April 19, 2023 • 58 mins
On this episode of Bear Grease Clay Newcomb talks with New York Times best selling author Steve Rinella and Dr. Dan T. Carter, professor emeritus at the University of South Carolina about black-listed book “The Education of Little Tree.” The book, an alleged semi-autobiographical story about a Cherokee boy growing up in southern Appalachia, was written by Forest Carter, which was the false identity of famed white supremicist, Ku Klux Klan chapter founder and speech writer for Governor George Wallace, Dan Carter. In part 1, Clay reflects on the honest, insightful, and empathetic context of the book and explores the nuance and dissonance of what to do with with art in light of an artist’s beliefs. I really doubt you’re gonna to wanna miss this one…
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
And I sat down and read it, and I realized
I could see why it was so popular, but I
could also see the traces of the real author.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
On this episode, we're going to learn about one of
the greatest American literary cons of all time, or was
it a con at all? The good news is that
at the Navigation Helm, we'll have author and Southern historian
doctor Dan T. Carter, Professor Emeritus at the University of
South Carolina, and New York Times bestselling author and crow
(00:38):
call extraordinaire Steve Runella of Meat Eater. These guys are
going to talk to us about a book called The
Education of Littletree and the wild life of its author.
There aren't any better guests on Planet Earth to tell
us the story of a double life lies in racism
that produced a brilliant piece of literature so rooted in
(01:02):
American wilderness and values it'll make you want to bard
owt hoot and kiss your mama after the trill.
Speaker 3 (01:09):
I really doubt you're gonna want.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
To miss this one. And Hey, I want to let
you know that my friend Brent Reeves has a new
podcast coming out on this feed starting on April twenty first,
called This Country life. It's incredibly fun and we're thrilled
to bring it to you on this bear Grease feed.
(01:40):
My name is Klay Nukem, and this is the bear
Grease podcast where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant, search
for insight and unlikely places, and where we'll tell the
story of Americans who live their lives close to the land.
Presented by FHF Gear, American made purpose built hunting and
(02:02):
fishing gear as designed to be as rugged as the place.
As we explore, Grandpa stopped and pointed by the side
of the trail. There she is, Turkey run see. I
(02:23):
dropped to my hands and knees and saw the tracks
little stick like impressions coming out of a center hub. Now,
Grandpa said, we'll fix the trap, and he moved off
the trail until he found a stump hole. We cleaned
it out, first the leaves, and then Grandpa pulled out
his long knife and cut into the spongy ground and
we scooped up the dirt, scattering it among the leaves.
(02:46):
When the hole was deep so that I couldn't see
over the rim, Grandpa pulled me out and we dragged
branches to cover it and over these spread armfuls of leaves.
Then with his long knife, Grandpa dug a trail sloping
down downward into the hole and back toward the Turkey run.
He took the grains of red Indian corn from his
pocket and scattered them down the trail and threw a
(03:09):
handful into the hole. Now we will go, he said,
and we set off again up the high trail. I
spewed from the earth like frosting, crackling under our feet.
The mountain opposite us moved closer as the hollow far
below became a narrow slit, showing the spring branch like
the edge of a steel knife sunk in the bottom
(03:31):
of its cleavage. We set down in the leaves off
the trail just as the first sun touched the top
of the mountain across the hollow. From his pocket, Grandpa
pulled out a sour biscuit and deer meat for me,
and we watched the mountain while we ate. The sun
hit the top like an explosion, sending showers of glitter
and sparkle.
Speaker 3 (03:50):
Into the air.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
The sparkling of the icy trees hurt my eyes to
look at it, and it moved down the mountain like
a wave. As the sun backed the night shadow down
and down, a crow sent three hard calls through the air,
warning we were there. And now the mountain popped and
gave breathing sighs that sent little puffs of steam into
(04:13):
the air. She pinged and murmured as the sun released
the trees from their death armor of ice. Grandpaul watched
same as me, and listened as the sounds grew with
the morning wind that set up a low whistle in
the trees. She's coming alive, he said, soft and low,
without taking his eyes from the mountain. Yes, sir, I said,
(04:36):
She's coming alive. And I knew right there that me
and Grandpa had an understanding that most folks didn't. Your
ears and the engine of your imagination have just partook
of the writings of Forest Carter. In the opening chapter
of his book called The Education of Little Tree, published
(04:58):
in nineteen seventy six, Carter identified himself to the world
as a Cherokee Indian raised in a cabin with his
grandparents in East Tennessee. This is the story he told
to Barbara Walters in nineteen seventy five on The Today Show.
It would be my guess that you've probably never heard
of this book, even though it became a New York
(05:19):
Times bestseller in nineteen ninety one, selling over one million copies,
and in the heyday of Oprah Winfrey's Book Club in
the late nineteen nineties, it made her list, staying there
until two thousand and seven, when she removed it.
Speaker 3 (05:35):
And it isn't surprising because.
Speaker 2 (05:37):
It's incredibly good, with descriptive prose, intriguing plot themes, and
brilliant displays of the beautiful and functional connection the protagonists
have to the natural world. That's why I was originally
interested in it. It's got some turkey trapping, fox hunting
with hounds, corn and watermelon planting, mules, moonshining, and some
(05:59):
insight on management. It even takes some big swings at
the establishment. It has a where the red fern grows
feel with a young orphaned boy learning moral and practical
lessons from his Cherokee grandfather in the Great Depression era
of the nineteen thirties. A big delivery of the book, however,
(06:19):
is a deep empathy for Native Americans and a display
of their wisdom and how they got a raw deal.
Remember that if something hadn't happened to this book. It
would have been an American classic like the Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn or Charlotte's Webb. But something did happen, and
I've got to fess up. You've already been misled. Forest
(06:44):
Carter wasn't a Cherokee Indian at all, and his name
wasn't even Forest Carter.
Speaker 3 (06:50):
Here's my friend, Steve Ranella. He knows this book.
Speaker 2 (06:56):
Steve, When is the first time that you read The
Education of Littletree?
Speaker 4 (07:00):
When you and I first started talking about this book
a while back, it forced me to try to recollect
how I became familiar with it. I know now, I
absolutely I became familiar with it when I was in college.
I was in a class called the Literature of Political
Rhetoric by taught by a guy named doctor Gillis, and
(07:23):
he gave us that book to read. In addition to
things like some of the works of Martin Luther King Junior,
writings of the Unibomber, writings of Camille Paglia, just wild
stuff all over the place, we read works from people
who had like an axe to grind, okay, and you
threw that in the.
Speaker 3 (07:43):
Mix, people with an acts to grind.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
I really wish We could have done this different, and
you could have read this book before you know what
you're about to know. But I wasn't afforded this privilege either.
I read the book after I learned that Forrest Carter
wasn't Forrest Carter at all, but rather his name was
Asa Earl Carter. I'd be really impressed if you knew
(08:08):
that name from American Southern history, and you will. Doctor
Dan T. Carter, who is no relation to Asa Carter,
is a University of South Carolina professor emeritus and renowned
Southern historian and acclaimed author. He wrote a biography of
the Alabama governor George Wallace, who became famous for opposing desegregation.
(08:33):
Most recently, doctor Carter wrote a book called Unmasking the Clansman,
just published in April of twenty twenty three. More on
that in a minute, though, I wanted to ask doctor
Carter about the Education of Little Tree's unusual rise to
national fame after being published in nineteen seventy six but
not becoming a New York Times bestseller until nineteen ninety one.
(08:57):
This is an extremely rare thing. Here's doctor Carter.
Speaker 1 (09:04):
That book was reissued in nineteen eighty eight, and then
it just by word of mouth. It had no advertising.
It was published by a University of New Mexico press.
It just kept picking up, picking up more and more
people reading it, and by the summer of nineteen ninety
(09:24):
one it had climbed on to the New York Times
bestseller list. Then I did become interested in it. And
as as it continued, I realized I'd never read the book,
and I knew about it, and I sat down and
read it, and I saw on one level why people
(09:46):
loved it so much. I think we love books about
coming of age. And as one agent said who represented Carter,
at one time, Indians were hot. By the nineteen eighties
and nineteen nineties, people were interested in Native Americans, and
particularly at a time when you're trying to develop broader
(10:09):
ranges of books for adolescents and young people, and the
education story seemed to fit right within this. You've got
a story about a young Native American growing up in
the mountains of East Tennessee, and it's an appealing story,
and it seems to have a kind of moral core
to it, because obviously he's learning moral lessons from his
(10:32):
Cherokee grandfather. And it's the kind of moral lessons that
you like to believe you'd teach your children or grandchildren.
But it's also embedded in what Americans were coming to,
if not revere, at least respect a lot more. And
that was the Native American frame of cosmic reference and morality.
(10:55):
And so it was just a winner all the way around.
And I realized as I read it carefully, I could
see why it was so popular, But I could also
see the traces of the real.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
Author, traces of the real author. In storytelling, the listener
you have to be handled with great care, like a
little baby ducklin trying to jump out of your hands
while you're carrying it to the pond. The listener will
try to jump out of your hands if you don't
(11:28):
tell him the hook at just the right moment. They've
got to be intrigued enough by the unknown to keep
listening but not get bored. So get ready for the hook,
the down load, the dirty scoop, And here it is.
The author said his name was Forrest Carter, that he
was a Cherokee Indian, and that his story was semi
(11:49):
autobiographical of his upbringing Tennessee. But his real name was
Asa Carter. We know that he wasn't a Cherokee, we
know that he wasn't raised by his Cherokee grandfather. We
know that, But he was actually from Anniston, Alabama, and
he was a leader in his own strict sect of
the klu Klux Klan. He was a vehement segregationist and
(12:11):
an ardent prophet of the white supremacy movement, and his
message was carried by his successful print publication he founded
and his radio broadcast. Doctor Carter's book, Unmasking the Klansman
is the one and only biography on Asa Carter. Asa
Carter was the Klansman, and Doctor Carter, of no relation
(12:34):
to A. SA Carter, is undoubtedly the nation's expert on A.
Speaker 3 (12:39):
SA Carter. The book is fascinating.
Speaker 2 (12:42):
I wish I could have thrown all this information on
you at the end after we've learned about the education
of Littletree, because it's an amazing book, and it won't
make a lick of sense when you understand who this
man was. And as we understand what the book's about,
we're trying to understand how this dude wrote this book.
(13:02):
It just doesn't add up. And I haven't even told
you the wildest part. It involves a man by the
name of George Wallace, who, on January fourteenth, nineteen sixty three,
gave his inaugural speech on the steps of the state
capital of Alabama after being elected governor. Wallace would become
(13:23):
the face of opposition to the civil rights movement when
he delivered his infamous Segregation Forever speech in the name.
Speaker 3 (13:32):
Of the greatest people that have ever tried this earth, I.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
Draw the line in the dust and passed the gauntlet
before the feet of Tierney, and I say segregation now,
segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever. Wallace's words segregation now, segregation tomorrow,
and segregation forever, would be an unforgetable moment in American history,
(14:01):
branding him is the face of racism. However, these weren't
his words. He had secretly hired Asa Carter to write
this speech. Those are Ace's words. How could this man
have written a book so brilliantly empathetic and authentic that
he fooled the world? And I can tell you We're
(14:24):
gonna have to guess. Because Asa Carter died unexpectedly and
tragically in nineteen seventy nine at the age of fifty
four years old. There is just drama stacked on top
of drama with this story and with this guy. And
I want to say up front that I am uninterested
in villainizing Asa Carter. He didn't need any help with that.
(14:48):
And I'd like to say that forty three years after
this man's death, we should not be affected or damaged
by the things he said or believed. However, we can
learn something about the extremes of human nature from his life.
Were in pursuit of uncovering the true identity of Asa
Carter and decide if he was a.
