One morning last week I checked the voice mail in my office and listened to a message from Brad, a friend who lives in Honolulu. Another friend of his who lives in Murphy had some time ago given him a copy of Forrest Carter’s The Education of Little Tree, the story of a young Cherokee boy’s coming of age during the Great Depression. Brad’s copy of the book had disappeared at some point but recently resurfaced. He told me that he was re-reading it with great pleasure. He had called to query me as to whether “it was OK for me to enjoy reading it as much as I am?”

Brad probably figured I had read the book, which I have. He probably figured that I have an interest in Cherokee history and culture, which I do. For whatever reason, he figured that I have an opinion about the book. Well, maybe I do, maybe I don’t. Brad has opened a can of worms. Maybe that’s what he was up to in the first place.

Like Brad, I had read The Education of Little Tree some years ago with considerable pleasure. And word of mouth leads me to believe that many readers here in western North Carolina, including numerous Cherokees, have also read the book with pleasure. But since my initial reading, allegations surfaced in the early 1990s about the author Asa “Forrest” Carter that makes it very difficult to view the book in the same light. Before we get to that matter, let’s take a quick look at The Education of Little Tree.

Carter, who is also the author of The Outlaw Josey Wells and other books, is a good writer. His prose is crisp and flexible. He can develop a plot line. He can depict a scene vividly. He can evoke the emotions a character is feeling. He can lead the reader into empathizing with those emotions.

The Education of Little Tree was published by the University of New Mexico Press in 1976. My copy is a 1986 softcover reissue sub-titled, “A True Story by Forrest Carter.” The reissue has a foreword by Rennard Strickland, who at that time was dean of the law school at Southern Illinois University. He subsequently became the director of the American Indian Law and Policy Center at the University of Oklahoma and has published several books on Cherokee culture, including Fire and Spirits: Cherokee Law from Clan to Court.

In his foreword, Strickland calls “Little Tree” a “rare book like Huck Finn that each new generation needs to discover and which needs to be read and reread regularly ... this book is a document of universal meaning (that) speaks to the human spirit and reaches the very depth of the human soul.”
The Education of Little Tree opens with this sentence: “Ma lasted a year after Pa was gone.” The narrator - who is 5 years old - is adopted by his Granpa, who is half Cherokee, and his Granma, who is a full blood. They take him home on a bus. Departing the bus, they walk a considerable distance to his grandparent’s cabin.

“After a long time, we turned off the wagon ruts onto a foot trail and headed dead set into the mountains. Seemed like we’d come straight up against a mountain, but as we walked, the mountains seemed to open up and fold in around us on all sides. . . . We crossed a foot log over the spring branch and there was the cabin, logged and set back under big trees with the mountain at its back and a porch running clear across the front.”

That night Granma sings a song about a boy named “Little Tree” in which the forces of the natural world welcome him home: “Granma sang and rocked slowly back and forth. And I could hear the wind talking, and Lay-nah, the spring branch, singing about me and telling all my brothers. I knew I was Little Tree, and I was happy that they wanted me. And so I slept, and I did not cry.”

The book is primarily the story of a boy’s relationship with his grandfather. The boy learns the Cherokee ways and outlook. It ends, of course, with his grandparents’ deaths. It’ll make you shed a little tear or two.

Sounds like something you’d like to read? Well, you should. But at the risk of ruining the experience for you, let’s go to a document by Amy Kallio Bollman entitled “The Education of Little Tree’ and Forrest Carter - What is Known? What is Knowable?” (http://www.nativeweb.org/pages/legal/carter.html).
Bollman, who is at the University of Oklahoma, outlines the allegations mentioned above.


“That Forrest Carter, author of The Education of Little Tree, was born as Asa Earl Carter (also known as ‘Ace’ Carter) is no longer in dispute,” Bollman writes. “India Carter (his widow), Eleanor Freide (his agent), and Elizabeth Hadas (director of the University of New Mexico Press during the press furor over the book) have all publicly acknowledged this. Asa Carter was not an orphan at five years old; he was not raised by his grandparents; he was not an “unlettered” cowboy. None of the well-researched sources on Carter, either praising or damning him, deny these basic points.

