The Education of Little Tree by Forrest Carter (review)

Reviews 165 enthusiasm, he confessed, “The work doesn’t jell,” and put it aside for the Winter of Our Discontent. In 1965, he briefly returned to Malory, but completed only seven of the adventures. These are self-contained and among the best, so that readers will find the volume satisfying and perhaps wish for more. In addition, there are 68 pages of letters from Steinbeck to his agent Elizabeth Otis and his friend Chase Horton. Some of these are in Steinbeck: a Life in Letters, but many are printed for the first time. (There are additional letters on Malory to Vinaver, Pascal Covici and others in the Life in Letters.) But since both collections of letters are edited and excerpted, we sometimes have different parts of the same letter in the same two books. The letters deal not only with Steinbeck’s research on Malory and his problems with translation and adaptation but with reflections on art and the artist, on language and style, on medieval life and thought, and on the heroic vs. modern anti-heroes. As such, they are revealing both to students of Steinbeck and of Malory and the Middle Ages. ROBERT E. MORSBERGER California State Polytechnic University, Pomona The Education of Little Tree. By Forrest Carter. (New York: Delacorte Press/Eleanor Friede, 1976. 216 pages, $7.95.) The Education of Little Tree is the third and probably the best book written by Forrest Carter. His first book, The Rebel Outlaw, Josie Wales, was renamed Gone To Texas, then renamed again The Outlaw — Josie Wales for the Dell paperback edition. I read it as Gone to Texas and thought it remarkably unrealistic, a fit source for a Clint Eastwood Western — which it became, as The Outlaw — Josie Wales. Carter’s second book, The Vengeance of Josey Wales, sounds enough like the first to cause me to avoid it. But I like The Education of Little Tree. Little Tree is the Indian name of Forrest Carter. The book, described on the jacket as “a true story,” is an account of five years of Carter’s life, from age five to age ten (that is early), when he lived in the Tennessee mountains with his grandfather (half Cherokee) and his Cherokee grand­ mother. Carter attempts to show the thinking of the boy when the events in the book were happening. He only partially succeeds; the chief flaw of the work is that the feelings and the thinking of the mature man constantly intrude. Although the paragraphs are short and the style rela­ tively simple, the book is not juvenile literature, although, like Fred Gipson’s Hound Dog Man, which it resembles, it could be read by young people. 166 Western American Literature When the Cherokees and other Southern tribes were removed to the Indian Territory in the infamous Trail of Tears incident, some Cherokees fled to the mountains; their descendants are still there, mainly on the North Carolina side of the Great Smokies. Some, like Carter’s ancestors, settled on the Tennessee side. Little Tree began living with Granpa and Granma in 1930. He learned the Indian ways of living, including hunting and fishing. He helped to grow corn and assisted Granpa in his trade of converting the corn to liquid, which was more potable, portable, and profitable. He was taken away from his grandparents, who were deemed unfit to raise him because Granpa had once been convicted of moonshining. He was placed in an orphanage run by members of a strict religious sect, where as a “bastard” (his father and mother had been married Cherokee style) he was told he was doomed to hell. There he was beaten unmercifully for naively telling his class in school about the mating season of deer. The most vivid loving portrait in the book, other than those of Granma and Granpa, is that of the old Cherokee, Willow John, who rescued Little Tree from the orphanage so that he could live with Granma and Granpa until their death. The Education of Little Tree, though colored by Carter’s mature thinking, is filled with sentiment and nostalgia, seasoned with a fair amount of realism and plain speech. The result is pleasing; Carter writes...