Speaker 3 (15:09):
Changed man when he died or a con man.
Speaker 2 (15:13):
Here's more from doctor Carter on how he learned about
the double life of Asa Carter. Your original interest in
Asa Carter was you were doing a biography on George Wallace, right,
and then you went to meet Seymour Trammel, who was
George Wallace's right hand man.
Speaker 3 (15:33):
Right hand man.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
Yeah, tell me about meeting him, but then him telling
you about about the book, and.
Speaker 1 (15:41):
Well, of all the people, and I interviewed about forty
people for the bick But this I started this in
the late eighties, so there were still a lot of
these people around, manyrem long now.
Speaker 5 (15:52):
Of all the people I.
Speaker 1 (15:54):
Interviewed, by far the most interesting and insightful was Seymour Trammel.
He was a country boy from South Alabama who became
Wallace as a finance commissioner in his right hand man.
As smart as he was, really smart, got in trouble,
ended up in prison, and by the time I knew him,
(16:14):
he was a different person. He just prison had changed him.
He had had trouble drinking, he'd stopped all that, and
he was introspective in a way that he never was
as a young man, you know, looking back on his life.
He could see all the mistakes he had made and
all the things he said, I've done wrong, you know.
(16:34):
But he was the one that gave me insight when
I started talking to him.
Speaker 5 (16:40):
One day.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
We had several long conversations and I was talking to
him and I said something about this guy. He's a carter,
I said, I keep running into him. I said, was
he really George Wallace's speech writer for that famous segregation
Today's aiation? And he began laughing. He said, of course
(17:01):
he was. He said anything that was he said George
was good. But he said the best stuff was always
from Asa, you know. He said, you know he was
a real writer. And I knew that Asa had Carter,
who was a white supremacist and a radio announcer, had
written a bunch of radio programs in the fifties, published
(17:22):
a very slick magazine called The Southernert Southern, And he said,
you know, he wrote novels. He one of them was
made into a movie. I just thought, I think, Seymour,
he's not that old, but clearly his mind is slipping
away here. And because I didn't know about the Double Life,
you know, all I knew was Asa Carter had written
(17:45):
this and he was a writer. So that was in
nineteen ninety, I think it was. And it wasn't more
than about six months later that my son and I
were watching a film called The Outlaw Josie Wales by
Clint Eastwood, sort of his breakthrough film. And I don't
know why. I came to the end of it it
(18:07):
said based on the book by Forrest Carter, and I
thought Forrest Carter. Didn't think about it. And the next
morning I woke up and I said, Forrest Carter, Asa
Carter worshiped Nathan Bedford, Forrest General Nathan, the Confederate General Nathan,
So I started. It didn't turn out to be hard
at all. It was like something that was in plain sight. There.
(18:28):
All you had to do was go back to the
original publication of the book, which was called Gone to
Texas but became The Outlaw jose Wells, and it had
the copyright. I went to the copyright thing in Washington
and there was his address, Asa Carter's address in Alabama,
the exact same address. He'll be ten Bears.
Speaker 5 (18:51):
I am ten Bears.
Speaker 1 (18:57):
I'm Josie Wales.
Speaker 5 (19:01):
I have heard you're the great writer.
Speaker 1 (19:06):
You would not make peace with the Bluecoats.
Speaker 5 (19:09):
You may go in peace. I reckon that.
Speaker 3 (19:19):
Got nowhere to go.
Speaker 4 (19:20):
Then you will die.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
I came here to die with you.
Speaker 5 (19:28):
I live, will you.
Speaker 1 (19:31):
It's so hard for men like you and me.
Speaker 2 (19:33):
It's living. It's hard, and all you've ever cared about
it's been butchered and raped. Asa Carter didn't just write
The Education of Little Tree. He wrote a book originally
called Gone to Texas, and Clint Eastwood turned it into
his breakout movie, The Outlaw Josee Wales. In this scene,
the Comanche ten Bears respects Josie Wales because he didn't
(19:56):
give in to the Union Army in the Civil War.
This is a good movie and it's hard not to
love the protagonist, Josie Wells, the Confederate soldier played by
Clint Eastwood. Asa was a prolific novelist. Here's more from
doctor Carter.
Speaker 1 (20:15):
And then I began looking in this forest. Carter, operating
out of Applene, Texas, had written four books, The Outlaw
of Josie Wells, a Vengeance, Trail of Josie Wells, and
a book called A Watch Far Mail on the Mountain,
which is a fictional biography of Geronimo.
Speaker 5 (20:35):
It's a really good book.
Speaker 1 (20:37):
I mean, I think it's the best book he ever wrote,
and it's pretty accurate, but it's also is just powerfully written.
In fact, one of the major writers and reviewed it
in New York Times said this is the best book
ever written by a Native American.
Speaker 2 (20:52):
And then they believed Forrest Carter was.
Speaker 1 (20:57):
From from East Tennessee who had spent years as a
cowboy out in the way, moved out west and was
a cowboy out there, a Cherokee cowboy.
Speaker 2 (21:08):
So if Seymour trammell knew this, yes, who would have
known this?
Speaker 3 (21:12):
Lots of people, So all the people in Alabama.
Speaker 1 (21:15):
Not all but his close friends knew.
Speaker 2 (21:17):
Who knew that Asa Carter was Forest Carter? Yeah, yeah,
And I guess there wasn't they were They just kind
of why wouldn't they have brought that up?
Speaker 3 (21:27):
Or was it just they thought it was his pen name.
Speaker 2 (21:30):
They just didn't see any relevance to it.
Speaker 1 (21:32):
A whole range of things. Sometimes some of them said, well,
you know, he'd never have gotten anything published as far
as Asa Carter because of all the trouble he got
into in the fifties as a white supremacist. A lot
of it though Clay was I'm going to show those
Yankee liberals. A lot of his close friends, I mean,
(21:52):
for example, as Forrest Carter, when the Outlaw Josie Wells
came out, he was introduced and interviewed on The Today
Show with Barbara Walters, which is one of the most
watched television shows in America at the time, and he
told several people back in Alabama that he was going
(22:13):
to be on the Today Show, and his friends thought
it was hilarious that he was tricking this Yankee newspaper
order and it was kind of a big joke.
Speaker 5 (22:25):
I mean, one of his closest friends.
Speaker 1 (22:27):
Ray Andrews said, I literally lay down the floor laughing,
and another one of his friends kept saying, oh my god,
I hope she doesn't ask him about the Cuklut Slam,
which he had a cuklut Slam group. So that was
part of it. But here's the other thing that's so
fascinating to me, Clay is when that show ran, the
(22:48):
switchboard at the Today Show lit up with people from
Alabama who were not his friends, say, you people are stupid.
This isn't Forrest Carter, it's Asa Carter. And they totally
ignored it. His editor said, this nonsense. You know I
know him, I've known him for years. Of course he's
(23:09):
an Indian. Absolutely, he's an Indian. His movie agent, she
wrote a wire. She said, I couldn't believe that I'd
had him in my house. I knew he was an Indian.
He looked like an Indian, he talked like an Indian,
he acted like an Indian. And it was just a
kind of to me. It's an example of how you
(23:31):
get your mindset in a certain way and you just
don't change it. The other thing that was critical, I
think you think about this now. This is the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 3 (23:40):
There's no internet, no internet.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
And there's no way for social media to catch up
amplify any of this. This could never have happened in
after two thousand and five or twenty ten, you know.
But at that time it simply disappeared. The story simply disappeared.
And the claims Wayne Greenhaw, his friend of mine, I
discovered and I didn't even know this at the time.
(24:04):
He wrote a story in nineteen seventy five saying that
there are a lot of similarities he said, between Asa
Carter and Forrest Carter. This is when he was big
time with the movie with Clint Eastwood and everything, and
he pitched it to the New York Times, and they
were so scared of being sued that they changed that
(24:24):
story and it appeared in the New York Times. But
it was so ambivalent that you couldn't figure out whether.
Speaker 3 (24:30):
He really was or wasn't really.
Speaker 2 (24:32):
So in nineteen seventy five, yeah, in New York Times said, yeah,
that Eric Carter.
Speaker 1 (24:39):
There are a lot of similarities between the.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
Two, talk about pulling the wool over the eyes of America.
And before he died he would outright deny that he
was as of Carter. In part two of the series,
We're going to learn a lot more about Ace's life
and why he did what he did. Before we go
any further, we've got to understand this book. The first
(25:04):
thing we have to do is understand The Education of
Little Tree, because it will show us a window into
the mind of Ace of Carter. Here's Steve Ranella and I.
The Education of Little Tree was written in nineteen seventy
six by a man who went by the name of.
Speaker 4 (25:20):
Forrest Carter, and it was initially understood to be a
was taken to be autobiographic.
Speaker 2 (25:28):
Autobiographical of a young Cherokee Indian boy and his parents
die and he goes to live with his grandparents in
the mountains.
Speaker 4 (25:38):
Very late on backstory, I mean it opens with a
collection of people trying to figure out what to do
with an orphaned child. Yeah, he latches onto his grandpa's
leg and stays there without saying anything, without crying, holding
his legs so long that eventually it's just determined that
the grandpa will bring him home.
Speaker 3 (25:56):
He's five.
Speaker 5 (25:56):
No one's got a better idea.
Speaker 3 (25:58):
The boys five years old.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
The story is this boy being leaving his mother and
father who have died.
Speaker 4 (26:06):
I think it was just like out of let's agree
to use the terminology used by the author.
Speaker 5 (26:11):
Okay, the boy is.
Speaker 4 (26:13):
It's clear up front the boy is regarded as a
bastard child. Okay, he's but he's not. His parents were
married in the Cherokee way, but there's a treatment of
him as such. And he goes to live with his
full Cherokee grandmother and his half Cherokee, half Waite grandfather,
(26:35):
who is very much presented to be very much.
Speaker 5 (26:37):
Of the Cherokee.
Speaker 2 (26:38):
And so the book is basically just a few years
of his of the boy's life. It's just it's a
small sliver of time when his grandfather teaches him essentially
how to how to be a man, and how to
be a Cherokee, and how to survive in the modern
modern world and time. The opening chapter of the book,
(27:00):
they go and trap turkeys, They fox hunt with hounds.
The grandfather in later chapters teaches the boy how to
make moonshine.
Speaker 5 (27:10):
That's his trade. He's in the whiskey.
Speaker 2 (27:11):
Trade, right, And so the book is about the education
of Little Tree because the boy quickly when he comes
home with his grandfather, is named Little Tree.
Speaker 4 (27:21):
He's learning very practical skills, when to plant, how to
fertilize soil, how to make whiskey, how to catch calffish,
all these very practical skills. But what he's really getting
the education is.
Speaker 5 (27:32):
How to be.
Speaker 4 (27:34):
What is your obligation to your family, what is your
obligation to the natural world around you. He gets a
moral a very pure moral education by doing very practical things.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
The book like from a literary perspective to me, the
book just reeks of you feel like you're in western
North Carolina. You feel like you're in the mountains.
Speaker 4 (27:57):
Oh, I feel it feels completely authentic. Yeah, well, let
me say this. You know when you're watching some kind
of poorly done show or movie and there's a scene
that involves a contractor, okay, and the contractor is doing something,
someone's doing a construction thing or preparing something, and you're
(28:17):
watching it and you know that that actor has never
repaired anything. Yeah, and you know that no one on
that set has ever watched someone repair something, And it's
all just a stab in the dark about how someone
repairing something might approach that, and there's zero authenticity. I'm
(28:37):
sensitive to that. I don't like to see that that'll
make me turn something off when I see that. In
reading this, and I have a lot of exposure, not
as much in the South, I have a lot of
exposure to rural culture all across America. In reading this,
I would say that person knows what they're talking about.
