No Substance #183: The Long Lie of Forrest Carter, Part 2
(Below is part two of my essay on Forrest Carter. The first part is here, in last week’s newsletter, if you missed it. Otherwise, I hope you enjoy.)
Forrest Carter is a successful author.
When you write about Carter, you’re not writing about an obscure American author, one whose work has no clear and visible footprint in the country’s culture. The fiftieth anniversary of Carter’s first novel, The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales, took place in 2023. It, like all of Carter’s books, is still in print. Of Carter’s four novels, three have been turned into films. Of the three, Clint Eastwood’s The Outlaw Josey Wales, is now part of the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. It is considered one of American cinemas great films, directed by and starring what many consider a cultural icon. More people have seen the film than the book, but doesn’t limit Carter’s reach. Eastwood’s film is not a loose adaption of his work. It’s a very faithful one. Much of what you see on the screen is simply transcribed from the book, from characters, to scenes, to dialogue.
Carter’s novels don’t have a lot to recommend. The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales (retitled later as Gone to Texas) is unevenly paced, full of repetition, and littered with ellipses. Set in 1866, the novel features Josey Wales, a Confederate soldier who cannot accept peace with the North after the loss of his family. For a while, Wales fights as a guerilla, but when his companions take advantage of the Union’s offer of amnesty and pardons, he heads to Texas. The novel works best when Wales is viewed as a fictional stand in for Carter. Wales’ journey to Texas becomes Carter’s journey, and the bitterness and anger that Carter felt while making the journey best explains its subtext and overarching themes. This is best exemplified when Wales confronts the Comanche chief, Ten Bears, near the end of the book. “What ye and me cares about,” Carter writes, “has been butchered... raped. It’s been done by them lyin’, double-tongued snakes thet run guv’mints. Guv’mins lie... promise... back-stab... eat in yore lodge and rape yore women and kill when ye sleep on their promises. Guv’ments don’t live together... men live together. From guv’mints ye cain’t git a fair word... ner a fair fight. I come to give ye either one... ‘er to git either one from ye.”
A critic can sometimes make a mistake comparing a character or an ideology to the author, but in Carter’s case, a large body of work exists well before The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales. It is therefor easy to draw the lines between speeches, columns, and novels. The sentiments that Wales express in his dialogue – please note, the ellipses are all Carter’s – the belief that the government interferes with good, honest people, and that the government’s interference destroys communities is not substantially different from George Wallace’s famous speech where he claimed, “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”
If The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales is about Carter, then what is most surprising about The Education of Little Tree, Carter’s so called autobiography, is how little it has to do with him at all. None of his real family is in it, or any real events of his childhood. Instead, the book is deliberately conceived as an act of deception, a lie that Carter builds around a simple political message. To do so, Carter adopts a folksy tone and crafts a narrative based on racial stereotypes, fake Cherokee language and ceremony, and Shakespeare. From a craft standpoint, it’s Carter’s most successful and complete novel. From a critical point of view, what’s clear is how important Carter’s thesis of government interference is to him. Carter’s first example of this in The Education of Little Tree is with The Trail of Tears, before he moves on the government services that come to take him to an orphanage and the reverend there tells him that he was “born evil.”
Carter’s most successful book has another subtext that isn’t in any of his other books and that is the importance of Western culture. Throughout the book, Carter discusses how important church is, how important being careful with your money is – even if you earn it making whisky that gangsters will try to get in on – and how important Shakespeare is. It’s not by happenstance, after all, that Carter’s barely literate grandparents read Shakespeare, but by careful design and deliberation. Carter knows who his readership is and it isn’t Native Americans. Instead, it’s white people. It’s the people he wants to reach out and warn, the people who are his “racial kin,” the people who are in danger, but don’t know it.
The question I found myself returning to while I read The Education of Little Tree is why did Carter decide on being Cherokee? In part, it was because Carter was looking for a cause to hide behind while he pushed an agenda that he knew was not popular. Full throat white supremacy will sell, but it won’t sell in big numbers. Carter knew that it wouldn’t make him rich. He knew that it wouldn’t reach a huge audience. Until 1971, Carter’s career had been boom and bust, like a lot of modern day professional racists. He wanted something that would last. But why Cherokee, in particular? The answer to that is a little more difficult, I think. In the South, to claim that you are part Cherokee gives you a legitimacy that other white people don’t have. It allows you to step outside the history of white colonisation – a history that is one of invasion – and allows you to lay claim to the land in a way that only original inhabitants can. It’s easy to see how a white supremacist like Carter would have been drawn to this to hide behind.
