Can I See Your I. D.? (5 page)

A Jew, free, in Germany. At last.

“Excuse me, sir,” you begin. “Are you really Jewish?” You ask this while still dressed in your Hitler Youth uniform. The man does not reply. To be called “sir” by a Hitler Youth must seem as unreal to him as his very presence does to you. He cannot imagine what will happen next.

You wrap your arms around this stranger. You hug him. “I'm a Jew too,” you whisper. “My name is Solomon Perel.”

Well, Forrest, as authors of best-selling books for children go, you sure are extraordinary.

For one thing, before
The Education of Little Tree
came along, you were best known for writing a novel that became a violent Clint Eastwood Western.

For another, you've been dead twelve years.

Of course, there's something else too—but we'll get to that in a minute.

Today,
Little Tree
is number one on the best seller list for paperback nonfiction. Your Depression-era tale of life with your Cherokee grandparents in the Tennessee hills—“A True Story,” says the cover—has become a book that people love to tell other readers about, like they're letting them in on a secret.

Maybe they're reacting to your neat trick of telling your story from a five-year-old's perspective—matter-of-fact, sweetly naive, yet somehow wise beyond his years. It makes the heartbreaking parts all the more tender and the funny parts all the more laugh-out-loud.

And though
The Education of Little Tree
is occasionally risqué—what with all the talk of moonshine and fornication—teachers in middle schools and high schools have taken to sharing your book with their students. They say it's one that these kids really need to read.

That audience may not be one that you had in mind when you wrote the book. But honestly, who could have predicted any of this?

As an author, you seemed to come from out of nowhere around 1973, a middle-aged cowboy drifter with no yarn-spinning past other than the stretch you said you'd to have spent as Storyteller in Council to the Cherokee Nations. You were peddling a self-published novel about Josey Wales, a pro-Confederate guerrilla after the Civil War. That's not the sort of thing that big New York City publishers were knocking each other over to get their hands on, but your tale of Wales's quest for a new life and identity caught the eye of one. And your exotic background and entertainingly rough-around-the-edges personality surely helped seal the deal.

They made the rare decision to republish that shoot'em-up page-turner themselves, and
The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales
got made into that Clint Eastwood movie in '76. Along the way, you found your cowboy-hatted, newly mustachioed self on TV in front of millions of viewers one morning, talking with Barbara Walters on the
Today
show.

You kept working, turning out another Josey Wales book, and one about Geronimo, and
The Education of Little Tree
. You also generated your share of commotion, especially when you had too much to drink and let loose with eyebrow-raising comments about blacks and Jews.

Eventually, you got drunk and out of hand one time too many, and a fistfight left you dead. Just half a dozen years after becoming an author, it was all over for you. And as so often happens in publishing,
The Education of Little Tree
faded away too. The publisher figured that pretty much everyone who was ever going to read your story had already bought a copy, so they stopped printing new ones.

But then something else happened that almost never does:
Little Tree
's editor found a new publisher for it—in New Mexico, of all places. The book came back into print, and you, in a sense, came back from the dead. It was only the beginning of an incredible new story—a story about a story.

Readers who discovered
The Education of Little Tree
on its second time around couldn't stop talking about it. However many copies of
Little Tree
were sold one year, twice as many were sold the year after that. Booksellers, especially, loved to connect customers with this beautiful little book—so spiritual, and funny—about a Native American boy and his grandparents. Many readers saw an environmental message as the young Cherokee learns of “The Way” and “Mon-o-lah, the Earth mother” from his nature-loving Granma and Granpa. What a wonderful multicultural book to share with students.

Little Tree
kept striking a chord with readers who wouldn't know a Cherokee from a Cheyenne. Sales doubled again and again, which led to newspaper and magazine articles about the phenomenon. It all just added to the warm feeling folks got from the book itself. Those articles led to more sales, which led to more publicity, which led to . . .

This.

This article, right here, in today's
New York Times
. “
The Education of Little Tree
,” it says, “is a hoax.” It also says that—well, you don't need to be told what all it says, because it's your life it's talking about. Your actual life, Ace.

But for all those readers who never heard of Asa Earl Carter, the article fills them in. On his—your—decades-long career as a fiery Alabama racist. On your membership in the Ku Klux Klan. On your talent for whipping bigots into a frenzy, and for taking matters into your own vicious hands on occasion.

