The Education of Little Tree
Page 1
Contents
Sharing Little Tree
Little Tree
The Way
Shadows on a Cabin Wall
Fox and Hounds
“I Kin Ye, Bonnie Bee”
To Know the Past
Pine Billy
The Secret Place
Granpa’s Trade
Trading with a Christian
At the Crossroads Store
A Dangerous Adventure
The Farm in the Clearing
A Night on the Mountain
Willow John
Church-going
Mr. Wine
Down from the Mountain
The Dog Star
Home Again
The Passing Song
The Education of Little Tree
Forrest Carter
Foreword by Rennard Strickland
University of New Mexico Press
Albuquerque
ISBN for this digital edition: 978-0-8263-1694-3
© 1976 by Forrest Carter; Copyright renewed 2004
© 2008 by India Carter LLC
All rights reserved.
University of New Mexico Press edition reprinted by arrangement India Carter LLC
An Eleanor Friede Book
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Carter, Forrest
The education of Little Tree.
Reprint. Originally published: New York: Delacorte Press.
© 1976. With new foreword.
1. Carter, Forrest—Biography—Youth.
2. Novelists, American—20th century—Biography.
3. Cherokee Indians—Biography. I. Title.
[ps3553.a777z464 1986] 813.54 85-28956
ISBN 0-8263-2809-1
Sharing Little Tree
Granma said when you come on something good, first thing to do is share it with whoever you can find; that way, the good spreads out where no telling it will go. Which is right.
In reissuing Forrest Carter’s The Education of Little Tree, the University of New Mexico Press is doing exactly what Granma advised young Little Tree. The Press is sharing an important book. Little Tree is one of those rare books like Huck Finn that each new generation needs to discover and which needs to be read and reread regularly. The Education of Little Tree is a fine and sustaining book, wonderfully funny and deeply poignant.
Little Tree’s author, Forrest Carter, wrote a number of important books including the popular Outlaw Josey Wales; he wrote one great book, The Education of Little Tree. Originally to have been called “Me and Grandpa,” Little Tree is Carter’s autobiographical remembrances of life with his Eastern Cherokee hill country grandparents. But Little Tree is more, much more than a touching account of 1930s depression-era life. This book is a human document of universal meaning. The Education of Little Tree speaks to the human spirit and reaches the very depth of the human soul.
Everyone who has ever read The Education of Little Tree seems to remember when and where and how they came to know the book. Whether they saw it in the autobiography section of a chain bookseller, or heard it reviewed as “Book of the Week” on a television book show, or found it on the gift table at a tribal souvenir shop while passing through an Indian reservation, Little Tree’s readers passionately remember these first meetings. For The Education of Little Tree is a book from which one never quite recovers. After reading Little Tree one never again sees the world in quite the same way.
Upon publication in 1977 The Education of Little Tree was widely reviewed and universally acclaimed. Reviewers as diverse as those of The New York Times and local mountain weeklies saw in The Education of Little Tree an inspirational, autobiographical remembrance of a young Indian boy which might provide a fresh perspective for a mechanistic and materialistic modern world. Thus Little Tree found its first and most loyal readership among those who cared about the young, about “growing up,” about the Indian, about the earth, and about the relationship of man and the earth.
Soon Little Tree began to find fans among other groups. Teenagers took to the book almost as a cult. The values as well as the prose touched many who didn’t usually read. Younger children found Little Tree on their own. Librarians began to find Little Tree missing from the shelves. Students of Native American life discovered the book to be as accurate as it was mystical and romantic. Elementary-school teachers learned that Little Tree fascinated their seemingly world-weary charges. But most generally the love of Little Tree passed from reader to reader with the increasingly hard-to-find borrowed copy of the book.
With this University of New Mexico Press edition, The Education of Little Tree is again available. Old and new readers can once more share this incredibly touching and deeply moving story which informs the heart and educates the spirit.
Rennard Strickland
For The Cherokee
Little Tree
Ma lasted a year after Pa was gone. That’s how I came to live with Granpa and Granma when I was five years old.
The kinfolks had raised some mortal fuss about it, according to Granma, after the funeral.
There in the gullied backyard of our hillside shack, they had stood around in a group and thrashed it out proper as to where I was to go, while they divided up the painted bedstead and the table and chairs.
Granpa had not said anything. He stood back at the edge of the yard, on the fringe of the crowd, and Granma stood behind him. Granpa was half Cherokee and Granma full blood.
He stood above the rest of the folks; tall, six-foot-four with his big, black hat and shiny, black suit that was only worn to church and funerals. Granma had kept her eyes to the ground, but Granpa had looked at me, over the crowd, and so I had edged to him across the yard and held onto his leg and wouldn’t turn loose even when they tried to take me away.
