But the story has a bitter side. According to some who knew him before he died in 1979, the author was really Asa (Ace) Carter, a former speechwriter for Alabama Gov. George Wallace and a notorious white-supremacist leader. “I knew that Asa went under the name of Forrest Carter,” confirmed Gerald Wallace, the governor’s younger brother. “It was common knowledge among Wallace people.” Oscar Harper, who worked with Asa Carter on the 1963 Wallace campaign and became his friend, remembers seeing Forrest Carter on the “Today” show in July 1975. “I said, ‘Damn, it’s Asa Carter. I hope she [Barbara Walters] doesn’t ask him about the Klan’.”
Asa Earl Carter was a piece of work. “His early days were violent,” says Gerald Wallace, “but you sit down one on one, you would appreciate his intelligence.” Born in 1925 in Oxford, Ala., Carter came to prominence in the 1940s as a radio announcer and executive secretary of the anti-integrationist North Alabama Citizens Council, sometimes referred to as the White Citizen’s Council. In April 1956, after four men connected with the council were arrested for attacking Nat King Cole on a Birmingham stage, Carter offered no apologies. “I’ve swung on niggers myself,” he said. According to Dan T. Carter, an Emory University professor now working on a biography of Wallace, Carter formed the Original Ku Klux Klan of the Confederacy, a 100-member group responsible for the 1957 castration of a black man outside Birmingham. (Professor Carter may be a distant relative of Asa Carter.) That same year, Asa Carter was arrested for shooting J. P. Tillery, a Klan lieutenant, at a KKK meeting in Birmingham; charges were dropped.
Asa became a speechwriter for George Wallace, and contributed to the governor’s infamous 1963 inaugural speech, in which Wallace ranted “Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!” a turn of phrase often attributed to Carter. As Gerald Wallace says, “He had a way with words.” Carter eventually split with Wallace over what he saw as Wallace’s softening on racial issues, and ran unsuccessfully against the governor in 1970. In the early ’70s, he published a 12-page pamphlet claiming Wallace ,‘made a deal for nigger votes."
How he came to be Forrest Carter is unclear. He chose the name Forrest, says Dan Carter, after Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate hero in the Civil War and a founder of the Klan. The original copyright on “Gone to Texas” belongs to Bedford Forrest Carter. Harper says Asa talked openly of his books and his plans for future “Josey Wales” movies. But friends who first met Forrest Carter later in life, like Dallas Morning News columnist Bob St. John, say Asa Carter was never mentioned. “It doesn’t sound like the same guy,” St. John says. “But you never know, do you?”
In his lifetime, Forrest Carter denied being Asa, though he appears to have signed some correspondence “Asa.” Wayne Greenhaw, an Alabama Journal columnist who first linked the two Carters in The New York Times in 1976, cites an original copy of “Gone to Texas,” sent to Alabama House of Representatives clerk John Pemberton with a note reading, “Here’s the book … Your friend, Asa.” Dan Carter says the address on the copyright for “Gone to Texas” was Route. 4, White Plains Ala.–the same address Asa Carter used.
Forrest Carter’s agent, Eleanor Friede, who describes herself as “a New York liberal,” doesn’t believe the two men were the same person. “How can a person [like Asa Carter] write ‘Little Tree’?” she asked. “Come on–that kind of honesty and truth? Could that come from a bigot?” Through Friede, India Carter refused to comment.
The UNM Press has no plans to drop the quaint little book. “We have 400,000 copies due into our warehouse,” says marketing director Peter Moulson. “We certainly are not going to burn them. It would seem an incredible waste of trees.” In light of the evidence, the book’s folksy homilies, like the publisher’s New Age fastidiousness, seem a tasteless joke.
