No Substance #182: The Long Lie of Forrest Carter, Part 1
(Today I have a long essay to share with you. It’s so long I thought it best to cut it into two newsletters, this one and the next. The whole essay is about Forrest Carter, one of the great literary hoaxes and a truly terrible person. So, naturally, please enjoy.)
Forrest Carter, the author of The Education of Little Tree and The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales (later turned into The Outlaw Josey Wales by Clint Eastwood) died on June 7th, 1979. Since then, Carter’s work has been read by millions and he has become one of America’s great literary hoaxes, raising questions of identity, authenticity, and truth. But, before we get to that, I want to tell you how Forrest Carter died.
He died while visiting his son. He was on his way to Hollywood, to discuss a film of his fourth book, but stopped in Potosi where his son lived. Somewhere during the visit, Carter got to drinking and found himself in an argument with his son. Rumour has it that it was about Carter’s wife, India, who he had abandoned, but it’s only a rumour. In truth, the two could have fought about anything. Carter had taken to calling his sons his nephews for years now. A few months before, he’d gotten drunk at a function and referred to two people there as “Good ol’ Jews” and the whole thing was bad news. And, of course, there was Carter’s career, a career built on lies. Still, whatever the two fought about, it’s not important I suppose. What’s important is that father and son fought and during the fight, Carter fell and choked to death on his own vomit.
Such a death was, I am here to tell you, actually quite fitting. You don’t get to say that about most people who choke to death on their own vomit, but in this case, it was oddly poetic.
You see, in 1973, Carter reinvented his life and began to tell people that he was a self taught writer, an orphan, and Cherokee. He real name was Little Tree, he said. Of course, that wasn’t true. His real name was Asa Earl Carter. He was the son of Ralph and Hermione Carter and he was born Alabama, 1925. There is no record of him having any family connection to Native Americans and plenty of evidence that Carter was a white Southerner who had been, among other things, a member of the Ku Klux Klan and the writer of George Wallace’s 1963 “Segregation Forever” speech.
The truth about Carter was revealed to the public in 1976 by Wayne Greenhaw in The New York Times. Like many literary hoaxes, the author denied it, then the author’s representatives also denied it. It seemed enough and everything continued as it had before. Carter continued to write under the name Forrest Carter. He did interviews. He signed books. He gave speeches. He drank. Sometimes, when he got drunk, he would sing ‘authentic’ Cherokee songs. Other times, he would get violent. Once he pull a knife out at Hollywood producer’s office and threaten the staff.
The publishers of Carter’s books were probably happy he was dead. He sold well. In fact, Carter’s autobiography, The Education of Little Tree, went on to sell more than a million copies after his death, and it graced the top of The New York Times best seller list for some time and was even taught in schools throughout the United States. In 1991, Dan T. Carter (a historian and very distant relation) wrote a second article for The New York Times about Forrest Carter. He talked about how Carter wasn’t Native America, how the book was a lie, and Carter’s own history in the KKK.
The article got more traction, though not enough to change the little empire that continued (and continues) to exist around Carter’s work. The University of New Mexico, the publisher of The Education of Little Tree, stopped calling the book a biography and acknowledge Carter’s background, but they didn’t stop selling the book. Nor did it stop a film being released in 1997, or the University of New Mexico releasing a 25th anniversary of the book in 2001. It came with a forward by Rennard Strickland that claimed the book was a “deeply poignant” work which is what you want from your hoaxes, I guess.
A few years later, The University of New Mexico continued its support of the Carter estate and released The Outlaw Josey Wales, an omnibus that combined The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales and The Vengeance Trail of Josey Wales. It came with an afterword by Lawrence Clayton who said Carter was an author who campaigned “against social and religious disorder and injustice.”
Carter’s final novel, Watch For Me On the Mountain, continues to be published by Bantam, or at least as far as I know. The edition I bought a few years back came with a biography that said Carter was the storyteller-in-council to the Cherokee Nation.
When you first begin to read about Asa Earl Carter and Forrest Carter, like I did, you begin by reading about two men, as if a split happened somewhere and the two emerged from one. Quite often it is said that when Asa Earl Carter changed his name to Forrest Carter, he left his racism behind. He became a new man, a Cherokee author of westerns and biographies.
When you put two images of Carter side by side you could easily believe that they are two different people. The first picture, Asa Earl Carter’s picture, is from the year he ran for governor of Alabama, 1970. In the picture, Carter wears a suit. He is well presented, tidy, neat. But no suit disguises the fact that he is a big man running to fat. In many ways, he reminds you of a parasite who has filled himself with blood. The second picture comes from 1975. Asa is now Forrest. His image is on the dustjacket of Gone To Texas (the second, less awkward title of The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales). He’s still a big man, but he’s slimmer now, tanned, and with a moustache. The suit is gone. He is dressed casually. He is smiling. The book’s copy tells you that Carter is an orphan who grew up with his grandparents and his “Indian” name is Little Tree.