(29:00):
That person when it comes to the physical stuff, right,
that person has fished, They've been there. That person has
been to a still. That person has worked in corn patches.
That person has raised melons, right, that person has dealt
with dogs.
Speaker 2 (29:16):
Let me read you another section Steve about when he
was out at night and as a coon hunter myself.
When I read this, I was like, this guy has
been in the mountains at night, because he described it
better than I could. They were going fox hunting, and
he said dark fell in close, and the mountains moved
in on either side as we walked. Before long we
(29:38):
came to win and the trail Grandpa had taken the left,
and there was no more room in the trail except
for right on the edge of the spring branch. Grandpa
called this the narrows seemed like you could stretch out
your arms on either side and touch the mountains straight up.
They went dark and feathered with tree tops, which left
a thin slice of stars above us. I love that
(30:00):
when I read that, like a thin slice of stars
above us. Now this author had been there. He went
on to say, way off, a mourning dove called long
and throaty, and the mountains picked it up and echoed
the sound over and over, carrying it further and further away,
until you wondered how many mountains and hollows that call
would travel, And it died away so far it was
(30:21):
more like a memory than a sound. He said that
the call of a mourning dove was more like a
memory than a sound. I mean that's some good writing.
Speaker 3 (30:34):
That's something.
Speaker 4 (30:34):
It's poetic without being pretentious. It's there's just great. All
the metaphor is great. They hide their still so well.
He says that a bird couldn't find it. I mean,
it's just it's it just is good writing. Like it's
good writing.
Speaker 2 (30:52):
Steve said he recognized authenticity in this author. I want
to read an excerpt where Grandpa is telling a childhood
story about a Civil War vet named Coonjack who gets
offended in church. Coonjack stood up and said, I here
tell the sum in here been talking about me behind
(31:14):
my back, and I want you to know that I'm awares.
I know what's the matter with you. You're jealous because the
deacon board put me in charge of the key to
the song box. Well, let me tell you, and if
you don't like it, I got the difference right here
in my pocket. Grandpa said, sure enough. Coonjack lifted his
deer shirt and showed a pistol handle he was stomping.
Speaker 1 (31:38):
Mad.
Speaker 2 (31:38):
Grandpa said that church house was full of some hard men,
including his Paul, who would soon as not shoot you
if the weather changed. And nobody raised an eyebrow, he said,
his pau stood up and said, Coonjack, every man here
admires the way you've handled the key to the songbook box,
best handling ever been done. If words have been mistook
(32:02):
to cause you discomfort, I here and now state the
sorrow of every man present. Konjack sat down, total mollified
and contented, as.
Speaker 3 (32:12):
Was everybody else.
Speaker 2 (32:14):
On the way home, Grandpa asked his paw why Konjack
could get away with such talk, and Grandpa said that
he got to laughing about Konjack acting so important over
the key to the songbook box, and he said his
paw told him Son don't laugh at Coonjack. You see,
when the Cherokee was forced to give up his home
(32:35):
and go to the nations, Coonjack was young, and he
hid out in the mountains, and he fought to hold on.
When the war between the states come, he saw maybe
he could fight that same government and get back the
lands and home. He fought hard both times he lost.
When the war ended, the politicians set in trying to
(32:56):
get what was left of what he had. Koonjack fought
him and run and hid and thought some more. You see,
Coonjack came up in a time of fighting. All he's
got now is the key to the songbook box. And
if Konjack seems cantankerous, well there ain't nothing left for
Coonjack to fight. He never knowed nothing else. Grandpa said,
(33:20):
he come might near crying for old Coonjack. He said
that after that, it didn't matter what Konjack said or did.
He loved him because he understood him. He loved him
because he understood that's powerful empathy and deep insight into
(33:41):
human nature. When we heard Forrest Carter right about the
natural world, it's clear he had experienced it. But also
when I hear him talk about empathy and understanding people's issues.
It feels just as authentic. I want to read you
one more excerpt, and it's a window into the home
of Little Tree's grandma and Grandpa. Will learn that Grandpa's
(34:05):
name is Wales. Grandma's name was Bonnie B. I knew
that when I heard him late at night say I
ken ya, Bonnie B. He was saying I love you.
When they would be talking, Grandma would say, do you
kin me, Wales, and he would answer, I kenya. It
meant I understand you. To them, love and understanding was
(34:29):
the same thing. Grandma said. You couldn't love something you
didn't understand, nor could you love people nor God if
you didn't understand the people and God. Grandpa and Grandma
had an understanding, and so they had a love. Grandma
said the understanding run deeper as the years went by,
and she reckoned it would get beyond anything mortal folks
(34:52):
could think upon or explain, and so they called it ken.
Grandpa said, back before his time, ken folks meant any
folks that you understood and had an understanding with, so
it meant loved folks. But people got selfish and brought
it down to mean just blood relatives, but that actually
(35:14):
it was never meant to mean that you can't love
something you don't understand. These uneducated hill folks mapped out
and functionalized love in a way they suspected mortal people
couldn't understand or explain. They recognized that genuine love and
understanding should be spread much wider than the rudimentary understanding
(35:39):
of blood relatives. Ken folks are all the people that
you truly understand and that understand you, and thus you
love them. This is deeply philosophical, and it sprung from
the creative loins of a racial supremacist. This would be
the last thing that we think he'd under stand. Incredible
(36:01):
writers usually have a uniquely comprehensive grasp on their topic
of expertise, and in this situation, Asa Carter's expertise was
on the inner gold and purest character of these marginalized people.
This man seemed to truly understand love, which begs the
question of where did he get access to this? We're
(36:25):
roiling towards a deeper and more difficult question, though. Does
the outside life of an author matter or should the
content simply be taken for what it is? Can we
draw meaningful ideas from a flawed source.
Speaker 3 (36:42):
I want you to be thinking about that.
Speaker 2 (36:44):
And doctor Carter has some ideas, and he's going to
show us a place where ASA didn't get it quite right.
Speaker 1 (36:55):
Writers are not perfect people, and their backgrounds are off
on things that make us cringe, and yet we can
still look at their books and their works. Their writing
works is great worthwhile we don't know. Shakespeare may have
been a jerk, you know, for all we know. But
(37:16):
the other thing I think it was mixed in with
this Clay was having interviewed Native Americans who did know
something about Cherokee culture, and they found the book some
of it interesting. They didn't dislike the book at all,
but they found it false in some respects, and they
(37:38):
talked about how he got some of it right, but
he got some of it fundamentally wrong, and they talked.
I think the thing that they found most bewildering and
they disliked the most, was that they felt reading it
(37:59):
that it was more kind of New Age philosophy in
which you're embracing Native American ideas but not really authentically capturing.
I'll give you just one example. I mean, there's some examples.
One of them is a language which was made up.
It's not Cherokee. But that didn't that didn't bother them.
You know, what bothered them, both of them, was that
(38:24):
the ideas he expressed about the cosmos, about the world
religious view of Cherokees tended to be vague earth mother,
you know, this kind of thing. And what what both
of them said is that Cherokee's ideas about God, the
Great Spirit, whatever you want to call it, is very
(38:47):
deeply rooted in specifics. And one of them was very
eloquent talking about how he talks about how beautiful a
mountain is, and he said, he's a good writer, you know,
he can describe just but he said, a Cherokee would
describe precisely the mountain, the name of it, the exact river.
(39:09):
Everything has to be specific because it's very specific to
their world view. And he said this does a site
specific sites said yes, site specific religion, everything. And one
of them said, very he grew up in an area
where there were lots of whites as well as and
he said, uh, it struck me reading it that it's
(39:31):
this mixture of both Indian life and white rife. He said,
for example, virtually no Indians made corn whiskey. Uh it
was a white man's thing, and it was they didn't
drink it. They did, but but he said, Scotch Irish
were pretty tight about that, and you get into trouble
(39:54):
if you started. They were the ones that controlled control
of the whiskey making business.
Speaker 2 (39:59):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (39:59):
So it was also that they didn't think nullified the book.
Speaker 5 (40:03):
But and they wasn't quite consistent.
Speaker 1 (40:05):
But it's not really And so their whole thing was
read it as a I saw it or a kind
of novel, but don't give it out to students and
say this is Cherokee life.
Speaker 2 (40:18):
Shakespeare may have been a jerk. That's funny, doctor Dan T.
Speaker 5 (40:23):
Carter.
Speaker 2 (40:24):
And the truth is we don't really know much about
Shakespeare's private life. And if you remember, we've heard about
site specific religions and our tacumpsas series Doctor Dave Edmunds
said that that was part of why relocating Native Americans
was so devastating to their culture. We're going to now
get back into the fabric of this book with mister
(40:46):
Steve Ranella. Did y'all hear that CBS called him the
Julia Childs of the Campfire?
Speaker 3 (40:53):
That's funny. Here's Steve.
Speaker 4 (40:57):
Part of the education of Little Tree b on the
things that we spoke about being how to utilize the
landscape through hunting, fishing, agriculture, how to treat the landscape
with respect, how to treat the people around you and
the people you love with respect and empathy, and how
to not be boastful or prideful, and how to behave
(41:21):
in a discreete fashion. There is also another thing that
little Tree is educated on are the evils of pretty
much everything that is organized. He has taught to understand
that politicians are by definition corrupt, that the education system
(41:42):
is corrupt in and of itself, government is corrupt, organized
religion is corrupt. You have your word, you have the
promises of the people around you, but anything that comes
from you that has been institutionalized you should be very
suspicious of. And that is like a key part of
(42:05):
the education.
Speaker 2 (42:06):
And it comes about in such natural ways inside the books, sure,
like for instance, the grandfather is making whiskey and there's
a whiskey tax, so they have to hide their still
so they don't pay the tax. So in the book,
the grandfather loves George Washington until he finds out that
Washington is the one that instituted the whiskey tax, and
then he really tries to justify, like, how could Washington
(42:31):
have done? That?
Speaker 4 (42:32):
Must have been a mistake. Yeah, he seethes. He can't
get it out of his head. He normally refuses, he
likes to walk, refuses to be picked up by a car,
allows himself to get picked up by a car just
so he can ask the driver of the car what
he thinks about what Washington did. He can't get it
out of his head. Yeah, in his mind. If I
(42:53):
grow corn on my land and I have a contraption
I made on my land and I can take my
corn and make a beverage with it, how in the
world is this anything?
Speaker 5 (43:02):
How does this have anything to do with the government?
Speaker 4 (43:04):
Yeah, explain like what has gone bad? When I've done
this all with my hands, so on my.
Speaker 2 (43:11):
Property, beautifully laid out. Because the grandfather, you trust him
so much. He's so straightforward, he's so certain, he's so naive,
but he's so honest, like you, just the writer wants
you to think, this man sees the world in his
most simplistic terms, but the right way. It's hard not
(43:35):
to love Grandpa. He and little Tree once had to
bury a fox dog named Ringer that had died on
the hunt, and little Tree was very sad. This is
what Grandpa said. And it's important to know that this
book is written in dialect, so sometimes it sounds kind
of funny when you take it out of context. Grandpa said,
(43:56):
everything you lost which you had loved, give you that feeling.
Speaker 3 (44:00):
He said.
Speaker 2 (44:00):
The only way around it was to not love anything
which was worse, because you would feel empty all the time.
Grandpa said, supposing old Ringer had not been faithful, then
we wouldn't be proud of him. That would be a
worse feeling, which is right. Grandpa said, when I got old,
I would remember old Ringer, and I would like it.
Speaker 3 (44:19):
He said. It was a funny thing. But when you got.
Speaker 2 (44:21):
Old and remember them you loved, you only remembered the good,
never the bad, which proved the bad didn't count.
Speaker 3 (44:29):
Know how the bad didn't count. Know how.
