When Wallace ran his wife, Lurleen, for governor in his place, there was talk of making Carter her press secretary, but cooler heads among Wallace's advisors suggested that this might be too high-profile for a man with Carter's past. He was kept on for a while as a speechwriter until Lurleen Wallace died of cancer. By 1968 Wallace was ready to run for president and had to clean up his rhetoric. All ties to "Ace" were cut. Deserted and, he felt, betrayed, Carter ran against Wallace for the governor's seat in 1970. In his TV commercials, Carter looked large, thick-set and barrel-chested, with dark, thick, Russian-like hair and eyebrows. He looked like George Wallace's bigger, meaner brother. Positioned in front of a Confederate flag, he railed against "race-mixing," Communists in Hollywood and anything else he could tie to the "guv'mint" in Washington. He finished last.
Wales was born out of the ashes of Asa Carter's political defeat, just as, in Carter's novel, Wales rises from the ruins of the old Confederacy. In 1973 Carter and his wife, Thelma, sold their Alabama home and moved to Florida where Carter could get away from his political debacle. Within a year, a new Carter emerged, slimmer, darker (all that Florida sun) and with a new name: Forrest. The name was chosen in homage to Nathaniel Bedford Forrest, the infamous Confederate cavalry general and a founder of the Ku Klux Klan. And, like Wales, Forrest Carter went to Texas to begin a new life -- one that was to definitively disprove F. Scott Fitzgerald's claim that there are no second acts in American life.
From writing racist speeches, Carter turned to writing genre fiction. In 1973 Eleanor Friede at Delacorte Press accepted his first novel, "Gone to Texas," for publication. Carter was now spending time around Abilene, visiting his sons (whom he referred to, for reasons that remain unclear, as his nephews) and making new friends. He told them that he was from Florida, that he had Cherokee family in north Alabama and that he was an official "story teller" and "oral historian" for the Cherokee nation. He dressed in jeans and string ties and affected a folksy speech pattern. He performed what he called Cherokee songs and dances for his friends. To the surprise of his friends and family, and probably Carter himself, "Gone to Texas" was published and, thanks to Friede's clout, even got reviewed in publications that ignored westerns. It sold well, pleasing the vast readership of Louis L'Amour, but also impressing a handful of readers beyond the western audience that an intense new sensibility was at work in the tired and predictable genre. Carter was delighted to promote his book with personal appearances. An Austin bookseller recalls that "He was such a great storyteller that people who heard him, people who didn't buy westerns, bought his books."
What kind of people have bought Forrest Carter's books? Certainly the Wales novels appealed to the readers of pulp westerns and action-adventure novels. But Carter also seemed to make fans of thousands who wanted something more from their pulp -- and the story he told shared important themes with his lone wolf, white-supremacist past. The character of Wales is a superhero-like conflation of several Confederate guerrilla fighters of the Civil War and post-Civil War era, particularly Jesse James and Cole Younger. Wales is a child of the mountains, and "he preferred the mountains to remain wild, free, unfettered by law and the irritating hypocrisy of organized society." Wales is white, but "His kinship . . . was closer to the Cherokee than to his social brothers of the flatland." Like thousands of ex-Confederates, he hangs a "G.T.T." sign on his door -- "Gone to Texas" -- and flees through Indian country, pursued, long after it would seem necessary, by federal soldiers and marshals. Before the novel ends, the Goya-esque landscape is cluttered with corpses, almost in anticipation of Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian."
In contrast to the Wales stories, "The Education of Little Tree" is a sweet, sad idyll, a pastiche of pop Zen and New Age homilies crossed with a dash of down-home red-in-tooth-and-claw Darwinism. On the surface "Little Tree" is a story of peace and tolerance; at its heart it shares much with the bloody Wales books. Carter's philosophy of implacable nature is displayed in a passage where Little Tree is saddened when a hawk tears a harmless quail to pieces. "Don't feel sad, Little Tree. It is the Way. Tal-con caught the slow and so the slow will raise no children who are also slow ... and so Tal-con lives by the Way. He helps the quail." And so, in nature's harmony, the dominant species rules. Man upsets the harmony by empowering the weak. Government corrupts nature by helping the weak.
In addition to wisdom from Granpa and Granma, Little Tree learns life lessons from a kindly Jewish peddler, "Mr. Wine." Mr. Wine, anticipating Milton Friedman by half a century, says, "If you was loose with your money, then you would get loose with your time, loose with your thinking and practically anything else. If a whole people got loose, then politicians seen they could get control. They would take over loose people and before long you had a dictator. Mr. Wine said no thinking people ever had a dictator." Fascists, of course, do not regard their leaders as dictators but as expressions of their own will.
Perhaps no two books by the same author have ever had so few readers in common. But scratch the surface of "Little Tree's" Native American worldview and you'll find a Confederate-minded noble savage. In fact, the Cherokees in both "Little Tree" and the Wales' books are honorary Confederates, fighting the evils of what both Little Tree and Wales call "guv'mint."
Sometime in late 1973 Bob Daley, a producer for Clint Eastwood's Malpaso Productions in California, received a book with a note for Eastwood. "The letter spoke of Clint's 'kind eyes,'" says Daley. "I thought, 'Who in the world thinks that Clint Eastwood has 'kind eyes'? I was curious." Daley didn't read westerns, but he gave "The Rebel Outlaw Josey Wales" a try. Intrigued, he talked Clint into giving it a try; the next day Eastwood told Daley to buy it for Malpaso. Carter's cut was $25,000 for screen rights -- not bad for a first-time author writing in a pulp genre -- with an additional $10,000 if the film was made.
A short time later Carter called to say he'd be in the area and wanted to stop by. "Fine," said Daley, "where will you be? Los Angeles? He said, 'No, I'll be in Dallas.' I just looked at the phone, wondering what kind of character we'd gotten involved with." Daley had no idea. When Carter arrived, he was staggeringly drunk and proceeded to piss all over the office carpet. Daley had an assistant hustle him to a hotel.
The next day, sober, he made his way back to Daley's office. "He no sooner got there," Daley recalls, "than he said, 'Well, it was fine meetin' ye, but I reckin' I'd better be gittin' ta home.' It took me a moment to realize that he was talking like Wales. I thought, 'This is worse than I thought.' I talked him into staying another night to have dinner with some of my people from the production office. Again, he showed up drunk, and he pulled a knife and held it to the throat of one of our secretaries. He later said it was all a joke."
The film's first director, Philip Kaufman, was not impressed by "The Rebel Outlaw Josey Wales." "'Fascist' is an overworked word," says Kaufman from his California home, "but the first time I looked at that book that's what I thought: 'This was written by a crude fascist.' It was nutty. The man's hatred of government was insane. I felt that that element in the script needed to be severely toned down. But Clint didn't, and it was his movie." Eastwood eventually fired Kaufman and went on to direct himself.
Then, the same year as the release of "Josey Wales" came the publication of "Little Tree," and Carter was on the verge of superstardom. But Carter's gift for promotion became his undoing. In 1975 Carter appeared on the Barbara Walters show, doing pre-publicity for the Eastwood film "The Outlaw Josey Wales" and Carter's upcoming books, "Little Tree" and his second western, "The Vengeance Trail of Josey Wales." He smiled, winked and squinted under the brim of his black cowboy hat, but moments after his appearance NBC was bombarded by calls from area code 205. A handful of his old cronies in Alabama had made him. Forrest Carter's days were numbered.
Next page: Forrest Carter's world collapses