Little Tree the Klansman and "benign" racism
To left: A more honest cover, brought to you by terrible photoshopping.
I remember leafing through a copy of The Education of Little Tree at a friend's home many years ago. The book had been published in Korea under the title 내 영혼이 따뜻했던 날들 (The Days when My Soul Was Warm), and was a bestseller here as it was in the U.S. I read through a bit where the protagonist's grandfather taught him that predators hunt the old, weak and sick leaving the strong ones to breed. So evidently natural selection was a part of Cherokees spirituality? How nice. I put the book back and didn't give it much thought.
I was reminded of this brief exposure when I read The Real Education of Little Tree, about the life and career of author Asa "Ace" Carter. Carter was a staunch segregationist and speechwriter for George Wallace, who would go on to become the infamous segregationist governor of Alabama. Wallace never openly hired him, however, but rather paid him through a series of intermediaries because Carter was considered too radical and sinister in his open calls for violence against racial integration. Yes, this guy was too racist for George Wallace.
After a series of failed ventures including running for public office, setting up white-only private schools, and starting a paramilitary organization whose members would wear Confederate flag armbands, Carter turned to literature. He wrote The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales about the adventures of a Confederate officer, and styled himself Forrest Carter to distance himself from his disgraced earlier career as Asa Carter. He moved to Florida, then Texas, creating a completely new part-Cherokee cowboy and drifter past for his new circle of friends including his New York agent, Eleanor Friede. Little Tree came out in 1976, purporting to be Carter's memoir of living with his Cherokee grandparents as a child, and did moderately well during his lifetime before blowing up on the bestseller list 12 years after his death in 1979.
Carter did not discard his racial views along with the name Asa. When he lived in Texas he would still go on public rants about how black people needed to go back to Africa, and once caused an embarrassing scene at a speaking event when he drunkenly called a fellow speaker and a member of the audience a "good ol' Jew girl" and "good ol' Jew boy." This was not surprising, seeing how he was a confirmed anti-Semite by the time he was out of high school in 1943; he told his friends he had joined the Navy so that he would not have to fight the Germans, whom he considered kin to his Scotch Irish ancestors, and he was also opposed to fighting a war for Jews against a country that had not attacked the United States.
So why did a lifelong racist pretend to be part Cherokee and write about purportedly Cherokee characters? The article describes Carter's view about Indians this way:
Blacks, [Carter] said, were undeserving compared with the patient and brave Indians, who had suffered terrible wrongs inflicted by the Yankees. “I heard him say many times that blacks don’t know what it is to be mistreated,” says Buddy Barnett, Asa’s friend from childhood, who lives in Oxford, Alabama. “The Indians have suffered more.”
So he attributes character traits like "patient" and "brave" to an entire group of people, or rather extremely diverse indigenous peoples. He also defines them by their suffering, as though Indians have no existence outside of what white people did to them. As Geary Hobson, himself a Cherokee, scoffed: "The Indians [in Little Tree] are sweet, sweet little creatures who can’t do any wrong.”
Since the characters in Little Tree are not actual Cherokees but rather props to prove a point, it should not be surprising that the elements of Cherokee culture, language, and history in the book are riddled with errors and outright fabrications. As Debbie Reese of American Indians in Children's Literature points out, Carter's account of the Trail of Tears bears no resemblance to the actual Cherokee removal. Speakers of the Cherokee language laugh about the made-up Cherokee words in the book (via AICL, video below the trailer), and, as Debbie said, EVERYONE should have put down the book when it described Cherokees holding "mating dances" in the spring. I mean, how do you take the thing at all seriously at that point? Oh, but it's Injuns, you see! They're so close to nature, like animals! *barfs forever*
Most telling about Carter's view of Indians, or rather "Indians" since there is no connection to actual Indians, is the context in which he raised up these shining paragons of virtue. He was drawing a contrast between the nobility of his "Indians" and the blacks of the Civil Rights era, the ones who had the gall to ask for such unthinkable things as the vote and equal citizenship. Carter's "Indians" were not even sweet little paragons for their own sakes but were rather a rhetorical truncheon to hit black people with. See? Indians suffered more than you! And they don't go crying to the federal guvmint like you do! Why can't you shut up and sit down so I can keep living in my fantasy world whyyyyy.
This objectification and racial divide-and-conquer tactic is not only creepy, it's familiar. Whenever I got into a debate about the treatment of blacks in America and my real face was visible on the forum, racists would tell me that I needed to join in hating black people because I was Asian. They'd talk about how black people hated Koreans like me, and how we were such a model minority unlike, you know, those people.
Just typing the above made me feel slimy. Yes, asshat white people, if there's one thing I can't get enough of it's being stereotyped as a good little worker drone for a white-supremacist establishment. I adore being turned into a parable for you to make your racist points. Most of all, I LOVE how you assume I'm going to bow and scrape in gratitude that "Nice white people rike me! They rearry, rearry rike me!" and go on the offensive against a group that has suffered, and continues to suffer, unspeakable violence and discrimination in America.
Honestly, I prefer racial slurs to this kind of creeping. I just laugh off insults like "gook" and "chink." But these smarmy paeans to my supposed superiority make me feel dirty, because I recognize it for what it is: A job offer as enforcer in a racial hierarchy. Worse, I know it's a position I already occupy by virtue of who I am.
As Arundhati Roy observed in her essay about BR Ambedkar and Gandhi, The Doctor and the Saint, a caste system depends on those lower on the pole having someone else to look down on. It is "an elaborate enforcement network in which everybody polices everybody else. The Unapproachable polices the Unseeable; the Malas resent the Madigas; the Madigas turn upon the Dakkalis, who sit on the Rellis; the Vanniyars quarrel with the Paraiyars, who in turn could beat up the Arundhatiyars." In the realm of ideology, Asa Carter used his imagined Cherokees as the middle managers on the racial totem pole. Since they don't have the numbers and presence to be very effective enforcers, however, in everyday life Asians occupy that position above Hispanics and blacks. It's not because the nice white people like us, it's because the racial caste system needs a middle as well as a bottom if it is to survive.
This is why the kind of racism behind The Education of Little Tree is not benign, harmless, or okay. There's no such thing as benign racism or benign objectification of a group of people. At best, it's a total erasure of living, breathing people's reality and the reduction of their existence to feel-good sentimentality. At worst and and its core, the myth of the "better people" is a prop holding up a system of unthinkable brutality.
Asa Carter's views are not irrelevant or incidental to Little Tree. Rather, his violent racism is central to the entire work. Carter might have been a con man and a bastard, but he was one smart con man and bastard: He knew what was required to hold up the system of white supremacy, and he knew its logic. He knew that mainstream white society would not seek out or listen to the actual Cherokees who would realize in an instant that the book was bunk.
Above all, like any successful author (or con man) Carter knew what his audience wanted to hear, and that a book that condescends to and erases American Indians to score cheap emotional points was exactly right for the public's palate. He got that right, so much so that people still defend and celebrate this book decades after the hoax was revealed. Is it any wonder, when the book reflects so much of what America is?
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