Can I See Your I. D.?

by Chris Barton

  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.

  WHAT HAPPENED NEXT?

  IN THE WEEKS after The New York Times revealed Forrest Carter’s true identity, Carter’s widow acknowledged that her husband and Ace Carter were the same man. Though the publisher removed “A True Story” from the book’s cover and reclassified it as fiction, The Education of Little Tree remained a best seller, retained many supporters, and was made into a movie. In 2007, the debate over whether the author’s background diminishes the book was revived when the title was found on—and removed from—a list of recommended reading on the website of TV host Oprah Winfrey. It has sold more than 1.5 million copies.

  KIDNAPPED PRINCESS?

  PRINCESS CARABOO

  SUNDAY, JUNE 8, 1817

  BATH, ENGLAND

  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.

  Late in the evening, Elizabeth Worrall, the wife of the town clerk, arranged for you to have a private room and a meal at a local inn. On a wall there you saw a picture of a pineapple, and you indicated that it grew in your homeland. The innkeeper made you some tea, and before you drank it you covered your eyes and uttered something that sounded like a prayer. When the cup was refilled, you refused to drink from it until you had washed the cup yourself and repeated the prayer ritual.

  They were captivated. You were just getting started.

  Hoping to divine your origins, the next morning the vicar brought books with geographic prints and engravings. You couldn’t read English—or so he believed—but he thought you might see something you recognized. For you, this was on-the-spot research into the role you were playing. You pointed out prints of China, indicating that you had been brought from there on a ship.

  Mrs. Worrall took you home with her. Whatever language she thought you might be speaking, she was determined to break through to you. She wrote her own name, spoke it, repeated it, and handed you her pen. You shook your head and pointed at yourself. “Caraboo,” you said. “Caraboo.”

  “Caraboo?” Well, why not?

  Mrs. Worrall took you on a tour of the house, and when you saw Chinese figures on the furniture, you reacted as if they were familiar to you. You began piling quirk on top of quirk. At dinner, you appeared disgusted by the notion of eating meat, and you refused all beverages other than
water. Never mind the rum and steak you’d shared just two days earlier with that dull young fellow you’d met while traveling (and gladly ditched soon after).

  You attracted plenty of visitors who tried to figure out who you were and where you came from—but who evidently gave no thought to what a person from Asia might actually look like. One of them pretended to understand your language—a mixture of dialects from the Sumatran coast and nearby islands, he explained. Through that “understanding,” he came away with the story that you were an important person on your island home, one who had been kidnapped and then somehow became free in England.

  Sumatra? A person of importance? Kidnapped? A houseguest that intriguing could expect to stay on the Worrall estate for a while.

  And so you did—and what a show you put on! You would kneel by the pond, pray in the bushes, wear flowers and feathers in your hair, and beat a gong and tambourine in the garden. You climbed trees, swam naked, shot arrows while running about, and rowed Mrs. Worrall around the pond.

  Mrs. Worrall’s friends, enchanted, came with objects for you to examine and secondhand stories of Asia to share with each other. Before them, you mugged, danced, gesticulated—and paid attention. Once they accepted that you could not speak English, they would say anything in front of you, all the time feeding you the material you needed to further your masquerade.

  That dagger, for example. One dedicated visitor brought an Asian dagger, explaining to the other visitors how the natives used poison on the tip. Soon after, you just happened to demonstrate, rubbing juice from the leaves of a houseplant onto the blade, poking yourself with the tip, and then pretending to faint from the toxins.

  And all those books—what would you have done without them? Those the vicar had brought were just the beginning. No one suspected that you could actually make sense of the words while you perused the pictures.

  One guest brought a big book about Java, and your response was clear. This, you wanted them to understand, was your home.

  When another book included examples of Sumatran dialects, you seized on them—these, you wanted them to know, formed the tongue you spoke. And with a little inspiration from a volume depicting written languages from around the globe—Arabic and Persic, Sanskrit and Greek, Chinese and Malay—you produced spirals and loops and diamonds and dots from your own language.

  You took apart the information provided by those visitors, and then you put it back together in a way different enough and sufficiently exotic for your listeners to accept as the way things were in your homeland.

