “The Appropriation of Cultures,” from 1996, a Black guitarist playing at a joint near the University of South Carolina is asked by a group of white fraternity brothers to sing “Dixie.” He obliges with a rendition so genuine that the secessionist anthem becomes his own, shaming the pranksters and eliciting an ovation. “I write fiction.”īeneath his work’s ever-changing surface lies an obsession with the instability of meaning, and with unpredictable shifts of identity. “I’ve been called a Southern writer, a Western writer, an experimental writer, a mystery writer, and I find it all kind of silly,” he said earlier this year. Everett, sixty-four, is so consistently surprising that his agent once begged him to try repeating himself-advice he’s studiously ignored. “If I can make you believe it, then it’s fair game,” he once said of his books, which range from elliptical thriller to genre-shattering farce their narrators include a vengeful romance novelist (“ The Water Cure”), a hyperliterate baby (“ Glyph”), and a suicidal English professor risen from the dead (“ American Desert”). The author of twenty-two novels, he excels at the unblinking execution of extraordinary conceits. Percival Everett has one of the best poker faces in contemporary American literature.
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