Author | Forrest Carter |
---|---|
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Genre | Historical fiction |
Publisher | Delacorte Press |
Publication date | 1976 |
Media type | Print (hardback, paperback) |
Pages | 216 [1] |
Preceded by | The Vengeance Trail of Josey Wales |
Followed by | Watch for Me on the Mountain |
The Education of Little Tree is a memoir-style novel written by Asa Earl Carter under the pseudonym Forrest Carter. [2] When first published in 1976 by Delacorte Press, it was promoted as an authentic autobiography recounting Forrest Carter's youth experiences with his Cherokee grandparents in the Appalachian mountains. However, the book was proven to be a literary hoax orchestrated by Asa Earl Carter, a KKK member from Alabama heavily involved in segregationist causes before he launched his career as a novelist. Although claimed to be autobiographical originally, it is now known to be based on Carter's fanciful and fraudulent family claims.
The book was a modest success at its publication, attracting readers with its message of environmentalism and simple living and its mystical Native American theme. It became a bigger popular success when the University of New Mexico Press reissued it in paperback, and it saw another resurgence in interest in 1991, entering the New York Times Best Seller list and receiving the first American Booksellers Association Book of the Year (ABBY) award. It also became the subject of controversy the same year when historian Dan T. Carter definitively demonstrated that Forrest Carter was Asa Earl Carter, [3] spurring several additional investigations into his biography. It was revealed that he had been a Ku Klux Klan member and segregationist political figure in Alabama who wrote speeches for George Wallace. Carter's claim that he had Cherokee ancestry on his maternal grandparents' side is controversial within his family. [4]
Carter was planning a sequel titled The Wanderings of Little Tree at the time of his death in 1979. A film adaptation was released in 1997. The book has been the subject of a number of scholarly articles, many focusing on the hoax and on the impact of the author's white supremacist background on the work.
The fictional memoirs of Forrest "Little Tree" Carter begin in the late 1920s, when his parents die, and he is given to the care of his part-Cherokee grandfather and his Cherokee grandmother at the age of five. The book was going to be called Me and Grandpa, according to the book's introduction. The story centers on the child's relationship with his Scottish-Cherokee grandfather, a man named Wales (an overlap with Carter's other fiction).
The boy's Cherokee "Granpa" and "Granma" call him "Little Tree" and teach him about nature, farming, whiskey making, mountain life, society, love, and spirit by a combination of gentle guidance and encouragement of independent experience.
The story takes place during the fifth to tenth years of the boy's life, as he comes to know his new home in a remote mountain hollow. Granpa runs a small moonshine operation during Prohibition. The grandparents and visitors to the hollow expose Little Tree to supposed Cherokee ways and "mountain people" values. Encounters with outsiders, including "the law," "politicians," "guv'mint," "city slickers," and "Christians" of various types add to Little Tree's lessons, each phrased and repeated in catchy ways. (One of the devices the book uses frequently is to end paragraphs with short statements of opinion starting with the word 'which,' such as "Which is reasonable.")
The state eventually forces Little Tree into a residential school, where he stays for a few months. At the school, Little Tree suffers from the prejudice and ignorance of the school's caretakers toward Indians and the natural world. Little Tree is rescued when his grandparents' Native American friend Willow John notices his unhappiness and demands Little Tree be withdrawn from the school.
At the end, the book's pace speeds up dramatically and its detail decreases. A year or so later, Willow John gets sick, sings the passing song, and then dies. Two years after that, Granpa dies from complications of a fall, telling the boy "It was good, Little Tree. Next time, it will be better. I'll be seein' ye."
Early the following spring after performing her Death Chant, Granma dies a peaceful death in her rocking chair on the front porch while Little Tree is away. The note pinned to her blouse reads: "Little Tree, I must go. Like you feel the trees, feel for us when you are listening. We will wait for you. Next time will be better. All is well. Granma." Little Tree heads west with the two remaining hounds and works briefly on various farms in exchange for food and shelter.
The book ends just before the Great Depression, after both of Little Tree's last companions, two of Granpa's finest hounds, die, signaling his coming of age (Little Red falls through creek ice and Blue Boy dies a while later of old age), after which he moves on with his life, always remembering “The Way” which his grandparents instilled into his soul.