Speaker 2 (44:35):
That's deeply philosophical too. It makes me wonder if Asa
hoped his life would be judged by the same rules
as Ringer. Here's more from Steve Ranella, and we're gonna
get into something a bit more serious.
Speaker 4 (44:51):
There's a thing we haven't looked into which is the
philosophy and viewpoints on poverty. Almost everybody in this book
is exceptionally poor, very very poor, like cash economies of
sub one thousand dollars annually. When Little Tree and his
grandpa go to sell their bootleg whiskey as a store,
(45:11):
the storekeeper will always have Little Tree do an errand
for him. The storekeeper wants to reward Little Tree with
a piece of candy, but he knows that he cannot
give Little Tree a piece of candy for free, so
he needs to put it to Little Tree that he
has expired candy. He can't sell. It feels very wasteful
throwing it out, and that Little Tree would be doing
(45:32):
him a favor to take a piece of the candy.
Under those conditions, Little Tree will eat that candy. Little
Tree meets the daughter of a sharecropper at the store.
She has no shoes. Little Tree's grandma makes her a
pair of moccasins. He gives the girl a pair of
moccasins the next time they go to the store. When
the girl's sharecropper father sees her in the moccasins and
(45:55):
sees how glad she is, he gets a stick and
whips her until she bleeds, makes her give the moccasins
back to little tree. You think the grandpa is going
to condemn the man. The grandpa says, I understand, they
can't get used to nice stuff. They'll never have nice stuff.
There's no reason for her to want things she won't
get them. So I understand why he had to do
(46:18):
what he had to do, like a great reluctance to condemn.
And then sometimes I'm like, it's like a vicious scene. Yeah,
but he's like, I understand. He was not for me
to judge.
Speaker 2 (46:29):
The grandfather was very empathetic towards people. And that's a
word that will go back to because when you see
that whoever wrote this book was trying to I mean,
it feels like they were trying to promote a message
of empathy.
Speaker 4 (46:43):
On the issue of empathy, and it is. There is
a very strong environmental message, like a rigid, very strong
environmental message. There's a lot of all empathy.
Speaker 2 (46:53):
Nowhere is there an environmental message in this The environmental
message of that trees are sentient life forms, Okay, that
you don't cut one down for no reason.
Speaker 5 (47:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (47:05):
They would mostly try to only use trees that had
been felled by lightning strucks, or that fell over. You
could communicate through trees not to take more than your
share of anything. That if you didn't love birds, birds
won't show themselves to you. If you didn't love game animals,
game animals won't come near you. They know that you
(47:26):
love them, they want to be near you. It's a
really strong environmental message, and it's got teeth right. Bad
things can befall people that disrespect nature. It's not just
appealing to emotion and beauty. It's like these are like
real things with real implications, like you can cut yourself
off from life by disrespecting nature.
Speaker 3 (47:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (47:47):
But within all that, all the messages of empathy, there's
another message there too, and it can be read in
a way that reflects on what I said to you
when I talked about institutions. It teaches empathy, but it
teaches something else too. I mean it teaches distrust.
Speaker 2 (48:04):
Distrust for the organized systems of man, primarily the government,
are strong themes of the book. However, they're presented in
such conjunction with the lovable protagonists. I feel like it
would be hard for anyone to disagree with its sentiment,
as it's presented, and the fact that a Cherokee Indian
is the one making the judgment, it feels very just
(48:26):
like he's got the right to believe that, And in general,
I'd say I feel the same way. Here's Steve bringing
closure to this book.
Speaker 4 (48:37):
There's something that happens really interesting in the book. From
a structural standpoint, the main plot point, the main conflict,
isn't even introduced until the end of the book. There's
a definition of story that goes that a story is
someone or something wants something, but there are obstacles to
(48:58):
them getting it. A story is someone or something overcoming
obstacles to get what they want. Okay, that's true of
The Tortoise and the Hair, It's true of Shakespeare's works, right,
It's like, that's what story is. The conflict in this
book only comes up in the end. The conflict, the
real conflict in the book, comes up that eventually the
institutions that little Tree has been trained to be suspicious
(49:22):
of the institutions come for him. It emerges you don't
even know who. It emerges that people have complained that
this boy is being raised, this bastard child, is being
raised by heathens and isn't going to get a formal education,
and that they don't have formal custodial rights over him.
They're just sort of they fell into being his caretakers.
(49:42):
And all you've seen is the extremes the grandmother and
grandfather have gone through to give him, like the best
of everything, the best moral education, the best work education.
He has a study from the dictionary. They have the
librarian recommend books to bring home that neither of them
can read, so that the grandma can read them the books.
(50:03):
He's getting a formal education. And then the suits show
up and say he's not being educated, and they take
him away. No sooner does he go away though. That
conflict is resolved and he's back home. It's like the
thing you expect to be coming the whole time comes
in the end and it gets resolved very quickly, but
(50:25):
then you quickly launch into this this other thing, and
then the heartbreak because then everyone he cares about dies.
His friend that we haven't talked about, Willow John, dies,
the grandpa dies, the grandma dies.
Speaker 5 (50:39):
Then you go through.
Speaker 4 (50:40):
All of the dogs dying one by one until he's alone.
Then the book, without any the book just ends. He
buries the last dog and it's done. There's not even
the sentence the mule dies, So it's Southern literature. There's
a dead mule, all the dogs die.
Speaker 5 (50:59):
It's yeah, and you have no idea like.
Speaker 2 (51:04):
Yeah, you're left. We don't know what happened.
Speaker 5 (51:06):
Only we don't even know.
Speaker 4 (51:08):
We don't know what kind of person he became, because
even when you get into the end, when he leaves home,
he just walks away.
Speaker 5 (51:16):
When he leaves, he walks out, shuts.
Speaker 4 (51:18):
The door behind him, and walks out, And we don't
see him come up against anything moral. We don't see
him come up against any conflict. We don't see him
interact with any other human. We just see him go
through the act of burying everything he loves in an
areas alone. You assume that he carries with him this
strong moral compass, but we don't see it.
Speaker 2 (51:40):
Spoiler alert, everything dies. If you choose to read this book,
which I would recommend, you have to take the big
boy approach, knowing all the while what's coming, while still
allowing it to take you on a journey. It's a
double whammy because you'll also know Asa Carter's story too.
(52:01):
In this closing section, Steve asked me a very difficult
question and then delves into a very serious topic in
today's America. It's good insight from Steve.
Speaker 4 (52:15):
When you were working on this, I've spoke to you
and you mentioned talking to an academic who said to you,
you know that book's been blacklist blacklisted. I understand that,
and I understand why I was given the book not
as a kid, but as a student, as a college student,
and I was very quickly after giving the book, I
was invited to wrestle with the identity of the author.
(52:38):
Here's a question for you. Do you read this to
your kid? I can't decide. Hmmm, man, eight ten and twelve.
My kids are eight ten and twelve. Do I read
them that book and then say, let me tell you
something about that person?
Speaker 3 (52:52):
A tough question.
Speaker 5 (52:53):
I haven't.
Speaker 2 (52:53):
But that is the biggest question here is that I
read this book and was fascinated by it, not even
looking at what we know about the author, but just
the connection to nature. The way the grandfather presented the
world to little Tree was just so interesting, and it
would be hard to find fault with much of it,
even the stuff about the government. I mean, a lot
(53:15):
of people I think would read it and be like, yeah.
Speaker 4 (53:18):
After the fact, after the revelations came out, people came
forward and like, well, you know, it is very stereotypical,
and the characters very stereotypical.
Speaker 5 (53:27):
But go find me people that were saying that in
the seventies.
Speaker 3 (53:29):
Yeah, they weren't. It's a full Oprah Winfrey.
Speaker 4 (53:32):
It's a real tough one. Once people were armed with
the truth, then they found all kinds of things. Well,
once they knew it, you know what, once they knew
what they were looking for, they found it. But they
didn't find it ahead of.
Speaker 2 (53:42):
Time, right, Steve, you tell me what you think happened here.
I could not find an academic person. It's someone that
worked for university literary professor that would talk to me
about this book. And it wasn't necessary. At first, I thought,
this book is well. The first person that did respond said, hey,
you realize this book has been blacklisted. That was essentially
(54:05):
his response, and I said, yeah, that's why I want
to talk about it. And then I began to get
the feeling that people didn't want to talk about it, yeah,
because it's just like, hey, don't even go there. But
I also think that I was sending emails out to
a bunch of people in contacting a big, wide web
of people, which we did, to which we had very
(54:27):
little response, which is unusual. I've rarely been found a
book that I couldn't find somebody willing to talk to
me about. I think that might also be a response
to the thing being blacklisted thirty years ago. Absolutely so,
just nobody's read it, nobody's read it in thirty years, and.
Speaker 4 (54:42):
They're gonna be afraid to talk about it now. I
know you don't like to get like overtly political. I'm
not going to get political, but I'm going to make
a point about something.
Speaker 3 (54:49):
Sure.
Speaker 4 (54:49):
At a time Republicans. At a time, the Republican Party
was free trade in nation building. Okay, you just go
back to the Neo kons free trade, nation building. It's
now not right. So there's protectionism, not free trade, emerging
as a pronomenant thing in the Republican Party. Protectionism and isolationism,
(55:10):
not meddling and not meddling in foreign affairs. Okay, protecting
our own trade, not meddling in foreign affairs. Had you
said ten years ago what a Republican is, you'd have
brought up nation building and free trade. So things change
Universities used to be heralded as a place where there
was a free exchange of ideas, where you could talk
(55:30):
about dangerous stuff. They're not now, by and large, universities
have become places where you need to tread very lightly.
You do not talk about dangerous stuff because you will
get reprimanded, and you'll get blacklisted, and you'll lose your job.
Universities have somehow become somewhat anti intellectual, and they have
(55:53):
become places where people are afraid of the exchange of ideas.
So that you're now not going to be able to
get someone to talk to you about this book. Is
because they probably want to.
Speaker 5 (56:02):
They're scared.
Speaker 4 (56:03):
Yeah, because someone's going to come for them for talking
about dangerous stuff.
Speaker 5 (56:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (56:06):
I guess now, if you want to talk about dangerous
stuff and free ideas, you got to listen to the
bar Grease podcast.
Speaker 3 (56:11):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (56:13):
Steve Ranella, the old guy in the country that would
talk to me about the education of Little Tree. We
ended on a light note, but the content was very serious.
Often it seems the people who demand tolerance in their
pursuit of enforcing it are incredibly intolerant. We live in
(56:37):
a messed up world, and the most powerful contribution we have,
bigger than voting, bigger than shouting down the crazies, bigger
than fighting foreign armies, bigger than our political doctrine, is
to build our individual lives and families intentionally, introspectively, empathetically
(56:57):
and with an unembittered, humble boldness towards truth. And it
helps to have a macro perspective of history that shows
us that life is short, and our lives are like
the flowers.
Speaker 3 (57:11):
Of the field.
Speaker 2 (57:11):
We pop up, then fade away. And I believe with
great certainty that will give account for our lives after
our death, and that knowledge is a powerful driver in
my life and actions here. I want to have integrity.
That's why fearlessly looking back into our history at some
(57:32):
bad stuff and sorting through it will help us navigate
the future.
Speaker 3 (57:37):
I think this is powerful stuff.
Speaker 2 (57:40):
And man as crazy as Asa Carter was, I cannot
lie my life was enriched by reading the Education of Littletree.
Speaker 3 (57:49):
I don't fully understand it.