But Carter certainly didn’t pretend to be Cherokee because he respected the Cherokee people. Lets be clear on that. There are quotes from Carter’s friends and publishers, from when he was Asa and when he was Forrest – from when he was in the KKK and when he was not, in other words – that talk about how much Carter respected Native Americans. Yet, Carter’s very behaviour tell us he did not. You can’t respect a community and then pretend to be a member of it. You can’t respect a community and claim that you send part of your profits to it, but don’t. You can’t respect a community and write a book about it where you make up its language and its culture. You can only do those things when you don’t respect a community and you only do those things when you are using that community for your own purposes. It is not right for anyone, be they the publisher, friend, or reader of Forrest Carter, to claim that the author respected Cherokee people. Carter was using the Cherokee. He was using their name and their identity so that he didn’t have to use his own.
Carter doesn’t limit himself to just using the Cherokee. In The Vengeance Trail of Josey Wales, Carter draws in the Apache and Geronimo to his ideologies. As a standalone novel, The Vengeance Trail of Josey Wales is no different than a lot of sequels. It’s less alive than the first and less urgent. In recognition of this, Carter spends the first quarter of the book not with Wales, but with Pablo Gonzales, a one armed Mexican who witnesses the brutal rape and killing of Wales’ friends. Thankfully, the ellipses are gone, but the violence is turned up. The villains are a group of Rurales led by Captain Jesus Escobedo, a man so evil that his particular kink is to rape Apache women until they die. Carter’s narrative for Wales has him run into an Apache revenge party, let by Geronimo himself. He describes the Apache in what is by now familiar words: “It was the Apache, for generations, who had lived on the thin line of death, running, hiding, fighting, raiding, moving; who had fought for, and only for, this “freedom.” Freedom from government! Freedom from the tributes, the taxes, the regulations, the parasite bureaucrats—the inevitable bureaucracy that sucked man dry of his spiritual self and ground him, rotting his soul with ambition for money, prestige, power; all the currents of storm and hell that man moves above the Mother Earth.”
The Vengeance Trail of Josey Wales is an important book in Carter’s body of work because it shows his further desire to use Native Americans as a disguise for his real conversation about white Southerners. It is not a complex message that he is sending to his readers, but Carter doesn’t want to be complex. He has learnt that simple repetition is the best way to convey messages of hatred and fear and The Vengeance Trail of Josey Wales is a distillation of that.
Carter’s final book was originally published under the title Cry Geronimo. Later, it was renamed Watch For Me On The Mountain, a title that echoes Carter’s speech when he formed The Original Ku Klux Klan of the Confederacy. On the cover, the book bills itself as “A Novel of Geronimo and the Apache Nation” but it’s mostly a revenge Western similar to Carter’s two Josey Wales novels. As a biography, fictionalised or not, it offers previous little insight into Geronimo, but I suspect that’s not the point. Instead, Carter returns to himself and turns Geronimo into a stand in for his own personal history. “A renegade, Major,” says the tracker Horn, who has been hired to hunt down the Apache by Union soldiers, and who might represent the journalists who were hunting down Carter, “is someone that deserts a faith or a cause; now, you shore can’t accuse ol’ Geronimo of that, no matter what the newspapers say.” He goes on then to elaborate how the cause of U.S. Army is thievery. The use of the “U.S. Army” is important because it links back to the government, the centre Carter’s ills, the cancer that needs to be cut out for people to live free (unless you’re black or brown, of course). The book so heavily retreads the ground that Carter has covered in his previous books that I felt fatigued even looking at it. I don’t know that anyone in this particular day and age loves their government, or the institutions that embody it, but few of us have the unrelenting anger that Carter did, or his sense of betrayal.
In articles and reviews about Forrest Carter, in respected press or journals or on Amazon or Goodreads, it is not uncommon to see someone ask, “Does the background of an author matter?”
