The Real Education of Little Tree
How the author of a current best-seller conned the world into believing he was a gentle Texas novelist instead of a vicious Alabama Klansman.
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“EVERYBODY WANTS TO WRITE BOOKS,” Carter once told Bob St. John, explaining how he had come to be an author. “I also had developed this great interest in history and got the yearn to make some of the characters of which I’d heard real.” One lobbyist remembers visiting Carter’s home in the early seventies, around the time that he dropped out of politics. In the middle of the day, Carter was in pajamas and a smoking jacket, writing in longhand on lined yellow paper. He was working on an adventure novel about a die-hard Confederate soldier. The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales is based on the life of Jesse James. After Josey Wales’s wife and children are butchered by Union sympathizers, he continues to fight for his cause, time and again outfoxing the enemy with cunning tactics.
But the book is also about Asa Carter — or about the author as he saw himself persecuted by the federal government. By the time it was privately printed in 1973, Carter has selected a new name — Forrest Carter — borrowed from Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Confederate hero and founder of the Ku Klux Klan. Changing his name was no big deal; he had gone by Bud as a boy and Earl in Colorado. This time the reason for his deception was simple: His discredited career as Asa Carter would prevent him from becoming a writer; adopting a pseudonym was a way to start afresh.
In 1973, Asa and Thelma Carter auctioned their home in Alabama and moved to Florida. Their two eldest sons settled in Abilene, where their father set them up with a filling station. That year, Carter’s book was accepted for publication by Eleanor Friede and Delacorte Press.
Carter visited Abilene often, sometimes staying for months in the house he had bought his sons - whom he now called his nephews. He cultivated a new circle of friends, for whom he had to concoct an entirely new past. He told them he was part Cherokee, a former cowboy, bronc rider, dishwasher, and ranch hand, a man with no formal education but with a knack for writing. He said he spent his time drifting around the country from his home in Florida, where his wife lived, to the Indian nation, where his kinfolk lived. Everything about the way he presented himself was a fraud, from his ungrammatical speech to his cowpoke ways. He wore jeans, a bolo tie with a turquoise stone, and a black cowboy hat. His Abilene friends loved him for his fabulous stories and his highspiritedness. Sometimes he woud sing ballads. And sometimes, especially if he had been drinking, he would preform Indian war dances and chant in what he said was the Cherokee language.
Speaking to a literature class in Hardin-Simmons University, Carter talked about how he had rambled around the country looking for work. He said he had gone to the back door of a ranch house north of Dallas “when I was almost starved to death” and asked for work. The owner had offered him a meal, “but I wouldn’t take it without working first,” Carter said. He eventually became close friends with the rancher, Don Josey. Today, Josey is the president of Rancho Oil in Dallas. He and Carter were friends all right, but the rest of the story was a lie. Josey says he met Carter at a rally for Lurleen Wallace. The heir to an oil fortune, Josey is also a Confederate history buff. He and Carter had a lot in common, Josey says, including a shared sense of mirth over Carter’s ability to pull of a hoax.
Of all the people Forrest Carter deceived, it was perhaps his agent, Eleanor Friede, whom he betrayed the most. Carter had no respect for the agents, the editors, the lawyers, and, above all, the Jews who ran the New York publishing world. Friede, who had become famous for discovering Jonathon Livingston Seagull , was a Manhattan liberal married to a Jewish publisher - just the kind of person Carson would be likely to hate. But he and Friede struck up a strange relationship. With her, Carter played his wide-eyed bumpkin role to the hilt. Friede, who now lives in rural Virginia, recalls that when she met Carter in 1976, she was astonished to find a large man with a commanding presence. From his letters and phone conversations, he had come across as an awestruck country boy. “He really seemed like a child,” she says.
Because Friede was Carter’s main contact with the publishing world, maintaining the masquerade with her was essential. Ron Taylor, one of Carter’s close friends in Alabama, says he helped Carter to keep up the image of a drifting cowboy. Taylor would mail Friede telegrams signed by Carter from various places throughout the South. “He kept feeding her these side stories to confuse her,” Taylor says. Carter told Friede he could write only when he retreated to meditate, fast, and commune with nature. he called it ‘hidin’ out.” Friede saw it as part of his creative, tormented personality; she still defends Carter, maintaining that The Education of Little Tree is no hoax. There’s no doubt that Carter shamelessly manipulated Friede. To her face, he was tender. He called her ‘Miss Eleanor.” But in letters to friends, he put her down. the relationship he cultivated with her was part friendship, part con game.
