The education of Little Fraud

The mask was crumbling, and 1976 brought with it a double blow from which Carter never recovered. First, his distant cousin Dan Carter, a historian and future biographer of George Wallace, wrote an Op-Ed for the New York Times blowing the whistle on the identity of the new literary lion from Texas. Shortly after, Carter's nemesis, Alabama journalist Wayne Greenhaw, wrote a piece -- also for the New York Times -- digging even deeper into his sordid past. But neither story would have any effect on book sales; indeed, at first, it seemed as if the stories would have no effect on Carter's career at all. Delacorte Press's Eleanor Friede publicly denied any connection between Ace and Forrest; for Carter's new friends in Texas, many of whom weren't disposed to give the New York Times much credence anyway, that was good enough.

For two years, Forrest Carter hung on in Texas, playing the local celebrity and trying to let Asa Carter fade back into the past. In 1978, in Dallas, he appeared at the Wellesley Book and Author Patron Party, sitting on a distinguished panel including historians Lon Tinkle, Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey and, incredibly, Barbara Tuchman. He played the folksy noble savage to the hilt, winning over both the panel and the audience. Tuchman laughed out loud when Carter embraced her and called her "a good ol' Jew girl."

I met Forrest Carter shortly after that at the Houston airport, working on a profile for the Houston Post. He was lean and sunburned and had a bushy mustache; he reminded me of an old photo of Wyatt Earp. Wearing a broad Stetson, he looked like a figure in a Remington painting in sunglasses. As a student in Birmingham I had watched him on TV when he ran for governor, but I wouldn't have recognized him as Asa if he had been pointed out to me.

I knew him only as the author of "The Education Of Little Tree," a book that I had regarded as inconsequential when I first read it, and of "Gone to Texas," which seemed a brutal but above-average genre piece. I vaguely remembered having seen something in the New York Times about Asa Carter's having gone off somewhere and started a new life for himself, but I never connected the bellowing hatemonger on TV with the grizzled-looking urban cowboy who mumbled as if he was the character in Mel Brooks' "Blazing Saddles" who spoke in "authentic frontier gibberish." We talked about his second Wales novel and about his recently finished book on Geronimo. I asked him if Clint Eastwood would be involved in the rumored next movie about Wales. He looked at me warily from under his hat, puffed on a cigarette and said, "I think Clint's had all he can take 'a me." He offered that "Robert Duvall kinda looks more like my Josey" and would make a "good 'un."

I told Carter that I thought his Wales novels were an attempt to win back the values on a mythical level that the Confederacy had lost on the battlefield. Carter squinted at me, smiled and said, "The values of a civilization never die so long as they're kept alive in legend."

I never got a chance to write my story. Shortly afterward, Forrest Carter was dead. Exactly how and why has never been made clear. Friends said that he had been drinking; rumors of Asa were starting to reach Abilene. One Texas friend said Carter aged 10 years between 1976 and 1978, largely because of his fear of the trickle-down from Dan Carter's piece. Though it took a year and a half for Carter's Op-Ed to have an effect, Carter began to feel the heat. A canceled speaking gig at a university here, a call from a local paper wanting to discuss the controversy there. By the summer of '78, said a friend, "Forrest was a mess. None of us understood at the time, but after the tragedy we could see in retrospect he was turning into a nervous wreck."

One night in June, Carter stopped off to visit one of his sons in Potosi, just south of Abilene. Perhaps two hours later, an ambulance arrived to pick up Forrest Carter's body. The death certificate listed "aspiration of food and clotted blood" as probable cause. It also mentioned a "history of fights." A story circulated that Carter had gotten into a drunken fight with his son and choked on his own vomit; one of the ambulance drivers said the scenario fit. An old friend from Birmingham conjectured that a fight between father and son broke out over the treatment of Carter's wife, whom he apparently deserted in Florida. Thelma Carter later resurfaced in Alabama, and has gone into seclusion, refusing to discuss her years with Asa.

Most of Forrest Carter's friends received a triple shock the next day when they picked up the papers. First was the news of his violent death. Added to that was the fact that many did not know he really was, or was suspected of being, the notorious Asa Carter. Finally, most had never heard Carter talk of having a son.

The question of whether the "The Education of Little Tree" represented a conscious attempt by Forrest Carter to rehabilitate himself can never be answered. In the essay mentioned above, Henry Louis Gates argued, as others have, that the sordid past of the author is irrelevant to the book's message and theme, which is one of tolerance and acceptance. The problem is that when one scratches the surface of the idyllic world of "Little Tree" one finds a philosophy as harsh and unforgiving as the one Josie Wales lives, a world where even the mention of "guv'mint" inspires hatred, paranoia and fear. One might even question whether "Little Tree" is really the plea for racial tolerance that its supporters have always maintained. American Indian activist Vine Deloria Jr. long ago noted that white American men who would bristle at the suggestion that they had African or Asian blood are often quick to claim Indian ancestry so long as the connection is on the mother's side (as Carter said his was) and Cherokee (also as Carter claimed). Why? Perhaps out of guilt at the deposal of the Cherokee from the eastern states, but more likely because it seems the safest connection to the "real" America, the one experienced by noble savages before the corrupting influences of civilization -- of "guv'mint." Like Asa Carter, many American males see a spiritual kinship between their ancestors, the savage Celts and Anglo-Saxons, and the American Indian, and to be born with Indian blood somehow better justifies being born with a chip on one's shoulder than being born white.

There appears to be no simple answer to who Carter was, or exactly what his books are about, but for some the solution is to simply deny the apparent contradiction between the legacy of Asa and Forrest. Indeed, some continue to deny that they were even the same man. Eleanor Friede, who manages the Carter literary estate, no longer goes that far, but insisted to the New York Times after Carter's death that "There was nothing anti-black or anti-Jewish about the man I knew." (Friede, who is Jewish, says she is retired and declined, through a representative, to be interviewed for this story). To Buddy Barnett, his childhood friend, "Forrest wasn't no bigot, just somebody who wanted to see right done to Indians."

However his books should be interpreted, as works of the imagination they pale before the most remarkable creation of Asa Carter's strange, short literary life: that half-breed ancestor of Confederate soldiers and Cherokee warriors named Forrest Carter.

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