Granma said I didn’t holler one bit, nor cry, just held on; and after a long time, them tugging and me holding, Granpa had reached down and placed his big hand on my head.
“Leave him be,” he had said. And so they left me be. Granpa seldom spoke in a crowd, but when he did, Granma said, folks listened.
We walked down the hillside in the dark winter afternoon and onto the road that led into town. Granpa led the way down the side of the road, my clothes slung over his shoulder in a tow sack. I learned right off that when you walked behind Granpa, you trotted; and Granma, behind me, occasionally lifted her skirts to keep up.
When we reached the sidewalks in town, we walked the same way, Granpa leading, until we came to the back of the bus station. We stood there for a long time; Granma reading the lettering on the front of the buses as they came and went. Granpa said that Granma could read fancy as anybody. She picked out our bus, right on the nose, just as dusk dark was settin’ in.
We waited until all the people were on the bus, and it was a good thing, because trouble set up the minute we set foot inside the door. Granpa led the way, me in the middle and Granma was standing on the lower step, just inside the door. Granpa pulled his snap-purse from his forward pants pocket and stood ready to pay.
“Where’s your tickets?” the bus driver said real loud, and everybody in the bus set up to take notice of us. This didn’t bother Granpa one bit. He told the bus driver we stood ready to pay, and Granma whispered from behind me for Granpa to tell where we were going. Granpa told him.
The bus driver told Granpa how much it was and while Granpa counted out the money real careful—for the light wasn’t good to count by—the bus driver turned around to the crowd in the bus and lifted his right hand and said, “How!” and laughed, and all the people laughed. I felt better about it, knowing they was friendly and didn’t take offense because we didn’t have a ticket.
I sat in the middle between Granma and Granpa, and Granma reached across and patted Granpa on the hand, and he held her hand across my lap. It felt good, and so I slept.
It was deep into the night when we got off the bus on the side of a gravel road. Granpa set off walking, me and Granma behind. It was cracking cold. The moon was out, like half of a fat watermelon, and silvering the road ahead until it curved out of sight.
It wasn’t until we turned off the road, onto wagon ruts with grass in the middle, that I noticed the mountains. Dark and shadowed, they were, with the half-moon right atop a ridge that lifted so high it bent your head back to look. I shivered at the blackness of the mountains.
Granma spoke from behind me, “Wales, he’s tiring out.” Granpa stopped and turned. He looked down at me and the big hat shadowed his face.
“It’s better to wear out when ye’ve lost something,” he said. He turned and set off again, but now it was easier to keep up. Granpa had slowed down, so I figured he was tired too.
After a long time, we turned off the wagon ruts onto a foot trail and headed dead set into the mountains. Seemed like we’d come straight up against a mountain, but as we walked, the mountains seemed to open up and fold in around us on all sides.
The sounds of our walking began to echo, and stirrings came from around us, and whispers and sighs began to feather through the trees like everything had come alive. And it was warm. There was a tinkle and a bobble and swishing beside us, a mountain branch rolling over rocks and making pools where it paused and rushed on again. We were into the hollows of the mountains.
The half-moon dropped out of sight behind the ridge and spewed silver light over the sky. It gave the hollow a gray-light dome that reflected down on us.
Granma began to hum a tune behind me and I knew it was Indian, and needed no words for its meaning to be clear, and it made me feel safe.
A hound bayed so sudden, I jumped. Long and mourning, breaking into sobs that the echoes picked up and carried farther and farther away, back into the mountains.
Granpa chuckled, “That’d be ol’ Maud—ain’t got the smell sense of a lap dog—dependent on her ears.”
In a minute, we were covered up with hounds, whining around Granpa and sniffing at me to get the new scent. Ol’ Maud bayed again, right close this time, and Granpa said, “Shet up, Maud!” And then she knew who it was and she came running and leaping on us.
We crossed a foot log over the spring branch and there was the cabin, logged and set back under big trees with the mountain at its back and a porch running clear across the front.
The cabin had a wide hall separating the rooms. The hall was open on both ends. Some people call it a “gallery,” but mountain folks call it a “dogtrot,” because the hounds trotted through there. On one side was a big room for cooking, eating and settin’, and across the dogtrot on the other side were two bedrooms. One was Granpa and Granma’s. The other was to be mine.
I laid out on the springy softness of deer hide webbing, stretched in the frame of hickory posts. Through the open window, I could see the trees across the spring branch, dark in the ghost light. The thought of Ma came rushing on me and the strangeness of where I was.
A hand brushed my head. It was Granma sitting beside me, on the floor; her full skirts around her, the plaited hair streaked with silver falling forward of her shoulders and into her lap. She watched out the window too, and low and soft she began to sing:
“They now have sensed him coming
The forest and the wood-wind
Father mountain makes him welcome with his song.