You want to believe that Carter changed after he left Alabama. It doesn’t matter if you liked his books or not, you want to believe that a person can leave far right ideology behind and become someone reasonable. It is why, I think, a lot of people present Carter as if he was two different men, as a before and after, like he’s been part of a racist detox program and this is the midnight infomercial about it. But unfortunately, there’s very little evidence to suggest that the changes Carter went through were anything but cosmetic, a set of physical changes he undertook so that he could continue the only career he’d known, that of a professional white supremacist.
In 1942, at the age of 17, Carter joined the Navy. He told his friends he picked the Navy over the Army because he’d rather be fighting the Japanese than his “racial kin,” the Germans. After he left the Navy, he attended university in Colorado, married his high school girlfriend India, and returned to Alabama. There he began his career. He co-founded The Southerner, sold recordings, and started a hotline, all of which were dedicated to white supremacy. During that time he also worked on the radio, but was fired in 1955 after he criticised National Brotherhood Week.
Carter’s views always supported violence, but in 1956, it reached a new level. That year, he formed his own splinter faction in the KKK called The Original Ku Klux Klan of the Confederacy. He gave a speech at the time where he said, “the mountain people – the real redneck – is our strength,” a statement that is important because he would return to it sixteen years later in his first novel, The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales. “The mountains,” Carter wrote, “were a way of life; independence and sanctuary, a philosophy that lent the peculiar code to the mountain man. “Where the soil’s thin, the blood’s thick,” was their clannishness. To rectify a wrong carried the same obligation as being beholden to a favor. It was a religion that went beyond thought but rather was marrowed in the bone that lived or died with the man.”
The mountain man, the mountain clan, and the mountain code are referenced throughout The Rebel Outawl: Josey Wales, but it also features in The Education of Little Tree, Carter’s “autobiography”. Granpa, Carter writes, “had all the natural enemies of a mountain man... I suppose today, the enemies would be called “the establishment,” but to Granpa, whether sheriff, state or federal revenue agent, or politician of any strip, he called them “the law,” meaning powerful monsters who had no regard for how folks had to live and get by.”
Carter’s Original Klu Kux Klan of the Confederacy embodied the words that he wrote later, in that it was an anti-establishment and violent. Fortunately, it was also short lived. Two events would come to define them. The first was in 1956. In that year, seven members attacked the musician Nat King Cole during a performance in Birmingham. The car the men arrived in was full of weapons. Fortunately, Cole was unharmed, but the same could not be said for Judge Edward Aaron. In 1957, Aaron was abducted by six members of Carter’s group and castrated. Carter was not officially involved in either of the attacks, but it’s difficult to imagine that either took place without his knowledge and tacit support. A year after the attack on Aaron, the Original Klu Kux Klan of the Confederacy broke up after an argument about money. During the argument, Carter shot at one of the other members, and was charged with attempted murder.
Carter beat the charge, but his reputation for violence and bigotry was so well known that, when he became a speechwriter for George Wallace in 1962, he did so unofficially. This enabled Wallace to deny that he’d ever met Carter, or that Carter was working for him. Yet, historians are clear that Carter was employed by Wallace’s office and wrote speeches that the governor used. The most infamous of those speeches was the “Segregation Forever” piece. Reportedly, Carter wrote Wallace’s speeches while holed up in a room alone, kept company by whisky, cigarettes, and a revolver.
Carter truly believed in Wallace and thought he would champion the cause of white supremacy throughout his political career. It was a foolish belief as Wallace would temper such statements when he tried to move nationally, but it speaks to Carter’s investment in his cause that he thought he’d found a champion of it in Wallace. It also explains why Carter felt so betrayed by Wallace that he would run against him in 1970 for governorship of Alabama.
Carter ran on a white supremacy platform and in a field of five, he finished last. The rhetoric he had embraced for 20 years, the rhetoric that he had made a living from, that he believed in, had failed to find its audience. On the day of Wallace was sworn back into power as Governor of Alabama, Carter and his friends protested by holding up signs that said, among other things, “White Children Are Being Destroyed in our Schools”.
In Marco Ricci’s 2010 documentary, The Reconstruction of Asa Carter, Wayne Greenhaw, the journalist who broke the truth about Carter in 1976, tells the story of how he came across Carter after the ceremony. It is an important story because it is here that many think the split between Asa and Forrest was made, that one ceased to exist and the other was born. Carter, Greenhaw said, was distraught by what he saw as Wallace’s betrayal. He said that Wallace had sold them out, that he was a phoney, and began cry. “I think he had a mirror in front of him,” Greenhaw recounted, “saying what the hell am I all about?”
He didn’t.
In 1973, Carter self-published his first novel The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales. The name on the book’s cover was Forrest Carter, but inside, the copyright was listed under Bedford Forrest Carter.
Carter’s pseudonym, you see, was taken from the Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, the first grand wizard of the KKK.
(Second part in #183)
Ben
(Ben Peek is the author of eight books including The Godless, Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth, and Dead Americans and Other Stories. His ninth book will be The Red Labyrinth. His short fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, Nightmare, Polyphony, and Overland, as well as various Year’s Best Books. He’s the creator of the psychogeography ‘zine The Urban Sprawl Project. He also wrote an autobiographical comic called Nowhere Near Savannah, illustrated by Anna Brown. He lives in Sydney, Australia.)