The Trees

Daisy tells Charlene that when she was cleaning up the blood at the scene of her husband’s murder, she found a little cross figurine. Charlene found one too. They keep the crosses on them. They are confused because their husbands didn’t own any crosses. They wonder if the dead Black man left them there.

Detective Hind drives with Ed and Jim to Money. They agree that they all joined the force so they could avoid having only white people be the only people licensed to carry weapons as law enforcement agents. A Mississippi police officer pulls them over. When they show the officer their badges, he says he should have just shot them. They continue with their drive.

Twelve Bible study students wait for Reverend Fondle in his garage. He prepares for his sermon in his bedroom. He looks in the mirror and sees a Black man standing behind him. Before he can react, the Black man wraps his neck in barbed wire and squeezes against his neck. Blood pours out of Reverend Fondle’s neck. As he gasps for air, he sees the body of a dead Black man on his bed. He recalls a memory from his childhood, watching a Black man get shot on the street. The last image Reverend Fondle sees before death is a large blade.

When Ed, Jim, and Agent Hind arrive at the Money Sheriff’s office, Hattie is upset. She informs them that Reverend Fondle has been murdered. They ask for the address to join Sheriff Jetty in the investigation. When Hattie says the Sheriff didn’t request them at the scene, Agent Hind threatens to shoot her, so Hattie gives them the address.

After they eat at Bluegum, Damon admits to Gertrude that he’s scared but he doesn’t know why. Gertrude asks Damon if he’s ever been called a racial slur. When he says he hasn’t, she tells him that she’s never been called one directly, but that every time a slur against a Black person is used, it’s used against her. She tells Damon that she wants him to meet someone.

There is early-season snowfall in Duluth, Minnesota. Taggert Muldoon isn’t concerned about the snow because his ex-wife has their children for the week. Taggert has recently been laid off from his job at a meatpacking plant. He thinks racist thoughts about Latinx people, blaming them for taking his job. He wishes he could drive them out, just as his grandfather had helped to push Black people out of their town in 1920. A man calls out his name, which takes him by surprise because he thought he was alone in his house. Muldoon is murdered by the man.

Liam Murphy has worked as a detective in Duluth for a decade. In that decade, he’s seen very little crime and is shocked by Muldoon’s murder. Taggert Muldoon is found in the same manner as the dead men of Money. An unidentified dead Black man is also in the room with Taggert, holding his severed scrotum. His colleague, a white man named Wesley Snipes, asks Liam what he thinks of the scene. Liam notes that the bloodied room makes it look like there was a struggle, but that the dead Black man is much smaller than Taggert and unlikely to have killed him so brutally. Wesley notes that the scrotum looks as if it’s been cleanly ripped from Taggert’s body, not sliced off. They decide to start by talking to Taggert’s ex.

Deputy Sheriff Rake Kearney gets a call to report to a crime scene. A man has found two dead bodies along the side of a road. One body is tied with barbed wire, his throat cut, wearing an old prison uniform. The other body, that of a smaller Black man, lies unbloodied by the body of the bloodied dead white man, the white man’s scrotum in his hands. Rake calls in the Sheriff, who arrives and confirms that a man named Aaron Henderson had escaped prison that day.

Jim, Ed, and Agent Hind arrive at Reverend Fondle’s house. Sheriff Jetty is annoyed by Hind’s presence. He confirms the details of Reverend Fondle’s death are like the other murders in Money, but the dead Black man is different than the one they’ve seen before. Agent Hind reminds Sheriff Jetty that the mystery Black man is a victim as well. She orders that all the bodies be sent to Ed and Jim’s headquarters in Hattiesburg.

Gertrude brings Damon to meet Mama Z. Mama Z is painting her front porch black so it disappears in the nighttime. Mama Z has read Damon’s book on racial violence but chastises him for his book lacking an “ounce of outrage” (152). Gertrude takes Damon inside the house to show him Mama Z’s thorough collection of lynching records. She explains that Mama Z started her records in 1913, the year of her birth, because her own father had been lynched shortly after her birth.