Carter had been an active participant in several white supremacist organizations, including the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens' Council. [5] He was also a speechwriter for Alabama governor George Wallace, for whom he allegedly wrote Wallace's famous line "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever." [2] Although Carter claimed to be part Cherokee, in 1970 he ran for governor of Alabama against Wallace and others (Wallace eventually won another term after a runoff), on a White supremacist platform, finishing fourth among the seven candidates listed on the Democratic Party ballot.[ citation needed ]
In the years following his active political engagement, Carter left Alabama, changed his name, and began his second career as an author, taking care to conceal his background. He claimed categorically in a 1976 article in The New York Times that he, Forrest, was not Asa Carter. [6]
When Carter died in 1979, he was working on The Wanderings of Little Tree, a sequel to The Education of Little Tree, and on a screenplay version of the book. Twelve years after Carter's death, the fact that Forrest Carter was actually Asa Earl Carter was documented in a 1991 New York Times exposé by history professor Dan T. Carter (no direct relation). The supposed autobiographical truth of The Education of Little Tree was revealed to be a hoax.
In 2007, Oprah Winfrey pulled the book from a list of recommended titles on her website. While Winfrey had promoted the book on her TV show in 1994, calling the novel "very spiritual", she said she "had to take the book off my shelf" after learning the truth about Carter. [7]
Whether or not Carter wrote The Education of Little Tree from his childhood memories of his Cherokee uncle and grandparents has been disputed. The publisher's remarks in the original edition of the book inaccurately describe Carter as "Storyteller in Council" to the Cherokee Nation. When Carter's background was widely publicized in 1991, the book was reclassified by the publisher as fiction. Today, a debate continues as to whether the book's lessons are altered by the identity of the author. Sherman Alexie has said Little Tree "is a lovely little book, and I sometimes wonder if it is an act of romantic atonement by a guilt-ridden White supremacist, but ultimately I think it is the racial hypocrisy of a White supremacist". [7]
Members of the Cherokee Nation have said that so-called "Cherokee" words and many customs in The Education of Little Tree are inaccurate, and they point out that the novel's characters are stereotyped. [5]
In spite of the exposé, the book was adapted into a film of the same title in 1997, which was meant to be a TV movie but was given a theatrical release. In 2011, the documentary The Reconstruction of Asa Carter examined the life of the author; it has aired frequently on PBS. [8] [9] On June 13, 2014, This American Life aired the episode "180 Degrees", which argued whether or not there was a change in Carter's attitudes between the period from politician to writer. [10]
The Outlaw Josey Wales is a 1976 American revisionist Western film set during and after the American Civil War. It was directed by and starred Clint Eastwood, with Chief Dan George, Sondra Locke, Bill McKinney and John Vernon. The film tells the story of Josey Wales, a Missouri farmer whose family is murdered by Union militia during the Civil War. Driven to revenge, Wales joins a Confederate guerrilla band and makes a name for himself as a feared gunfighter. After the war, all the fighters in Wales' group except for him surrender to Union soldiers, but the Confederates end up being massacred. Wales becomes an outlaw and is pursued by bounty hunters and Union soldiers as he tries to make a new life for himself.
George Corley Wallace Jr. was an American politician and judge who served as the 45th governor of Alabama for four terms. He is remembered for his staunch segregationist and populist views. During Wallace's tenure as governor of Alabama, he promoted "industrial development, low taxes, and trade schools." Wallace sought the United States presidency as a Democratic Party candidate three times, and once as an American Independent Party candidate, being unsuccessful each time. Wallace opposed desegregation and supported the policies of "Jim Crow" during the Civil Rights Movement, declaring in his 1963 inaugural address that he stood for "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever."
Carl Edward Sanders Sr. was an American attorney and politician who served as the 74th governor of Georgia from 1963 to 1967.
Jesse Benjamin Stoner Jr. was an American lawyer, white supremacist, neo-Nazi, segregationist politician, and domestic terrorist who perpetrated the 1958 bombing of the Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, but was not convicted for the bombing of the church until 1980.
Asa Earl Carter was a 1950s segregationist political activist, Ku Klux Klan organizer, and later Western novelist. He co-wrote George Wallace's well-known pro-segregation line of 1963, "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever", and ran in the Democratic primary for governor of Alabama on a white supremacist ticket. Years later, under the pseudonym of supposedly Cherokee writer Forrest Carter, he wrote The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales (1972), a Western novel that was adapted into a 1976 film featuring Clint Eastwood that added to the National Film Registry, and The Education of Little Tree (1976), a best-selling, award-winning book which was marketed as a memoir but which turned out to be fiction.
