Floating this one with a new shelf to see how the kinder, gentler Goodreads policy will handle a review that brings up the author's documented historyFloating this one with a new shelf to see how the kinder, gentler Goodreads policy will handle a review that brings up the author's documented history of being a member of the Ku Klux Klan and a liar.
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After seeing the Coen Brothers’ version of True Grit and rereading the book, I had an urge to check out another western. Preferably one with a movie adaptation made that I could watch after reading. The Outlaw Josey Wales came to mind. I loved the movie but haven’t seen it in years. Plus, I’d read the book a long time ago and didn’t remember much about it. Now, I’m really kind of wishing that I would have left well enough alone.
I got this volume that had both the books by Forrest Carter. Gone to Texas is the one that inspired the film version with a Missouri farmer becoming a guerilla fighter during the Civil War after his family is killed by Union forces. After the war, Josey refuses to surrender and tries to fight his way to Texas. The second book, The Vengeance Trail of Josey Wales, is about Josey going into Mexico chasing after a sadistic bunch of rurales who came into Texas where they raped, murdered and kidnapped friends of his. This book also dealt a lot with how the corrupt Mexican landowners and the Catholic Church conspired to keep the peasants in debt and working the land.
As I was reading, something kept bugging me. In the first book, a lot of time is spent on how unfair and cruel the federal government had been to Josey, his Confederate comrades, and some of the Indians he meets. Josey is presented as the Mythical Righteous Redneck Warrior who will ruthlessly shoot you down, but is a straight talking man of his word. Unlike them guvment fellas.
At first, I thought this was just my Kansas nature. I’ve always been slightly irked about how both the real and fictional Missouri guerrillas who later turned to robbery were portrayed as heroes or at least anti-heroes. While there were plenty of atrocities on both side of the border war, it’d be nice if Kansas got a little credit for being the free state while the Missourians were fighting for the slave state.
However, the book had a bad habit of going on and on about how ruthless the government was while Josey and his pals were just simple folks wanting to live peacefully on the land. But slavery is never mentioned once, and there isn’t a single black character in the novel. Carter was supposedly part Cherokee who had written a memoir about his ancestry so I thought he had just decided to highlight the mistreatment of the Indians and leave slavery out of it to make Josey more sympathetic.
But while I was looking up Carter before writing this review, I found out that his real name was actually Asa Carter, and that he’d been a segregationist, a speech writer for George Wallace, and he was heavily involved with the Ku Klux Klan. According to Wikipedia, he had to leave the KKK after shooting two members in a dispute over finances. How bad do you have to be to get thrown out of the Klan?
In the 1970’s, he changed his name, tried to pass himself off as part Indian and wrote a ‘memoir’ called The Education of Little Tree so apparently he was the James Frey of his generation. He died shortly after writing the Josey Wales novels, but his double life was finally revealed in the early ‘90s.
Shit.
There’s nothing like finding out that a movie you really liked was inspired by a racist asshole, and that it was subtle propaganda about ‘the evils of guvment’. He even managed to work in some shots at the Catholics in the sequel. I feel dirty just for having read it.
I never got that vibe from the Eastwood version so I’m assuming it got filtered out of the movie, but that’s really going to be hard not to think about while watching Clint spit tobacco and sending troops on a Missouri boat ride. ...more
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