Tadhg Hoey at The Millions:
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.
more here.