Of course, the article brings up the most famous words you ever wrote—as a speechwriter for Alabama governor George Wallace. Better known than any you ever put in the mouths of Josey Wales or Little Tree, they were proclaimed by the governor on the statehouse steps in 1963: “Segregation now . . . segregation tomorrow . . . segregation forever!”

Those words were a signal to the world that men like you weren't about to let the non-white, non-Christian people of the South get on an equal footing. An unrepentant decade later, you disappeared without comment on those sentiments—with neither affirmation nor apology. But anyone looking for clues to your frame of mind could be excused for seeing one in the new name you adopted: Forrest, after Confederate general and Klansman Nathan Bedford Forrest.

In the character of Josey Wales, you showed a certain flair for romanticizing the lost cause of the Confederacy while depicting the North's endless persecution of Southerners. If that was simply the point of view of a literary character, well, he didn't represent much of an artistic stretch for you.

Little Tree, though—Little Tree was something different. You may have stuffed
The Education of Little Tree
with generous amounts of hooey—really: “Mon-o-lah”? —and the federal government didn't come off any better than it did in
Rebel Outlaw
. But at the heart of
The Education of Little Tree
you placed a vivid, sympathetic character far removed from your legacy as Ace Carter. That little-boy version of your “Forrest Carter” creation made it clear that you had grown as a writer.

Had you grown as a person, though? That's the question confronting newspaper readers today. But it's not the first time that question's been asked, now is it? And it's not the first time it will go unanswered.

When an Alabama newspaperman connected your pen name with your true identity fifteen years ago—right after the Josey Wales movie came out—it was mildly denied but otherwise met with silence. Readers forgot about it, or ignored it, or never noticed it in the first place. With
The Education of Little Tree
a best seller, that's not likely to happen again.

But if there's one thing that experience taught you about readers in particular and the public in general, it's this: Just because they've been shown the truth doesn't mean they'll stop buying your story.

You are a fibber. A confabulator. Mary Baker, you're a liar. You make up stories about yourself as easily as other people make their beds. And you're rarely without an audience eager to be fooled.

You certainly were in your element last night—the Saturday crowd at the Pack Horse Inn was made for stringing along. Running off from Bristol had made you thirsty, but not so thirsty that you broke character. As the exotic Princess Caraboo, you drew a picture of a tree. Eventually someone figured out that it was supposed to be a tea tree, and you received a cupful.

This morning, you're back at it. You're having breakfast with the Pack Horse's landlady—who believes that
she's
having breakfast with a mysterious foreigner—when a gentleman walks into the room.

Oh, no.

Not him!

It's Dr. Wilkinson. He knows everything about Princess Caraboo—and though that means, of course, that he actually knows nothing, your relief over being gone from Bristol disappears.

How did he know you were here? Did you let down your guard last night? Did you slip up and stray too far from the persona you've perfected these past two months? Does he suspect anything?

You begin to sob, covering your face with a handkerchief. But you pull yourself together and lower the handkerchief, and you discover that nothing between you and him seems to have changed. If Dr. Wilkinson has interpreted your tears as a sign of guilt—if he doubts that you are, indeed, Princess Caraboo from the island of Javasu—he doesn't let on.

Still, you've got to get out of here.

You go outside and begin making your way to the middle of Bath.

Dr. Wilkinson has blown things all out of proportion. Thanks to him, what began for you as a lark—donning a turban and pretending not to speak English—has become news as far off as London and Edinburgh.

But let's be fair. Yes, Dr. Wilkinson may have been unusually enchanted by the identity you've created. But many people have been intrigued by it, and you've certainly done nothing to discourage that.

In fact, you've let them help invent that identity. Princess Caraboo is as much their creation as yours.

 

She began so simply. You arrived in Almondsbury, just outside Bristol, on April 3—at loose ends, on foot, and practically empty-handed. You wore your black shawl on your head, a black dress, black stockings, and leather shoes—nothing exotic.

But no matter how many languages the local folks tried, you seemed not to understand them, and you addressed them in a tongue that none of them recognized. You'd had practice at that—you and your little sister used to lie in bed for hours jabbering back and forth in a lingo no one else could comprehend.