Speaker 2 (57:50):
You have to make that decision for yourself if you'd
read this book to your kids. On the next episode,
we'll again have Steve Vanella and doctor Dan Carr, and
we'll look even deeper into the double life of Asa
Carter and try to make sense of his life to
decide if he was a changed man, a con man,
or a crazy man. It's gonna be really good. Thank
(58:16):
you so much for listening to bear Grease, and don't
forget our big news about my bro Brent Reeves and
his new podcast, This Country Life that'll be on this
Bear Grease podcast feed. I hope you have a great
week and I look forward to discussing this with the
crew next week on the Bear Grease Render.
And I sat down and read it, and I realized
I could see why it was so popular, but I
could also see the traces of the real author.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
On this episode, we're going to learn about one of
the greatest American literary cons of all time, or was
it a con at all? The good news is that
at the Navigation Helm, we'll have author and Southern historian
doctor Dan T. Carter, Professor Emeritus at the University of
South Carolina, and New York Times bestselling author and crow
(00:38):
call extraordinaire Steve Runella of Meat Eater. These guys are
going to talk to us about a book called The
Education of Littletree and the wild life of its author.
There aren't any better guests on Planet Earth to tell
us the story of a double life lies in racism
that produced a brilliant piece of literature so rooted in
(01:02):
American wilderness and values it'll make you want to bard
owt hoot and kiss your mama after the trill.
Speaker 3 (01:09):
I really doubt you're gonna want.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
To miss this one. And Hey, I want to let
you know that my friend Brent Reeves has a new
podcast coming out on this feed starting on April twenty first,
called This Country life. It's incredibly fun and we're thrilled
to bring it to you on this bear Grease feed.
(01:40):
My name is Klay Nukem, and this is the bear
Grease podcast where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant, search
for insight and unlikely places, and where we'll tell the
story of Americans who live their lives close to the land.
Presented by FHF Gear, American made purpose built hunting and
(02:02):
fishing gear as designed to be as rugged as the place.
As we explore, Grandpa stopped and pointed by the side
of the trail. There she is, Turkey run see. I
(02:23):
dropped to my hands and knees and saw the tracks
little stick like impressions coming out of a center hub. Now,
Grandpa said, we'll fix the trap, and he moved off
the trail until he found a stump hole. We cleaned
it out, first the leaves, and then Grandpa pulled out
his long knife and cut into the spongy ground and
we scooped up the dirt, scattering it among the leaves.
(02:46):
When the hole was deep so that I couldn't see
over the rim, Grandpa pulled me out and we dragged
branches to cover it and over these spread armfuls of leaves.
Then with his long knife, Grandpa dug a trail sloping
down downward into the hole and back toward the Turkey run.
He took the grains of red Indian corn from his
pocket and scattered them down the trail and threw a
(03:09):
handful into the hole. Now we will go, he said,
and we set off again up the high trail. I
spewed from the earth like frosting, crackling under our feet.
The mountain opposite us moved closer as the hollow far
below became a narrow slit, showing the spring branch like
the edge of a steel knife sunk in the bottom
(03:31):
of its cleavage. We set down in the leaves off
the trail just as the first sun touched the top
of the mountain across the hollow. From his pocket, Grandpa
pulled out a sour biscuit and deer meat for me,
and we watched the mountain while we ate. The sun
hit the top like an explosion, sending showers of glitter
and sparkle.
Speaker 3 (03:50):
Into the air.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
The sparkling of the icy trees hurt my eyes to
look at it, and it moved down the mountain like
a wave. As the sun backed the night shadow down
and down, a crow sent three hard calls through the air,
warning we were there. And now the mountain popped and
gave breathing sighs that sent little puffs of steam into
(04:13):
the air. She pinged and murmured as the sun released
the trees from their death armor of ice. Grandpaul watched
same as me, and listened as the sounds grew with
the morning wind that set up a low whistle in
the trees. She's coming alive, he said, soft and low,
without taking his eyes from the mountain. Yes, sir, I said,
(04:36):
She's coming alive. And I knew right there that me
and Grandpa had an understanding that most folks didn't. Your
ears and the engine of your imagination have just partook
of the writings of Forest Carter. In the opening chapter
of his book called The Education of Little Tree, published
(04:58):
in nineteen seventy six, Carter identified himself to the world
as a Cherokee Indian raised in a cabin with his
grandparents in East Tennessee. This is the story he told
to Barbara Walters in nineteen seventy five on The Today Show.
It would be my guess that you've probably never heard
of this book, even though it became a New York
(05:19):
Times bestseller in nineteen ninety one, selling over one million copies,
and in the heyday of Oprah Winfrey's Book Club in
the late nineteen nineties, it made her list, staying there
until two thousand and seven, when she removed it.
Speaker 3 (05:35):
And it isn't surprising because.
Speaker 2 (05:37):
It's incredibly good, with descriptive prose, intriguing plot themes, and
brilliant displays of the beautiful and functional connection the protagonists
have to the natural world. That's why I was originally
interested in it. It's got some turkey trapping, fox hunting
with hounds, corn and watermelon planting, mules, moonshining, and some
(05:59):
insight on management. It even takes some big swings at
the establishment. It has a where the red fern grows
feel with a young orphaned boy learning moral and practical
lessons from his Cherokee grandfather in the Great Depression era
of the nineteen thirties. A big delivery of the book, however,
(06:19):
is a deep empathy for Native Americans and a display
of their wisdom and how they got a raw deal.
Remember that if something hadn't happened to this book. It
would have been an American classic like the Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn or Charlotte's Webb. But something did happen, and
I've got to fess up. You've already been misled. Forest
(06:44):
Carter wasn't a Cherokee Indian at all, and his name
wasn't even Forest Carter.
Speaker 3 (06:50):
Here's my friend, Steve Ranella. He knows this book.
Speaker 2 (06:56):
Steve, When is the first time that you read The
Education of Littletree?
Speaker 4 (07:00):
When you and I first started talking about this book
a while back, it forced me to try to recollect
how I became familiar with it. I know now, I
absolutely I became familiar with it when I was in college.
I was in a class called the Literature of Political
Rhetoric by taught by a guy named doctor Gillis, and
(07:23):
he gave us that book to read. In addition to
things like some of the works of Martin Luther King Junior,
writings of the Unibomber, writings of Camille Paglia, just wild
stuff all over the place, we read works from people
who had like an axe to grind, okay, and you
threw that in the.
Speaker 3 (07:43):
Mix, people with an acts to grind.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
I really wish We could have done this different, and
you could have read this book before you know what
you're about to know. But I wasn't afforded this privilege either.
I read the book after I learned that Forrest Carter
wasn't Forrest Carter at all, but rather his name was
Asa Earl Carter. I'd be really impressed if you knew
(08:08):
that name from American Southern history, and you will. Doctor
Dan T. Carter, who is no relation to Asa Carter,
is a University of South Carolina professor emeritus and renowned
Southern historian and acclaimed author. He wrote a biography of
the Alabama governor George Wallace, who became famous for opposing desegregation.
(08:33):
Most recently, doctor Carter wrote a book called Unmasking the Clansman,
just published in April of twenty twenty three. More on
that in a minute, though, I wanted to ask doctor
Carter about the Education of Little Tree's unusual rise to
national fame after being published in nineteen seventy six but
not becoming a New York Times bestseller until nineteen ninety one.
(08:57):
This is an extremely rare thing. Here's doctor Carter.
Speaker 1 (09:04):
That book was reissued in nineteen eighty eight, and then
it just by word of mouth. It had no advertising.
It was published by a University of New Mexico press.
It just kept picking up, picking up more and more
people reading it, and by the summer of nineteen ninety
(09:24):
one it had climbed on to the New York Times
bestseller list. Then I did become interested in it. And
as as it continued, I realized I'd never read the book,
and I knew about it, and I sat down and
read it, and I saw on one level why people
(09:46):
loved it so much. I think we love books about
coming of age. And as one agent said who represented Carter,
at one time, Indians were hot. By the nineteen eighties
and nineteen nineties, people were interested in Native Americans, and
particularly at a time when you're trying to develop broader
(10:09):
ranges of books for adolescents and young people, and the
education story seemed to fit right within this. You've got
a story about a young Native American growing up in
the mountains of East Tennessee, and it's an appealing story,
and it seems to have a kind of moral core
to it, because obviously he's learning moral lessons from his
(10:32):
Cherokee grandfather. And it's the kind of moral lessons that
you like to believe you'd teach your children or grandchildren.
But it's also embedded in what Americans were coming to,
if not revere, at least respect a lot more. And
that was the Native American frame of cosmic reference and morality.
(10:55):
And so it was just a winner all the way around.
And I realized as I read it carefully, I could
see why it was so popular, But I could also
see the traces of the real.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
Author, traces of the real author. In storytelling, the listener
you have to be handled with great care, like a
little baby ducklin trying to jump out of your hands
while you're carrying it to the pond. The listener will
try to jump out of your hands if you don't
(11:28):
tell him the hook at just the right moment. They've
got to be intrigued enough by the unknown to keep
listening but not get bored. So get ready for the hook,
the down load, the dirty scoop, And here it is.
The author said his name was Forrest Carter, that he
was a Cherokee Indian, and that his story was semi
(11:49):
autobiographical of his upbringing Tennessee. But his real name was
Asa Carter. We know that he wasn't a Cherokee, we
know that he wasn't raised by his Cherokee grandfather. We
know that, But he was actually from Anniston, Alabama, and
he was a leader in his own strict sect of
the klu Klux Klan. He was a vehement segregationist and
(12:11):
an ardent prophet of the white supremacy movement, and his
message was carried by his successful print publication he founded
and his radio broadcast. Doctor Carter's book, Unmasking the Klansman
is the one and only biography on Asa Carter. Asa
Carter was the Klansman, and Doctor Carter, of no relation
(12:34):
to A. SA Carter, is undoubtedly the nation's expert on A.
Speaker 3 (12:39):
SA Carter. The book is fascinating.
Speaker 2 (12:42):
I wish I could have thrown all this information on
you at the end after we've learned about the education
of Littletree, because it's an amazing book, and it won't
make a lick of sense when you understand who this
man was. And as we understand what the book's about,
we're trying to understand how this dude wrote this book.
(13:02):
It just doesn't add up. And I haven't even told
you the wildest part. It involves a man by the
name of George Wallace, who, on January fourteenth, nineteen sixty three,
gave his inaugural speech on the steps of the state
capital of Alabama after being elected governor. Wallace would become
(13:23):
the face of opposition to the civil rights movement when
he delivered his infamous Segregation Forever speech in the name.
Speaker 3 (13:32):
Of the greatest people that have ever tried this earth, I.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
Draw the line in the dust and passed the gauntlet
before the feet of Tierney, and I say segregation now,
segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever. Wallace's words segregation now, segregation tomorrow,
and segregation forever, would be an unforgetable moment in American history,
(14:01):
branding him is the face of racism. However, these weren't
his words. He had secretly hired Asa Carter to write
this speech. Those are Ace's words. How could this man
have written a book so brilliantly empathetic and authentic that
he fooled the world? And I can tell you We're
(14:24):
gonna have to guess. Because Asa Carter died unexpectedly and
tragically in nineteen seventy nine at the age of fifty
four years old. There is just drama stacked on top
of drama with this story and with this guy. And
I want to say up front that I am uninterested
in villainizing Asa Carter. He didn't need any help with that.
(14:48):
And I'd like to say that forty three years after
this man's death, we should not be affected or damaged
by the things he said or believed. However, we can
learn something about the extremes of human nature from his life.
Were in pursuit of uncovering the true identity of Asa
Carter and decide if he was a.
Speaker 3 (15:09):
Changed man when he died or a con man.
Speaker 2 (15:13):
Here's more from doctor Carter on how he learned about
the double life of Asa Carter. Your original interest in
Asa Carter was you were doing a biography on George Wallace, right,
and then you went to meet Seymour Trammel, who was
George Wallace's right hand man.