“That Asa Earl Carter was a segregationist is also beyond dispute .... That Asa Earl Carter was a writer for George Wallace is not entirely knowable .... That Carter was the leader of a Ku Klux Klan branch is similarly difficult to document. . . . That Carter was a heavy drinker is mentioned in nearly every long article written about him. Dana Rubin describes Carter in later life, showing up to a book-and-author luncheon intoxicated. Carter’s drinking apparently led to his death. Rubin tells us that the ‘cause’ on his death certificate reads, ‘aspiration of food and clotted blood’ due to ‘a history of fist fight.’ She goes on to say that the fight was reported to be a drunken one between Carter and his own son.

That Carter knew very little of Cherokee culture is apparent from his own work, The Education of Little Tree. Gary Hobson, an author and literary scholar who is an active member of the Cherokee tribe, tells us that none of the purportedly ‘Cherokee’ customs, nor any of the ‘Cherokee’ words in the book, were accurate.

“Whether or not the book, The Education of Little Tree, was written by a ‘racist’ has been hotly debated. In Texas Books in Review, Western American Literature, and Southwestern American Literature, Lawrence Clayton, an acquaintance and defender of Carter, claims that Carter was no longer actively racist. Henry Louis Gates Jr. argues that whether Carter was or was not ‘actually’ Cherokee or ‘actually’ a white supremacist is, in fact, irrelevant. He follows much current literary theory in suggesting that the author’s personal history is not the determining factor of the quality of a novel.

“That Carter’s book is an ‘autobiography’ is also a matter of some dispute. Gates’ thesis rides on the fact that The New York Times reclassified The Education of Little Tree as a novel. The book, in fact, has been listed in Books in Print as an autobiography from the time of its printing in 1976 through the present. Many current printings retain the subheading ‘A True Story,’ which the University of New Mexico Press promised to remove in 1991.

“Further, there is evidence from the time of the original publication that, in a press package distributed to reviewers, Carter himself referred to the book as an ‘autobiographical novel.’ It has been suggested that much of the material is drawn from Carter family fables and that ‘Granpa’ was based on Carter’s grandfather, who died when Carter was 5 perhaps not coincidentally, the same age ‘Little Tree’ is when he is orphaned.

“However, those who wish to claim that Carter was not a ‘racist’ should read his works in The Southerner, a white-supremacist publication, which he edited, wrote many articles for and published first under the aegis of the White Citizens Council and later on his own. The later publications were distributed during the same time period — early to mid-1970s — that the ‘Josey Wales’ books were published and The Education of Little Tree was (presumably) being written. A copy of the first volume of The Southerner, published in the 1950s, is available on microfilm from the New York Public Library, and other later volumes are available in the Birmingham Public Library’s archives on Asa Earl Carter.
Just as there is no ‘proof’ that Carter wrote for Wallace or that he led a Klavern, there is no ‘proof’ that he underwent any profound philosophical changes.

“In the end, we can say little that is certain about Carter or his book, The Education of Little Tree, except that it is not an autobiography  at least not as we conventionally utilize the term — and that there is little in the book that accurately reflects the Cherokee culture. While the aesthetic value of the book is arguable, its value to anyone attempting to reclaim his or her Cherokee identity is virtually nil.”


I was born in and came of age in the South (Danville, Virginia) during the pre-Civil Rights era. Many members of my own family were die-hard segregationists. They weren’t covert racists. They were proud of it and would let you hear about it. Those same people were also, in some other important ways, some of the best people I could have known. Can a racist write a good book? Probably. Does the fact that he’s a racist have to color our impressions of that book? Yep, it sure does.

As an aside, I’ll note two experiences I had with elderly full-blood Cherokee women that I wrote separate feature stories about - the first in the late 1980s, the second in the early 1990s. Each liked what I had written, and as a token of appreciation each gave me a copy of The Education of Little Tree. Each said it was their “favorite book.” Like I said, Brad, you opened a can of worms. What do you think?

(George Ellison is a writer who lives in Bryson City. He wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 287713, or at ellisongeorge@cs.com

 

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