FOR SEVERAL YEARS THE LIE worked flawlessly. Not until the summer of 1976 did Alabama newspaper Wayne Greenshaw figure ot that Forrest was really Ace. He wrote an article saying so for the New York Times, but his revelations had practically no effect. A few months later, Delacorte came out with The Education of Little tree which it promoted as a true story. That was also the year that Clint Eastwood turned Josey Wales into a hugely successful movie. Invited to appear on the Today show with Barbara Walters, Carter was petrified that she might learn about his background, so he took pains to disguise himself. He was forty pounds lighter than he had been in Alabama. He was tanned and had grown a moustache. And he wore a cowboy hat pulled down over his face. Walters did not probe into his past, but several of Carter’s Alabama acquaintances saw the program, recognized their friend, and laughed at how old Ace had pulled a fast one.
Carter’s views did not mellow in Texas. His easygoing humor was a facade he had adopted to preserve the mask. An Abilene friend, Louise Green, remembers hearing Carter rage about blacks more than once. At a steakhouse in Abilene, Carter flew into a nasty tirade. ‘He said he didn’t want anybody to take care of his poor old mother, and he didn’t want to take care of ‘some niggers old mother either’,” Green says. On and on he went, louder and louder, about how “the niggers ought to go back to Africa.” until other diners began to glare.
Only a few friends knew of his double life, and to them, he revealed a profound cynicism about the people he was deceiving. “He said,’Y’all screwed me all those years, and I’m gonna get you back,’” says his Birmingham attorney, R.B. Jones. “‘Y’all think you’re so damn smart. I’ll show you who’s so damn smart.’” To Don Josey, Carter wrote about his plans for a Little Tree sequel, which would cover his life from the age of nine to fourteen, when he had supposedly rambled the Oklahoma backwoods with the Cherokees and then crossed into Texas. Carter wrote that he intended to ‘work some good stuff in there about knocking on your back door for work and eats, etc. in the process of which we will try to learn them sick New Yorkers something.”
By 1979, the lies and the liquor had caught up with him. he had gained weight and look dissipated. His friends in abilene worried that he might never dry out enough to write another book. On June 8, 1979, Carter was passing through Abilene on his way to Hollywood to discuss the feature film version of Watch for Me on the Mountain his fourth and final book, which was about the life of Geronimo. It was at his son’s home in Potosi, south of Abilene, that Carter died mysteriously. Listed as the cause of death on the certificate was ‘aspiration of food and clotted blood’ due to “history of fist fight.” The ambulance driver told one of Carter’s friends that Carter had had a drunken fight with his son, fell, and most likely choked on his own vomit.
It is possible to read The Education of little Tree as a story about a child beset by evils of organized religion and intrusive government. The characters of Granpa and Granma personify pure goodness that Carter imputed to Native Americans. But there is little that is truly autobiographical about the book. According to Doug Carter, Asa’s younger brother, Granpa is based on great-grandfather James Weatherly, who died sometime around 1930, when Asa was about five — too young for Asa to have remembered him in detail. There is no counterpart to Granma in the Carter family. No one in the family ever called Asa Little Tree. According to Eleanor Friede, Carter’s wife maintains that the family is of Cherokee descent. But Doug Carter insists that there isn’t any Indian blood in the family.
Asa Carter admired the Indian people, especially the Cherokees. But the Cherokee language used in the book is mostly made up. There is no such thing as “Mon-o-lah, the earth mother.” His depiction of the Cherokee way of life is romanticized, like something out of Longfellow. “It’s very precious,” says Cherokee Geary Hobson, a professor of English at the University of Oklahoma. “The Indians are sweet, sweet little creatures who can’t do any wrong.”
Only in an ideological sense is The Education of Little Tree true. It expounds an extreme kind of Jeffersonian political attitude that can be extended in any number of directions. To the left, it intersects with liberalism and multiculturalism; to the right, with libertarianism and anarchism. Out of context, the book might sound like a New Age manifesto. For many readers, it can exist on that level—surely all works of art take on a reality independent of their creators’ prejudices. But viewed in the context of Carter’s life and writings, The Education of little tree is the same right-wing story he had been telling all along. Perhaps there is another sense in which the story of Little Tree is true. Maybe, for Asa Carter, it represented a wishful kind of truth, the upbringing he wished he really had. “I think he felt so close to the background of the character he created,” says Doug Carter, “that I don’t believe he ever thought of it as deception.”
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