In Orange County, California, Lieutenant Detective Hal Chi reports to a murder scene. His partner, Daryl Ho, confirms that the deceased’s name is McDonald McDonald. McDonald McDonald’s dead body is accompanied by the dead body of an unidentified Asian male, who holds McDonald McDonald’s scrotum in his hand.

At Dinah, Agent Hind meets Gertrude. Agent Hind insists that Ed and Jim call her Herbie. Ed and Jim ask Gertrude to introduce Herbie to Mama Z.

Damon admires Mama Z’s collection of historical records and pores over them.

Mama Z’s first entry in her collection of lynching records is that of her own father, Julius Lynch. Born in 1859, Julius’s mother was an enslaved woman and his biological father was a white overseer of the plantation. The police report of 1913 records that Julius’s body was found tied by wire, hanging from a tree. The cause of death is recorded as a self-inflicted knife wound. The man who found Julius’s body and reported it to the Sheriff was a Black sharecropper named Chancey Boatwright. No suspects were identified in Julius’s death.

At Hattiesburg’s headquarters, Helvetica runs DNA tests and discovers the identity of the dead Black man found at the scene of Reverend Fondle’s murder. The dead Black man was Gerald Mister, another body that had been donated to science when he died, to the Acme Cadaver Supply of Chicago.

Jim is sent by the MBI to Chicago to check out the Acme Cadaver Supply. He reports to Chicago Detective Sergeant Daniel Moon. Daniel was on the scene of the Milam murder in Chicago. Jim shows him photographs of the scenes of the mysterious murders in Money. Daniel confirms that his crime scene looked similar, except that there wasn’t a mysterious unidentified second corpse.

Ed tries to research anything he can find about Granny C, Wheat, Junior Junior, and Reverend Fondle. Ed visits Reverend Fondle’s widow Fancel to find out more about him. At first, Fancel is wary of Ed due to his skin color, but she decides that he sounds “educated” for a Black man and will speak to him. She admits that Reverend Fondle wasn’t well-liked. He called himself a doctor but wasn’t a doctor. He was a preacher, but a self-proclaimed one and not very good at it. She admits that Reverend Fondle hated Black people. She tells Ed about the people Reverend Fondle hated or feared. He was scared and resentful of Sheriff Jetty because Jetty’s father quit the KKK when Fondle’s father was the Grand Kleagle. Jetty’s father supposedly quit because Fondle’s father murdered a Black man. Fancel confirms that Reverend Fondle was also in the KKK but tries to make it clear that he didn’t like white or Black people. Ed says it makes no difference to him.

Damon is upset by how similar Mama Z’s records are, dehumanizing each murder as a regular occurrence. Gertrude arrives with Herbie. Mama Z is surprised that the FBI has gotten involved in a local murder case, and Herbie suggests it’s because there is a civil rights component to these crimes. Mama Z doesn’t trust Herbie because she’s part of the FBI, even though she is a fellow Black woman.

Detective Moon brings Jim to the scene of the crime in Chicago. Moon proposes that the most gruesome part of the murder was the barbed wire, as experts have attested that even with two men pulling on the wire, it would be difficult to strangle someone so thoroughly with barbed wire. Moon agrees to go with Jim to the Acme Cadaver Company of Chicago.

Ed visits the coroner’s assistant Dill at his mother’s house. An old car in the driveway is covered with Trump bumper stickers. Ed asks Dill about his former boss. Dill admits that he never liked Reverend Fondle but assures Ed that he didn’t kill Fondle. Dill tells Ed that Reverend Fondle was essentially a criminal; he often lied about causes of death and barely did his job. Ed presses Dill for more information about Fondle’s crimes. Dill tells him about a time four years prior when a Black man, Garth Johnson, was found dead from a gunshot in the back of his head. Sheriff Jetty spoke nervously with Reverend Fondle about it, and Fondle put the cause of death as suicide.

Gertrude returns to the Bluegum after hours. She knows the code to get in, and walks to the back of the restaurant, where people are practicing martial arts and other fighting techniques.

Damon handwrites the names of the victims of lynchings so he can humanize them again. He wants to see the lynching victims as people and not as statistics and is distraught by how dehumanizing the records are in the archive.