"The Education of Little Tree"

Truly a story, at any rate

"The Education of Little Tree" is a coming-of-age story set during the Great Depression. After his parents' death, the young Forrest "Little Tree" Carter moves in with his Cherokee grandparents in the mountains of Tennessee and learns the importance of self-reliance and understanding others. But the book is not what it seems – though allegedly autobiographical, it is actually a work of fiction written by the infamous Asa Earl Carter.

Minor spoilers below.

One of the book's core messages concerns what Carter calls The Cherokee Way. Little Tree's Granpa describes it in this way:

The quail rose in a rush and sped into the trees—but one was slow. The hawk hit. Feathers flew into the air and then the birds were on the ground; the hawk's head rising and falling with the death blows. In a moment he rose with the dead quail clutched in his claws, back up the mountain and over the rim.

I didn't cry, but I know I looked sad, because Granpa said, "Don't feel sad, Little Tree. It is The Way. Tal-con caught the slow and so the slow will raise no children who are also slow. Tal-con eats a thousand ground rats who eat the eggs of the quail—both the quick and the slow eggs—and so Tal-con lives by The Way. He helps the quail.

"It is The Way," he said softly. "Take only what ye need. When ye take the deer, do not take the best. Take the smaller and the slower and then the deer will grow stronger and always give you meat. Pa-koh, the panther, knows and so must ye."

This take-what-you-need-and-leave-the-rest mindset ties together many of the book's chapters. In one scene set at the general store, Little Tree had been saving money for a present for his Granma, but a panhandler cons him into buying a sickly calf for himself instead. It dies on the way back to the farm. There are less literal examples as well: in another scene, after a man insults Granpa's Cherokee ancestry, he tells Little Tree that it's that person's problem and not theirs, so there's no reason to be bothered by it.

This relates to a second key theme: that a rich spirit cultivated through understanding and empathy is worth much more than material wealth. In another scene at the general store, a sharecropper rebukes his barefooted daughter for accepting moccasins from Little Tree and curses him. Later, Granpa movingly explains the source of the man's pride, concluding with:

Granpa said ye had to understand. But most people didn't want to—it was too much trouble—so they used words to cover their own laziness and called other folks "shiftless."

Easy to cast stones, hard to understand.

As alluded to at the beginning of this post, the big controversy around this book is that not only is it not actually a biography¹, but it was written by an avowed racist and KKK activist who ran against the segregationist George Wallace for Alabama's governorship (he thought Wallace was too soft), and then after losing moved to Texas and changed his name.

Armed with this knowledge, a number of the anecdotes can be read under a different light: maybe they're really about how government doesn't understand the governed and it's immoral to tell people their values are unacceptable. That sounds a lot like 20th century separationist philosophy. On the other hand, the book also encourages empathy toward people of a different heritage and background, living simply, and assuming the best of others. "Forrest" always denied being "Asa" – whether he had a change of heart in his later years, or was trying to publicize and justify his beliefs in a roundabout way, is an open question.

It's an interesting story, and one that I may write more about in the future².

My highly subjective rating: memorable and beautifully written, "The Education of Little Tree" promotes traditional American values, while the author's true biography is much darker. An interesting study in human psychology and further evidence that people are complicated.


1 There's actually a chapter about fake biographies in "The Liar In Your Life". (back)

2 This American Life released a podcast about Asa Carter, and an independent documentary about him was released in 2010. (back)