Vivian Juanita Malone Jones was one of the first two black students to enroll at the University of Alabama in 1963, and in 1965 became the university's first black graduate. She was made famous when George Wallace, the Governor of Alabama, attempted to block her and James Hood from enrolling at the all-white university.
Little tree or Little Trees may refer to:
The Rising Tide of Color: The Threat Against White World-Supremacy (1920), by Lothrop Stoddard, is a book about racialism and geopolitics, which describes the collapse of white supremacy and colonialism because of the population growth among people of color, rising nationalism in colonized nations, and industrialization in China and Japan. To counter the perceived geopolitical threat, Stoddard advocated Nordicism, racial segregation, and general racism, restricting non-white immigration into white-majority countries, restricting immigration of non-members of the "Nordic race" to countries primarily containing members of the "Nordic race"; restricting Asian migration to Africa; and slowly giving independence to European colonies in Asia. A noted eugenicist, Stoddard supported a separation of the "primary races" of the world and warned against miscegenation, the mixing of the races.
Literary forgery is writing, such as a manuscript or a literary work, which is either deliberately misattributed to a historical or invented author, or is a purported memoir or other presumably nonfictional writing deceptively presented as true when, in fact, it presents untrue or imaginary information or content.
The 1970 Alabama gubernatorial election was marked by a competitive Democratic primary battle between incumbent moderate Governor Albert Brewer and segregationist former governor and 1968 independent presidential candidate George Wallace. The Alabama Constitution was amended in 1968, allowing a governor to serve two consecutive terms.
Following his election as governor of Alabama, George Wallace delivered an inaugural address on January 14, 1963 at the state capitol in Montgomery. At this time in his career, Wallace was an ardent segregationist, and as governor he challenged the attempts of the federal government to enforce laws prohibiting racial segregation in Alabama's public schools and other institutions. The speech is most infamous for the phrase "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever", which became a rallying cry for those opposed to integration and the civil rights movement.
The Stand in the Schoolhouse Door took place at Foster Auditorium at the University of Alabama on June 11, 1963. George Wallace, the Governor of Alabama, in a symbolic attempt to keep his inaugural promise of "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever" and stop the desegregation of schools, stood at the door of the auditorium as if to block the entry of two African American students: Vivian Malone and James Hood.
Dan T. Carter is an American historian.
The Original Ku Klux Klan of the Confederacy was a Klan faction led by Asa Carter in the late 1950s. Despite the group's brief lifespan, it left its mark with a violent record, including an assault on Nat King Cole, participation in a riot in Clinton, Tennessee, and one of the few documented cases of castration by the Klan.
The Education of Little Tree is a 1997 American drama film written and directed by Richard Friedenberg, and starring James Cromwell, Tantoo Cardinal, Joseph Ashton and Graham Greene. It is based on the controversial 1976 fictional memoir of the same title by Asa Earl Carter about an orphaned boy raised by his paternal Scottish-descent grandfather and Cherokee grandmother in the Great Smoky Mountains.
The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales is a 1973 American Western novel written by Asa Earl Carter. It was adapted into the film The Outlaw Josey Wales directed by and starring Clint Eastwood. The novel was republished in 1975 under the title Gone to Texas.
White America, Inc., was an organization founded in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, in February 1955. The organization was created following the desegregation of schools in Arkansas, to attempt to prevent "any attempts by Negroes to enter white schools" in the state. The group joined two other militant white supremacist organizations in September 1955 to attempt to intimidate the local school board of Hoxie to reverse its decision to integrate its schools.
Edward Reed Fields is an American white supremacist and anti-Semite.
The Anniston and Birmingham bus attacks, which occurred on May 14, 1961, in Anniston and Birmingham, both Alabama, were acts of mob violence targeted against civil rights activists protesting against racial segregation in the Southern United States. They were carried out by members of the Ku Klux Klan and the National States' Rights Party in coordination with the Birmingham Police Department. The FBI did nothing to prevent the attacks despite having foreknowledge of the plans.
The Reconstruction of Asa Carter is a 2011 American documentary film directed by Marco Ricci. It is about Asa Earl Carter (1925–1979), who was a segregationist activist in the Southern United States in the 1950s and 1960s, before he had mainstream success in the 1970s as the supposed Cherokee novelist Forrest Carter, which created a scandal when his real identity was revealed.