He had also been a racist, an open advocate of white supremacy. He had sounded like an anti-Semite because he had been one all his life. His real name was Asa Earl Carter, and he was not from Texas but Alabama.
The answer was not fully known until last summer, when The Education of Little Tree improbably reached the New York Times best-seller list, fifteen years after its publication and twelve years after Forrest Carter’s death.Īs it turned out, he was not a cowboy author after all. The listeners were left to wonder how someone who had written so poignantly about humanitarian values could suddenly start talking like an anit-Semite. “Now, Stanley,” he went on, “there’s a good ol’ Jew boy.”Ī few uneasy titters arose from the audience as Carter’s boozy attempts to demonstarte his bigheartedness. Then he swung his arm toward Stanley Marcus, who was in the audience. “Now, she’s a good ol’ Jew girl,” Carter said. In an expansive moment, Carter pointed across the podium at his fellow speaker, historian Barbara Tuchman. Most of the listeners were well-groomed North Dallas men and women-the distinguished supporters of what passed for the city’s literary scene. In the grand ballroom of the Sheraton, the audience shifted uneasily at this gushing of bonhomie. The message was straight out of Carter’s 1976 book, the Education of Little Tree, an account of his upbringing in the backwoods of Tennessee, where his Indian grandparents taught him self-reliance, distrust of “guvmint,” communion with nature, and love of one’s fellow man. Wearing his trademark cowboy hat, the author of the Rebel Outlaws: Josey Wales and other Western adventures delivered a slurred speech about the need for people to love one another. It was October 1978, and the novelist from Abilene was a guest speaker at the Wellesley College Club book-and-author luncheon in Dallas. Everyone knew Forrest Carter had been drinking.
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