Speaker 3 (15:33):
Right hand man.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
Yeah, tell me about meeting him, but then him telling
you about about the book, and.
Speaker 1 (15:41):
Well, of all the people, and I interviewed about forty
people for the bick But this I started this in
the late eighties, so there were still a lot of
these people around, manyrem long now.
Speaker 5 (15:52):
Of all the people I.
Speaker 1 (15:54):
Interviewed, by far the most interesting and insightful was Seymour Trammel.
He was a country boy from South Alabama who became
Wallace as a finance commissioner in his right hand man.
As smart as he was, really smart, got in trouble,
ended up in prison, and by the time I knew him,
(16:14):
he was a different person. He just prison had changed him.
He had had trouble drinking, he'd stopped all that, and
he was introspective in a way that he never was
as a young man, you know, looking back on his life.
He could see all the mistakes he had made and
all the things he said, I've done wrong, you know.
(16:34):
But he was the one that gave me insight when
I started talking to him.
Speaker 5 (16:40):
One day.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
We had several long conversations and I was talking to
him and I said something about this guy. He's a carter,
I said, I keep running into him. I said, was
he really George Wallace's speech writer for that famous segregation
Today's aiation? And he began laughing. He said, of course
(17:01):
he was. He said anything that was he said George
was good. But he said the best stuff was always
from Asa, you know. He said, you know he was
a real writer. And I knew that Asa had Carter,
who was a white supremacist and a radio announcer, had
written a bunch of radio programs in the fifties, published
(17:22):
a very slick magazine called The Southernert Southern, And he said,
you know, he wrote novels. He one of them was
made into a movie. I just thought, I think, Seymour,
he's not that old, but clearly his mind is slipping
away here. And because I didn't know about the Double Life,
you know, all I knew was Asa Carter had written
(17:45):
this and he was a writer. So that was in
nineteen ninety, I think it was. And it wasn't more
than about six months later that my son and I
were watching a film called The Outlaw Josie Wales by
Clint Eastwood, sort of his breakthrough film. And I don't
know why. I came to the end of it it
(18:07):
said based on the book by Forrest Carter, and I
thought Forrest Carter. Didn't think about it. And the next
morning I woke up and I said, Forrest Carter, Asa
Carter worshiped Nathan Bedford, Forrest General Nathan, the Confederate General Nathan,
So I started. It didn't turn out to be hard
at all. It was like something that was in plain sight. There.
(18:28):
All you had to do was go back to the
original publication of the book, which was called Gone to
Texas but became The Outlaw jose Wells, and it had
the copyright. I went to the copyright thing in Washington
and there was his address, Asa Carter's address in Alabama,
the exact same address. He'll be ten Bears.
Speaker 5 (18:51):
I am ten Bears.
Speaker 1 (18:57):
I'm Josie Wales.
Speaker 5 (19:01):
I have heard you're the great writer.
Speaker 1 (19:06):
You would not make peace with the Bluecoats.
Speaker 5 (19:09):
You may go in peace. I reckon that.
Speaker 3 (19:19):
Got nowhere to go.
Speaker 4 (19:20):
Then you will die.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
I came here to die with you.
Speaker 5 (19:28):
I live, will you.
Speaker 1 (19:31):
It's so hard for men like you and me.
Speaker 2 (19:33):
It's living. It's hard, and all you've ever cared about
it's been butchered and raped. Asa Carter didn't just write
The Education of Little Tree. He wrote a book originally
called Gone to Texas, and Clint Eastwood turned it into
his breakout movie, The Outlaw Josee Wales. In this scene,
the Comanche ten Bears respects Josie Wales because he didn't
(19:56):
give in to the Union Army in the Civil War.
This is a good movie and it's hard not to
love the protagonist, Josie Wells, the Confederate soldier played by
Clint Eastwood. Asa was a prolific novelist. Here's more from
doctor Carter.
Speaker 1 (20:15):
And then I began looking in this forest. Carter, operating
out of Applene, Texas, had written four books, The Outlaw
of Josie Wells, a Vengeance, Trail of Josie Wells, and
a book called A Watch Far Mail on the Mountain,
which is a fictional biography of Geronimo.
Speaker 5 (20:35):
It's a really good book.
Speaker 1 (20:37):
I mean, I think it's the best book he ever wrote,
and it's pretty accurate, but it's also is just powerfully written.
In fact, one of the major writers and reviewed it
in New York Times said this is the best book
ever written by a Native American.
Speaker 2 (20:52):
And then they believed Forrest Carter was.
Speaker 1 (20:57):
From from East Tennessee who had spent years as a
cowboy out in the way, moved out west and was
a cowboy out there, a Cherokee cowboy.
Speaker 2 (21:08):
So if Seymour trammell knew this, yes, who would have
known this?
Speaker 3 (21:12):
Lots of people, So all the people in Alabama.
Speaker 1 (21:15):
Not all but his close friends knew.
Speaker 2 (21:17):
Who knew that Asa Carter was Forest Carter? Yeah, yeah,
And I guess there wasn't they were They just kind
of why wouldn't they have brought that up?
Speaker 3 (21:27):
Or was it just they thought it was his pen name.
Speaker 2 (21:30):
They just didn't see any relevance to it.
Speaker 1 (21:32):
A whole range of things. Sometimes some of them said, well,
you know, he'd never have gotten anything published as far
as Asa Carter because of all the trouble he got
into in the fifties as a white supremacist. A lot
of it though Clay was I'm going to show those
Yankee liberals. A lot of his close friends, I mean,
(21:52):
for example, as Forrest Carter, when the Outlaw Josie Wells
came out, he was introduced and interviewed on The Today
Show with Barbara Walters, which is one of the most
watched television shows in America at the time, and he
told several people back in Alabama that he was going
(22:13):
to be on the Today Show, and his friends thought
it was hilarious that he was tricking this Yankee newspaper
order and it was kind of a big joke.
Speaker 5 (22:25):
I mean, one of his closest friends.
Speaker 1 (22:27):
Ray Andrews said, I literally lay down the floor laughing,
and another one of his friends kept saying, oh my god,
I hope she doesn't ask him about the Cuklut Slam,
which he had a cuklut Slam group. So that was
part of it. But here's the other thing that's so
fascinating to me, Clay is when that show ran, the
(22:48):
switchboard at the Today Show lit up with people from
Alabama who were not his friends, say, you people are stupid.
This isn't Forrest Carter, it's Asa Carter. And they totally
ignored it. His editor said, this nonsense. You know I
know him, I've known him for years. Of course he's
(23:09):
an Indian. Absolutely, he's an Indian. His movie agent, she
wrote a wire. She said, I couldn't believe that I'd
had him in my house. I knew he was an Indian.
He looked like an Indian, he talked like an Indian,
he acted like an Indian. And it was just a
kind of to me. It's an example of how you
(23:31):
get your mindset in a certain way and you just
don't change it. The other thing that was critical, I
think you think about this now. This is the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 3 (23:40):
There's no internet, no internet.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
And there's no way for social media to catch up
amplify any of this. This could never have happened in
after two thousand and five or twenty ten, you know.
But at that time it simply disappeared. The story simply disappeared.
And the claims Wayne Greenhaw, his friend of mine, I
discovered and I didn't even know this at the time.
(24:04):
He wrote a story in nineteen seventy five saying that
there are a lot of similarities he said, between Asa
Carter and Forrest Carter. This is when he was big
time with the movie with Clint Eastwood and everything, and
he pitched it to the New York Times, and they
were so scared of being sued that they changed that
(24:24):
story and it appeared in the New York Times. But
it was so ambivalent that you couldn't figure out whether.
Speaker 3 (24:30):
He really was or wasn't really.
Speaker 2 (24:32):
So in nineteen seventy five, yeah, in New York Times said, yeah,
that Eric Carter.
Speaker 1 (24:39):
There are a lot of similarities between the.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
Two, talk about pulling the wool over the eyes of America.
And before he died he would outright deny that he
was as of Carter. In part two of the series,
We're going to learn a lot more about Ace's life
and why he did what he did. Before we go
any further, we've got to understand this book. The first
(25:04):
thing we have to do is understand The Education of
Little Tree, because it will show us a window into
the mind of Ace of Carter. Here's Steve Ranella and I.
The Education of Little Tree was written in nineteen seventy
six by a man who went by the name of.
Speaker 4 (25:20):
Forrest Carter, and it was initially understood to be a
was taken to be autobiographic.
Speaker 2 (25:28):
Autobiographical of a young Cherokee Indian boy and his parents
die and he goes to live with his grandparents in
the mountains.
Speaker 4 (25:38):
Very late on backstory, I mean it opens with a
collection of people trying to figure out what to do
with an orphaned child. Yeah, he latches onto his grandpa's
leg and stays there without saying anything, without crying, holding
his legs so long that eventually it's just determined that
the grandpa will bring him home.
Speaker 3 (25:56):
He's five.
Speaker 5 (25:56):
No one's got a better idea.
Speaker 3 (25:58):
The boys five years old.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
The story is this boy being leaving his mother and
father who have died.
Speaker 4 (26:06):
I think it was just like out of let's agree
to use the terminology used by the author.
Speaker 5 (26:11):
Okay, the boy is.
Speaker 4 (26:13):
It's clear up front the boy is regarded as a
bastard child. Okay, he's but he's not. His parents were
married in the Cherokee way, but there's a treatment of
him as such. And he goes to live with his
full Cherokee grandmother and his half Cherokee, half Waite grandfather,
(26:35):
who is very much presented to be very much.
Speaker 5 (26:37):
Of the Cherokee.
Speaker 2 (26:38):
And so the book is basically just a few years
of his of the boy's life. It's just it's a
small sliver of time when his grandfather teaches him essentially
how to how to be a man, and how to
be a Cherokee, and how to survive in the modern
modern world and time. The opening chapter of the book,
(27:00):
they go and trap turkeys, They fox hunt with hounds.
The grandfather in later chapters teaches the boy how to
make moonshine.
Speaker 5 (27:10):
That's his trade. He's in the whiskey.
Speaker 2 (27:11):
Trade, right, And so the book is about the education
of Little Tree because the boy quickly when he comes
home with his grandfather, is named Little Tree.
Speaker 4 (27:21):
He's learning very practical skills, when to plant, how to
fertilize soil, how to make whiskey, how to catch calffish,
all these very practical skills. But what he's really getting
the education is.
Speaker 5 (27:32):
How to be.
Speaker 4 (27:34):
What is your obligation to your family, what is your
obligation to the natural world around you. He gets a
moral a very pure moral education by doing very practical things.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
The book like from a literary perspective to me, the
book just reeks of you feel like you're in western
North Carolina. You feel like you're in the mountains.
Speaker 4 (27:57):
Oh, I feel it feels completely authentic. Yeah, well, let
me say this. You know when you're watching some kind
of poorly done show or movie and there's a scene
that involves a contractor, okay, and the contractor is doing something,
someone's doing a construction thing or preparing something, and you're
(28:17):
watching it and you know that that actor has never
repaired anything. Yeah, and you know that no one on
that set has ever watched someone repair something, And it's
all just a stab in the dark about how someone
repairing something might approach that, and there's zero authenticity. I'm
(28:37):
sensitive to that. I don't like to see that that'll
make me turn something off when I see that. In
reading this, and I have a lot of exposure, not
as much in the South, I have a lot of
exposure to rural culture all across America. In reading this,
I would say that person knows what they're talking about.
(29:00):
That person when it comes to the physical stuff, right,
that person has fished, They've been there. That person has
been to a still. That person has worked in corn patches.
That person has raised melons, right, that person has dealt
with dogs.
Speaker 2 (29:16):
Let me read you another section Steve about when he
was out at night and as a coon hunter myself.
