Asa Earl Carter - Controversy and Criticism

Controversy and Criticism

Carter spent the last part of his life trying to conceal his background as a Klansman and segregationist, claiming categorically in a 1976 The New York Times article that he, Forrest, was not Asa Carter. The article describes him as Forrest Carter being interviewed by Barbara Walters on the Today show in 1974. He was promoting The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales, which had begun to attract readers beyond the confines of the Western genre. Carter, who had run for governor of Alabama (as Asa Carter) just four years earlier, was identified by several Alabama politicians, reporters and law enforcement officials from this Today show appearance. The Times also reported that the address Carter used in the copyright application for The Rebel Outlaw was identical to the one that he used in 1970 while running for governor. "Beyond denying that he is Asa Carter", the Times noted, "the author has declined to be interviewed on the subject."

Carter autobiographical. In 1985 the book was purchased for a paperback edition and marketed by the University of New Mexico Press as a memoir. It was subtitled "A True Story by Forrest Carter". The story described the relationship between the boy and his Scottish-Cherokee grandfather, a man named Wales (an overlap with Carter's other fiction). Written from the perspective of a boy orphaned at age five, the book described how he had become accustomed to life in a remote mountain hollow with his "Indian thinking" 'Granpa' and Cherokee 'Granma', who called him 'Little Tree'.

Granpa runs a small whiskey operation during Prohibition and the later years of the Great Depression. The grandparents and visitors to the hollow expose Little Tree to (supposed) Cherokee ways and "mountain people" values. The state removes him to an orphanage, where he stays for a few months until an old Indian friend intimidates the director into allowing Little Tree's release. (In life, Carter was neither orphaned, nor raised by Cherokee grandparents.)

Before taking a new name and identity, Carter had claimed to have distant maternal Cherokee ancestry, a claim corroborated by some of his family members. Delacorte Press's original author biography referred to Carter as the Cherokee "Storyteller in Council." Members of the Cherokee nation have disputed his claim. They said so-called "Cherokee" words and customs in "The Education of Little Tree" are inaccurate, and the novel's characters are stereotyped. Several scholars and critics agreed with this assessment, adding that Carter's treatment of Native Americans repeated the romantic but racist concept of the "Noble Savage".

In 1985, the University of New Mexico Press bought rights to The Education of Little Tree from original publisher Delacorte Press and published it in paperback. By its second year, the new paperback edition began to sell briskly through word-of-mouth publicity. Sales eventually surpassing 600,000. Though Carter's background as Asa Carter was discussed in academic circles, it was not widely known by the book-buying public nearly ten years after the 1976 New York Times article about him. In 1991, after the book won the American Booksellers Book of the Year (ABBY) award, it ranked number one on The New York Times non-fiction paperback best-seller list for several weeks.

On October 4, 1991, Dan T. Carter (a history professor and distant cousin of Asa Carter) published the article "The Transformation of a Klansman" in the New York Times. This article shed light on Asa Carter's dual identity. The Times shifted the book onto its fiction list. Scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. also wrote an article on Carter and Little Tree for The Times that appeared in November 1991.

In 1997, a film adaptation of Little Tree was released, which revived publicity about Asa Carter. Carter's widow, India Carter, refused most interview requests during these years. In 1991 she did confirm to Publishers Weekly that Forrest and Asa were the same person. Eleanor Friede, Little Tree's original editor, defended Carter's background in 1997, telling the Times, "e was not a member of the Ku Klux Klan. I honestly don't see the point of all this nasty gossip dragged out years ago."

Following the 1991 publicity, the University of New Mexico Press changed the cover of Little Tree, removing the "True Story" subtitle and adding a fiction classification label. The biographical material in the introduction has never been changed to include details of Carter's involvement with segregationist politics and the KKK. Little Tree has continued to find readers and a place on reading lists for young adults since 1991. For fans who know of the controversy, many take the position of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who argued that Little Tree can be appreciated for its message of tolerance and its other qualities, despite the biography of its creator.

Richard Friedenberg wrote and directed the 1997 film adaptation. He also has defended the book, but not the author:

Mr. Friedenberg said what appealed to him about the book was that "the characters and milieu they were in represented everything that was good about America and everything that was bad." On the one hand, he said, the book dealt with the strength of the family and not necessarily with traditional families. On the other hand, he said, it dealt with ignorance and prejudice. Mr. Friedenberg said he found it perplexing and almost impossible to understand Mr. Carter's motives and literary ambitions. Although Mr. Carter, who wrote four books, failed to address the issue of his bigotry publicly, Mr. Friedenberg said he believed that "his apology was in his literature." For example, he said, the handful of blacks and Jews in his books are depicted sympathetically. "The bad guys are almost, without fail, rich whites, politicians and phony preachers," Mr. Friedenberg said.

Oprah Winfrey, who in 1994 endorsed Little Tree, subsequently removed it from her list of recommended book titles:

"I no longer—even though I had been moved by the story—felt the same about this book," Winfrey said in 1994. "There's a part of me that said, 'Well, OK, if a person has two sides of them and can write this wonderful story and also write the segregation forever speech, maybe that's OK.' But I couldn't—I couldn't live with that." The book has also been criticized on literary grounds: "I am surprised, of course, that Winfrey would recommend it," says Lorene Roy, president of the American Library Association. "Besides the questions about the author's identity, the book is known for a simplistic plot that used a lot of stereotypical imagery."