They have no fear of Little Tree
They know his heart is kindness
And they sing, ‘Little tree is not alone.’
Even silly little Lay-nah
With her babbling, talking waters
Is dancing through the mountains with her cheer
‘Oh listen to my singing,
Of a brother come amongst us
Little Tree is our brother, and Little Tree is here.’
Awi usdi the little deer
And Min-e-lee the quail-hen
Even Kagu the crow takes up the song
‘Brave is the heart of Little Tree
And kindness is his strength
And Little Tree will never be alone.’”
Granma sang and rocked slowly back and forth. And I could hear the wind talking, and Lay-nah, the spring branch, singing about me and telling all my brothers.
I knew I was Little Tree, and I was happy that they loved me and wanted me. And so I slept, and I did not cry.
The Way
It had taken Granma, sitting in the rocker that creaked with her slight weight as she worked and hummed, while the pine knots spluttered in the fireplace, a week of evenings to make the boot moccasins. With a hook knife, she had cut the deer leather and made the strips that she wove around the edges. When she had finished, she soaked the moccasins in water and I put them on wet and walked them dry, back and forth across the floor, until they fitted soft and giving, light as air.
This morning I slipped the moccasins on last, after I had jumped into my overalls and buttoned my jacket. It was dark and cold—too early even for the morning whisper wind to stir the trees.
Granpa had said I could go with him on the high trail, if I got up, and he had said he would not wake me.
“A man rises of his own will in the morning,” he had spoken down to me and he did not smile. But Granpa had made many noises in his rising, bumping the wall of my room and talking uncommonly loud to Granma, and so I had heard, and I was first out, waiting with the hounds in the darkness.
“So. Ye’re here.” Granpa sounded surprised.
“Yes, sir,” I said, and kept the proud out of my voice.
Granpa pointed his finger at the hounds jumping and prancing around us. “Ye’ll stay,” he ordered, and they tucked in their tails and whined and begged and ol’ Maud set up a howl. But they didn’t follow us. They stood, all together in a hopeless little bunch, and watched us leave the clearing.
I had been up the low trail that followed the bank of the spring branch, twisting and turning with the hollow until it broke out into a meadow where Granpa had his barn and kept his mule and cow. But this was the high trail that forked off to the right and took to the side of the mountain, sloping always upward as it traveled along the hollow. I trotted behind Granpa and I could feel the upward slant of the trail.
I could feel something more, as Granma said I would. Mon-o-lah, the earth mother, came to me through my moccasins. I could feel her push and swell here, and sway and give there … and the roots that veined her body and the life of the water-blood, deep inside her. She was warm and springy and bounced me on her breast, as Granma said she would.
The cold air steamed my breath in clouds and the spring branch fell far below us. Bare tree branches dripped water from ice prongs that teethed their sides, and as we walked higher there was ice on the trail. Gray light eased the darkness away.
Granpa stopped and pointed by the side of the trail. “There she is—turkey run—see?” I dropped to my hands and knees and saw the tracks: little sticklike impressions coming out from a center hub.
“Now,” Granpa said, “well fix the trap.” And he moved off the trail until he found a stump hole.
We cleaned it out, first the leaves, and then Granpa pulled out his long knife and cut into the spongy ground and we scooped up the dirt, scattering it among the leaves. When the hole was deep, so th
at I couldn’t see over the rim, Granpa pulled me out and we dragged tree branches to cover it and, over these, spread armfuls of leaves. Then, with his long knife, Granpa dug a trail sloping downward into the hole and back toward the turkey run. He took the grains of red Indian corn from his pocket and scattered them down the trail, and threw a handful into the hole.
“Now we will go,” he said, and set off again up the high trail. Ice, spewed from the earth like frosting, crackled under our feet. The mountain opposite us moved closer as the hollow far below became a narrow slit, showing the spring branch like the edge of a steel knife, sunk in the bottom of its cleavage.
We sat down in the leaves, off the trail, just as the first sun touched the top of the mountain across the hollow. From his pocket, Granpa pulled out a sour biscuit and deer meat for me, and we watched the mountain while we ate.
The sun hit the top like an explosion, sending showers of glitter and sparkle into the air. The sparkling of the icy trees hurt the eyes to look at, and it moved down the mountain like a wave as the sun backed the night shadow down and down. A crow scout sent three hard calls through the air, warning we were there.
And now the mountain popped and gave breathing sighs that sent little puffs of steam into the air. She pinged and murmured as the sun released the trees from their death armor of ice.
Granpa watched, same as me, and listened as the sounds grew with the morning wind that set up a low whistle in the trees.
“She’s coming alive,” he said, soft and low, without taking his eyes from the mountain.
“Yes, sir,” I said, “she’s coming alive.” And I knew right then that me and Granpa had us an understanding that most folks didn’t know.