The dilemma is presented as a deep, theological question, but it’s not. It’s a child’s question. We know the answer. We all know the answer. It has always mattered who the author is. It has always changed how you read a book.
The dilemma that exists, the true dilemma for the reader, is the question of if you should enjoy the work of someone who is offensive to you, or if you should reject it?
I like the work of many authors who were and are terrible people and who did and have done terrible things. Patricia Highsmith was an anti-Semite. William S. Burroughs shot his wife in the head. Charles Bukowski was an abusive alcoholic. I also dislike the work of authors who do things I admire. James Patterson, for example, is a huge advocate for literacy and donates money to independent bookstores. Like all readers, I navigate the lives of authors I like through a series of easy and difficult questions to myself. Not all the conclusions I reach satisfy everyone. Sometimes they don’t satisfy me.
But a literary hoax like the one Asa Earl Carter created is a different beast. It is a sustained piece of bastardry. Yes, Carter was a militant racist, but more than that, as an author he lied to us, the reader. Carter created a fiction within a fiction to hide himself. He created a false reality that ensured we could not engage his work honestly and it continues to this day. At best, to read Carter’s work without knowing the truth of it is to be unwittingly exposed to racist ideals and propaganda and reject it. At worst, it is to believe the deliberate lies about the Cherokee people that you will repeat later as truth, not realising that you are now using Native Americans to hide another person’s racism.
The truth is not robust. Carter shows us this, but we’ve been exposed to that realisation elsewhere, seen it in our lives every day. The truth is delicate. It splits and breaks easily, especially when it is given authority. We don’t have to look far to see how that happens outside literature. We can turn onto programs online and on air and watch as political leaders lie and their lies are supported by media networks. Anti-vaxxers promote their misinformation in public channels. Climate change is denied in papers and broadcasts. Flat earthers hold conferences that are open to the public. Our world is constantly getting remade and repacked around us, free of facts, free of truth, and we are forced to live in it as if these things are real.
Carter’s hoax damages more than just the truth. By still being in print, it actively denies legitimate Cherokee voices. How much more important, how much more factual, would it be if a real Cherokee author had written about their childhood and it sold millions? All the people who have bought Carter’s books innocently, believing that they will be introduced to something new, wouldn’t need to be told that they were lied to. And it’s not like the people who fall for Carter’s hoax suddenly stopped doing so in 1991. You can still buy Carter’s books, free of any note that reveals the truth about their author, or the intent of his books. At the very least, you would think that Carter’s publishers would address this, but neither have. Instead, they continue to sell his books, continue to take in the profits that they bring, and continue to allow people to be misled.
The question returns, then, but it is different. It is no longer about if Carter was an awful person. He was. The question isn’t if should you enjoy the work by an author who is offensive to you, because you can make that choice, and you’ll make it regardless of what I say. Rather, the question that remains is if it is acceptable to you that the work of an author who deliberately deceived you still exists as if it were real, or if its lies and ideals require the work to be presented differently?
Ben
Bibliography
Barra, Allen. ‘The Education of Little Fraud.’ Salon, December, 2001.
Carter, Dan T. ‘The Transformation of a Klansman.’ The New York Times, October, 1991.
Carter, Forrest. The Outlaw Josey Wales: Two Westerns. The University of New Mexico, 2008 (1973, 1976).
Carter, Forrest. The Education of Little Tree. University of New Mexico, 1990 (1976).
Carter, Forrest. Watch For Me On The Mountain. Delta Fiction, 1978.
Greenhaw, Wayne. ‘Is Forrest Carter Really Asa Carter? Only Josey Wales May Know For Sure.’ The New York Times, August, 1976.
Phillips, Wayne. ‘White Councils Split in Alabama.’ The New York Times, March, 1956.
Randal, Dave. ‘The Tall Tale of Little Tree and the Cherokee Who Was Really a Klansman.’ The Independent, September, 2002.
Reid, Calvin. ‘Widow of ‘Little Tree’ Author Admits He Changed Identity.’ Publisher’s Weekly, October, 1991.
Ricci, Marco. The Reconstruction of Asa Carter. Mouth Watering Media. 2011.
Rubin, Dana. ‘The Real Education of Little Tree.’ Texas Monthly, February, 1992.