When I read this, I was like, this guy has
been in the mountains at night, because he described it
better than I could. They were going fox hunting, and
he said dark fell in close, and the mountains moved
in on either side as we walked. Before long we
(29:38):
came to win and the trail Grandpa had taken the left,
and there was no more room in the trail except
for right on the edge of the spring branch. Grandpa
called this the narrows seemed like you could stretch out
your arms on either side and touch the mountains straight up.
They went dark and feathered with tree tops, which left
a thin slice of stars above us. I love that
(30:00):
when I read that, like a thin slice of stars
above us. Now this author had been there. He went
on to say, way off, a mourning dove called long
and throaty, and the mountains picked it up and echoed
the sound over and over, carrying it further and further away,
until you wondered how many mountains and hollows that call
would travel, And it died away so far it was
(30:21):
more like a memory than a sound. He said that
the call of a mourning dove was more like a
memory than a sound. I mean that's some good writing.
Speaker 3 (30:34):
That's something.
Speaker 4 (30:34):
It's poetic without being pretentious. It's there's just great. All
the metaphor is great. They hide their still so well.
He says that a bird couldn't find it. I mean,
it's just it's it just is good writing. Like it's
good writing.
Speaker 2 (30:52):
Steve said he recognized authenticity in this author. I want
to read an excerpt where Grandpa is telling a childhood
story about a Civil War vet named Coonjack who gets
offended in church. Coonjack stood up and said, I here
tell the sum in here been talking about me behind
(31:14):
my back, and I want you to know that I'm awares.
I know what's the matter with you. You're jealous because the
deacon board put me in charge of the key to
the song box. Well, let me tell you, and if
you don't like it, I got the difference right here
in my pocket. Grandpa said, sure enough. Coonjack lifted his
deer shirt and showed a pistol handle he was stomping.
Speaker 1 (31:38):
Mad.
Speaker 2 (31:38):
Grandpa said that church house was full of some hard men,
including his Paul, who would soon as not shoot you
if the weather changed. And nobody raised an eyebrow, he said,
his pau stood up and said, Coonjack, every man here
admires the way you've handled the key to the songbook box,
best handling ever been done. If words have been mistook
(32:02):
to cause you discomfort, I here and now state the
sorrow of every man present. Konjack sat down, total mollified
and contented, as.
Speaker 3 (32:12):
Was everybody else.
Speaker 2 (32:14):
On the way home, Grandpa asked his paw why Konjack
could get away with such talk, and Grandpa said that
he got to laughing about Konjack acting so important over
the key to the songbook box, and he said his
paw told him Son don't laugh at Coonjack. You see,
when the Cherokee was forced to give up his home
(32:35):
and go to the nations, Coonjack was young, and he
hid out in the mountains, and he fought to hold on.
When the war between the states come, he saw maybe
he could fight that same government and get back the
lands and home. He fought hard both times he lost.
When the war ended, the politicians set in trying to
(32:56):
get what was left of what he had. Koonjack fought
him and run and hid and thought some more. You see,
Coonjack came up in a time of fighting. All he's
got now is the key to the songbook box. And
if Konjack seems cantankerous, well there ain't nothing left for
Coonjack to fight. He never knowed nothing else. Grandpa said,
(33:20):
he come might near crying for old Coonjack. He said
that after that, it didn't matter what Konjack said or did.
He loved him because he understood him. He loved him
because he understood that's powerful empathy and deep insight into
(33:41):
human nature. When we heard Forrest Carter right about the
natural world, it's clear he had experienced it. But also
when I hear him talk about empathy and understanding people's issues.
It feels just as authentic. I want to read you
one more excerpt, and it's a window into the home
of Little Tree's grandma and Grandpa. Will learn that Grandpa's
(34:05):
name is Wales. Grandma's name was Bonnie B. I knew
that when I heard him late at night say I
ken ya, Bonnie B. He was saying I love you.
When they would be talking, Grandma would say, do you
kin me, Wales, and he would answer, I kenya. It
meant I understand you. To them, love and understanding was
(34:29):
the same thing. Grandma said. You couldn't love something you
didn't understand, nor could you love people nor God if
you didn't understand the people and God. Grandpa and Grandma
had an understanding, and so they had a love. Grandma
said the understanding run deeper as the years went by,
and she reckoned it would get beyond anything mortal folks
(34:52):
could think upon or explain, and so they called it ken.
Grandpa said, back before his time, ken folks meant any
folks that you understood and had an understanding with, so
it meant loved folks. But people got selfish and brought
it down to mean just blood relatives, but that actually
(35:14):
it was never meant to mean that you can't love
something you don't understand. These uneducated hill folks mapped out
and functionalized love in a way they suspected mortal people
couldn't understand or explain. They recognized that genuine love and
understanding should be spread much wider than the rudimentary understanding
(35:39):
of blood relatives. Ken folks are all the people that
you truly understand and that understand you, and thus you
love them. This is deeply philosophical, and it sprung from
the creative loins of a racial supremacist. This would be
the last thing that we think he'd under stand. Incredible
(36:01):
writers usually have a uniquely comprehensive grasp on their topic
of expertise, and in this situation, Asa Carter's expertise was
on the inner gold and purest character of these marginalized people.
This man seemed to truly understand love, which begs the
question of where did he get access to this? We're
(36:25):
roiling towards a deeper and more difficult question, though. Does
the outside life of an author matter or should the
content simply be taken for what it is? Can we
draw meaningful ideas from a flawed source.
Speaker 3 (36:42):
I want you to be thinking about that.
Speaker 2 (36:44):
And doctor Carter has some ideas, and he's going to
show us a place where ASA didn't get it quite right.
Speaker 1 (36:55):
Writers are not perfect people, and their backgrounds are off
on things that make us cringe, and yet we can
still look at their books and their works. Their writing
works is great worthwhile we don't know. Shakespeare may have
been a jerk, you know, for all we know. But
(37:16):
the other thing I think it was mixed in with
this Clay was having interviewed Native Americans who did know
something about Cherokee culture, and they found the book some
of it interesting. They didn't dislike the book at all,
but they found it false in some respects, and they
(37:38):
talked about how he got some of it right, but
he got some of it fundamentally wrong, and they talked.
I think the thing that they found most bewildering and
they disliked the most, was that they felt reading it
(37:59):
that it was more kind of New Age philosophy in
which you're embracing Native American ideas but not really authentically capturing.
I'll give you just one example. I mean, there's some examples.
One of them is a language which was made up.
It's not Cherokee. But that didn't that didn't bother them.
You know, what bothered them, both of them, was that
(38:24):
the ideas he expressed about the cosmos, about the world
religious view of Cherokees tended to be vague earth mother,
you know, this kind of thing. And what what both
of them said is that Cherokee's ideas about God, the
Great Spirit, whatever you want to call it, is very
(38:47):
deeply rooted in specifics. And one of them was very
eloquent talking about how he talks about how beautiful a
mountain is, and he said, he's a good writer, you know,
he can describe just but he said, a Cherokee would
describe precisely the mountain, the name of it, the exact river.
(39:09):
Everything has to be specific because it's very specific to
their world view. And he said this does a site
specific sites said yes, site specific religion, everything. And one
of them said, very he grew up in an area
where there were lots of whites as well as and
he said, uh, it struck me reading it that it's
(39:31):
this mixture of both Indian life and white rife. He said,
for example, virtually no Indians made corn whiskey. Uh it
was a white man's thing, and it was they didn't
drink it. They did, but but he said, Scotch Irish
were pretty tight about that, and you get into trouble
(39:54):
if you started. They were the ones that controlled control
of the whiskey making business.
Speaker 2 (39:59):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (39:59):
So it was also that they didn't think nullified the book.
Speaker 5 (40:03):
But and they wasn't quite consistent.
Speaker 1 (40:05):
But it's not really And so their whole thing was
read it as a I saw it or a kind
of novel, but don't give it out to students and
say this is Cherokee life.
Speaker 2 (40:18):
Shakespeare may have been a jerk. That's funny, doctor Dan T.
Speaker 5 (40:23):
Carter.
Speaker 2 (40:24):
And the truth is we don't really know much about
Shakespeare's private life. And if you remember, we've heard about
site specific religions and our tacumpsas series Doctor Dave Edmunds
said that that was part of why relocating Native Americans
was so devastating to their culture. We're going to now
get back into the fabric of this book with mister
(40:46):
Steve Ranella. Did y'all hear that CBS called him the
Julia Childs of the Campfire?
Speaker 3 (40:53):
That's funny. Here's Steve.
Speaker 4 (40:57):
Part of the education of Little Tree b on the
things that we spoke about being how to utilize the
landscape through hunting, fishing, agriculture, how to treat the landscape
with respect, how to treat the people around you and
the people you love with respect and empathy, and how
to not be boastful or prideful, and how to behave
(41:21):
in a discreete fashion. There is also another thing that
little Tree is educated on are the evils of pretty
much everything that is organized. He has taught to understand
that politicians are by definition corrupt, that the education system
(41:42):
is corrupt in and of itself, government is corrupt, organized
religion is corrupt. You have your word, you have the
promises of the people around you, but anything that comes
from you that has been institutionalized you should be very
suspicious of. And that is like a key part of
(42:05):
the education.
Speaker 2 (42:06):
And it comes about in such natural ways inside the books, sure,
like for instance, the grandfather is making whiskey and there's
a whiskey tax, so they have to hide their still
so they don't pay the tax. So in the book,
the grandfather loves George Washington until he finds out that
Washington is the one that instituted the whiskey tax, and
then he really tries to justify, like, how could Washington
(42:31):
have done? That?
Speaker 4 (42:32):
Must have been a mistake. Yeah, he seethes. He can't
get it out of his head. He normally refuses, he
likes to walk, refuses to be picked up by a car,
allows himself to get picked up by a car just
so he can ask the driver of the car what
he thinks about what Washington did. He can't get it
out of his head. Yeah, in his mind. If I
(42:53):
grow corn on my land and I have a contraption
I made on my land and I can take my
corn and make a beverage with it, how in the
world is this anything?
Speaker 5 (43:02):
How does this have anything to do with the government?
Speaker 4 (43:04):
Yeah, explain like what has gone bad? When I've done
this all with my hands, so on my.
Speaker 2 (43:11):
Property, beautifully laid out. Because the grandfather, you trust him
so much. He's so straightforward, he's so certain, he's so naive,
but he's so honest, like you, just the writer wants
you to think, this man sees the world in his
most simplistic terms, but the right way. It's hard not
(43:35):
to love Grandpa. He and little Tree once had to
bury a fox dog named Ringer that had died on
the hunt, and little Tree was very sad. This is
what Grandpa said. And it's important to know that this
book is written in dialect, so sometimes it sounds kind
of funny when you take it out of context. Grandpa said,
(43:56):
everything you lost which you had loved, give you that feeling.
Speaker 3 (44:00):
He said.
Speaker 2 (44:00):
The only way around it was to not love anything
which was worse, because you would feel empty all the time.
Grandpa said, supposing old Ringer had not been faithful, then
we wouldn't be proud of him. That would be a
worse feeling, which is right. Grandpa said, when I got old,
I would remember old Ringer, and I would like it.
Speaker 3 (44:19):
He said. It was a funny thing. But when you got.
Speaker 2 (44:21):
Old and remember them you loved, you only remembered the good,
never the bad, which proved the bad didn't count.
Speaker 3 (44:29):
Know how the bad didn't count. Know how.
Speaker 2 (44:35):
That's deeply philosophical too. It makes me wonder if Asa
hoped his life would be judged by the same rules
as Ringer. Here's more from Steve Ranella, and we're gonna
get into something a bit more serious.
Speaker 4 (44:51):
There's a thing we haven't looked into which is the
philosophy and viewpoints on poverty. Almost everybody in this book
is exceptionally poor, very very poor, like cash economies of
sub one thousand dollars annually. When Little Tree and his
grandpa go to sell their bootleg whiskey as a store,
(45:11):
the storekeeper will always have Little Tree do an errand
for him. The storekeeper wants to reward Little Tree with
a piece of candy, but he knows that he cannot
give Little Tree a piece of candy for free, so
he needs to put it to Little Tree that he
has expired candy. He can't sell. It feels very wasteful
throwing it out, and that Little Tree would be doing
(45:32):
him a favor to take a piece of the candy.
Under those conditions, Little Tree will eat that candy. Little
Tree meets the daughter of a sharecropper at the store.
She has no shoes. Little Tree's grandma makes her a
pair of moccasins. He gives the girl a pair of
moccasins the next time they go to the store. When
the girl's sharecropper father sees her in the moccasins and
(45:55):
sees how glad she is, he gets a stick and
whips her until she bleeds, makes her give the moccasins
back to little tree. You think the grandpa is going
to condemn the man. The grandpa says, I understand, they
can't get used to nice stuff. They'll never have nice stuff.
There's no reason for her to want things she won't
get them. So I understand why he had to do
(46:18):
what he had to do, like a great reluctance to condemn.
And then sometimes I'm like, it's like a vicious scene. Yeah,
but he's like, I understand. He was not for me
to judge.
Speaker 2 (46:29):
The grandfather was very empathetic towards people. And that's a
word that will go back to because when you see
that whoever wrote this book was trying to I mean,
it feels like they were trying to promote a message
of empathy.
Speaker 4 (46:43):
On the issue of empathy, and it is. There is
a very strong environmental message, like a rigid, very strong
environmental message. There's a lot of all empathy.
Speaker 2 (46:53):
Nowhere is there an environmental message in this The environmental
message of that trees are sentient life forms, Okay, that
you don't cut one down for no reason.
Speaker 5 (47:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (47:05):
They would mostly try to only use trees that had
been felled by lightning strucks, or that fell over. You
could communicate through trees not to take more than your
share of anything. That if you didn't love birds, birds
won't show themselves to you. If you didn't love game animals,
game animals won't come near you. They know that you
(47:26):
love them, they want to be near you. It's a
really strong environmental message, and it's got teeth right. Bad
things can befall people that disrespect nature. It's not just
appealing to emotion and beauty. It's like these are like
real things with real implications, like you can cut yourself
off from life by disrespecting nature.
Speaker 3 (47:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (47:47):
But within all that, all the messages of empathy, there's
another message there too, and it can be read in
a way that reflects on what I said to you
when I talked about institutions. It teaches empathy, but it
teaches something else too. I mean it teaches distrust.
Speaker 2 (48:04):
Distrust for the organized systems of man, primarily the government,
are strong themes of the book. However, they're presented in
such conjunction with the lovable protagonists. I feel like it
would be hard for anyone to disagree with its sentiment,
as it's presented, and the fact that a Cherokee Indian
is the one making the judgment, it feels very just
(48:26):
like he's got the right to believe that, And in general,
I'd say I feel the same way. Here's Steve bringing
closure to this book.
Speaker 4 (48:37):
There's something that happens really interesting in the book. From
a structural standpoint, the main plot point, the main conflict,
isn't even introduced until the end of the book. There's
a definition of story that goes that a story is
someone or something wants something, but there are obstacles to
(48:58):
them getting it. A story is someone or something overcoming
obstacles to get what they want. Okay, that's true of
The Tortoise and the Hair, It's true of Shakespeare's works, right,
It's like, that's what story is. The conflict in this
book only comes up in the end. The conflict, the
real conflict in the book, comes up that eventually the
institutions that little Tree has been trained to be suspicious
(49:22):
of the institutions come for him. It emerges you don't
even know who. It emerges that people have complained that
this boy is being raised, this bastard child, is being
raised by heathens and isn't going to get a formal education,
and that they don't have formal custodial rights over him.
They're just sort of they fell into being his caretakers.
(49:42):
And all you've seen is the extremes the grandmother and
grandfather have gone through to give him, like the best
of everything, the best moral education, the best work education.
He has a study from the dictionary. They have the
librarian recommend books to bring home that neither of them
can read, so that the grandma can read them the books.
(50:03):
He's getting a formal education. And then the suits show
up and say he's not being educated, and they take
him away. No sooner does he go away though. That
conflict is resolved and he's back home. It's like the
thing you expect to be coming the whole time comes
in the end and it gets resolved very quickly, but
(50:25):
then you quickly launch into this this other thing, and
then the heartbreak because then everyone he cares about dies.
His friend that we haven't talked about, Willow John, dies,
the grandpa dies, the grandma dies.
Speaker 5 (50:39):
Then you go through.
Speaker 4 (50:40):
All of the dogs dying one by one until he's alone.
Then the book, without any the book just ends. He
buries the last dog and it's done. There's not even
the sentence the mule dies, So it's Southern literature. There's
a dead mule, all the dogs die.
Speaker 5 (50:59):
It's yeah, and you have no idea like.
Speaker 2 (51:04):
Yeah, you're left. We don't know what happened.
Speaker 5 (51:06):
Only we don't even know.
Speaker 4 (51:08):
We don't know what kind of person he became, because
even when you get into the end, when he leaves home,
he just walks away.
Speaker 5 (51:16):
When he leaves, he walks out, shuts.
Speaker 4 (51:18):
The door behind him, and walks out, And we don't
see him come up against anything moral. We don't see
him come up against any conflict. We don't see him
interact with any other human. We just see him go
through the act of burying everything he loves in an
areas alone. You assume that he carries with him this
strong moral compass, but we don't see it.
Speaker 2 (51:40):
Spoiler alert, everything dies. If you choose to read this book,
which I would recommend, you have to take the big
boy approach, knowing all the while what's coming, while still
allowing it to take you on a journey. It's a
double whammy because you'll also know Asa Carter's story too.
(52:01):
In this closing section, Steve asked me a very difficult
question and then delves into a very serious topic in
today's America. It's good insight from Steve.
Speaker 4 (52:15):
When you were working on this, I've spoke to you
and you mentioned talking to an academic who said to you,
you know that book's been blacklist blacklisted. I understand that,
and I understand why I was given the book not
as a kid, but as a student, as a college student,
and I was very quickly after giving the book, I
was invited to wrestle with the identity of the author.
(52:38):
Here's a question for you. Do you read this to
your kid? I can't decide. Hmmm, man, eight ten and twelve.
My kids are eight ten and twelve. Do I read
them that book and then say, let me tell you
something about that person?
Speaker 3 (52:52):
A tough question.
Speaker 5 (52:53):
I haven't.
Speaker 2 (52:53):
But that is the biggest question here is that I
read this book and was fascinated by it, not even
looking at what we know about the author, but just
the connection to nature. The way the grandfather presented the
world to little Tree was just so interesting, and it
would be hard to find fault with much of it,
even the stuff about the government. I mean, a lot
(53:15):
of people I think would read it and be like, yeah.
Speaker 4 (53:18):
After the fact, after the revelations came out, people came
forward and like, well, you know, it is very stereotypical,
and the characters very stereotypical.
Speaker 5 (53:27):
But go find me people that were saying that in
the seventies.
Speaker 3 (53:29):
Yeah, they weren't. It's a full Oprah Winfrey.
Speaker 4 (53:32):
It's a real tough one. Once people were armed with
the truth, then they found all kinds of things. Well,
once they knew it, you know what, once they knew
what they were looking for, they found it. But they
didn't find it ahead of.
Speaker 2 (53:42):
Time, right, Steve, you tell me what you think happened here.
I could not find an academic person. It's someone that
worked for university literary professor that would talk to me
about this book. And it wasn't necessary. At first, I thought,
this book is well. The first person that did respond said, hey,
you realize this book has been blacklisted. That was essentially
(54:05):
his response, and I said, yeah, that's why I want
to talk about it. And then I began to get
the feeling that people didn't want to talk about it, yeah,
because it's just like, hey, don't even go there. But
I also think that I was sending emails out to
a bunch of people in contacting a big, wide web
of people, which we did, to which we had very
(54:27):
little response, which is unusual. I've rarely been found a
book that I couldn't find somebody willing to talk to
me about. I think that might also be a response
to the thing being blacklisted thirty years ago. Absolutely so,
just nobody's read it, nobody's read it in thirty years, and.
Speaker 4 (54:42):
They're gonna be afraid to talk about it now. I
know you don't like to get like overtly political. I'm
not going to get political, but I'm going to make
a point about something.
Speaker 3 (54:49):
Sure.
Speaker 4 (54:49):
At a time Republicans. At a time, the Republican Party
was free trade in nation building. Okay, you just go
back to the Neo kons free trade, nation building. It's
now not right. So there's protectionism, not free trade, emerging
as a pronomenant thing in the Republican Party. Protectionism and isolationism,
(55:10):
not meddling and not meddling in foreign affairs. Okay, protecting
our own trade, not meddling in foreign affairs. Had you
said ten years ago what a Republican is, you'd have
brought up nation building and free trade. So things change
Universities used to be heralded as a place where there
was a free exchange of ideas, where you could talk
(55:30):
about dangerous stuff. They're not now, by and large, universities
have become places where you need to tread very lightly.
You do not talk about dangerous stuff because you will
get reprimanded, and you'll get blacklisted, and you'll lose your job.
Universities have somehow become somewhat anti intellectual, and they have
(55:53):
become places where people are afraid of the exchange of ideas.
So that you're now not going to be able to
get someone to talk to you about this book. Is
because they probably want to.
Speaker 5 (56:02):
They're scared.
Speaker 4 (56:03):
Yeah, because someone's going to come for them for talking
about dangerous stuff.
Speaker 5 (56:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (56:06):
I guess now, if you want to talk about dangerous
stuff and free ideas, you got to listen to the
bar Grease podcast.
Speaker 3 (56:11):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (56:13):
Steve Ranella, the old guy in the country that would
talk to me about the education of Little Tree. We
ended on a light note, but the content was very serious.
Often it seems the people who demand tolerance in their
pursuit of enforcing it are incredibly intolerant. We live in
(56:37):
a messed up world, and the most powerful contribution we have,
bigger than voting, bigger than shouting down the crazies, bigger
than fighting foreign armies, bigger than our political doctrine, is
to build our individual lives and families intentionally, introspectively, empathetically
(56:57):
and with an unembittered, humble boldness towards truth. And it
helps to have a macro perspective of history that shows
us that life is short, and our lives are like
the flowers.
Speaker 3 (57:11):
Of the field.
Speaker 2 (57:11):
We pop up, then fade away. And I believe with
great certainty that will give account for our lives after
our death, and that knowledge is a powerful driver in
my life and actions here. I want to have integrity.
That's why fearlessly looking back into our history at some
(57:32):
bad stuff and sorting through it will help us navigate
the future.
Speaker 3 (57:37):
I think this is powerful stuff.
Speaker 2 (57:40):
And man as crazy as Asa Carter was, I cannot
lie my life was enriched by reading the Education of Littletree.
Speaker 3 (57:49):
I don't fully understand it.
Speaker 2 (57:50):
You have to make that decision for yourself if you'd
read this book to your kids. On the next episode,
we'll again have Steve Vanella and doctor Dan Carr, and
we'll look even deeper into the double life of Asa
Carter and try to make sense of his life to
decide if he was a changed man, a con man,
or a crazy man. It's gonna be really good. Thank
(58:16):
you so much for listening to bear Grease, and don't
forget our big news about my bro Brent Reeves and
his new podcast, This Country Life that'll be on this
Bear Grease podcast feed. I hope you have a great
week and I look forward to discussing this with the
crew next week on the Bear Grease Render.
Host
Clay Newcomb
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