  What’s more, you were consistent. “Lazor” always meant “ladies,” “manjintoo” always meant “gentlemen,” “rampue” always meant “pigeon,” and so forth. You always greeted visitors with the palm of your hand placed against your temple—on the left for women, on the right for men. And after you got such a reaction with a morning escapade to the rooftop—where you chanted to “Alla Tallah,” the name for God that you spotted on page 316 of Pantographia—you made sure you returned to the roof each Tuesday.

  Above all, you flattered those who came to gawk at you. Or, rather, you gave them the opportunity to flatter themselves by showing how much they knew (or imagined they did) about exotic topics and showing how cultured the titles on their bookshelves were. They may have been making fools of themselves, but they sure felt smarter.

  At last, this Sunday morning in Bath, you have arrived at the Circus, this great circular plaza in the middle of town. For now, you’re alone, but can Dr. Wilkinson be far behind? As you stroll about, never far from your mind is the story you concocted with the unwitting collaboration of the Worralls’ bluestocking guests—the story of how Princess Caraboo got to England in the first place.

  It involved not only a kidnapping but also deadly hand-to-hand combat. And two sets of pirates. And surgery performed on the back of your neck before you finally jumped overboard and swam onto the shores of England.

  You do have a scar at the base of your skull. And in fact, you did obtain that scar in the midst of an ordeal. It’s just that your actual ordeal did not resemble in the slightest the one that you shared with the folks in Almondsbury.

  You were born Mary Ann Willcocks twenty-six years ago in Witheridge, Devonshire. A cobbler’s daughter, you were poor, and poorly educated. After a falling-out with your family, you left home without a penny or a change of clothes.

  Eventually, as you neared London, begging along the way and sleeping in haylofts when you had to, you got sick and were admitted to a hospital. You were there for months, feverish and delirious. To try to set you right, they made an incision on the back of your neck, covering it with a warm cup to draw out your bad blood.

  When they released you, you stayed in London, working for the Matthews family and caring for their children. Mrs. Matthews and her daughter gave you informal lessons in writing and reading. You also gained some attention from the Matthewses by making the extraordinary claim—inspired by the fasting of the Jewish man next door?—that you sometimes went several days without eating.

  For six months after that, you lived at the Magdalen Hospital, a home for repentant prostitutes. You made up a background for yourself in order to get in, starting with the claim that you were an orphan whose father died when you were a newborn.

  A year later, in a London bookstore, you met a man called Baker. But after traveling around together for a few months—long enough for you to get pregnant—he gave you the slip. You told different people different made-up stories about who the father was.

  While pregnant, you worked at the Crab Tree pub. During your six months there, you called yourself Hannah, said your husband was dead, and told stories so outrageous that they delighted many a soul but fooled none of them. You gave birth to a son last year and left him at the foundling hospital—though you lived nearby and visited your baby each Monday.

  You became a servant for the Starling family—alternately entertaining and scaring the daylights out of their children with your stories—near the end of October. Right around that time, your son died. The next month, the Starlings dismissed you for setting fire to two beds in one week.

  It was five months later that Princess Caraboo appeared in Bristol. You had picked back up on your old pastime of begging, and doing so in a made-up tongue. You also found a begging partner—your roommate at a boarding house—and together you came up with the idea to make yourself more intriguing by wearing your black shawl as a turban.

  Combined with your lingo, it did the trick, and you decided to try your luck alone in the countryside around Bristol. You could don and shed your exotic-foreigner persona at will—but that was about to change. You were about to take up that role around the clock before an endless audience of visitor after visitor.

  Among them has been Dr. Wilkinson. He examined your scar and confirmed that it certainly had not been made by any Englishman or European. In the first days of June, his accounts of his meeting with you began to be published in newspapers all over England, complete with a gushing and detailed description of you:. . . a sweet smile; her mouth rather large; her teeth beautifully white and regular; her lips a little prominent and full, under lip rather projecting; her chin small and round . . . She appears to be about 25 years of age; her manners are extremely graceful, her countenance surprisingly fascinating . . .

  You were flattered, of course. But it’s one thing to fool a family or a single community, and quite another to be put on stage before an entire nation. With that mounting, suffocating pressure, is it any wonder that you bolted to Bath? You left behind all the trinkets and objects you’d been given to examine, no matter their worth. You covered the two dozen miles by foot and by cart, and here you are.

  And there he is. Dr. Wilkinson has caught up with you here at the Circus. Like a persistent hound—a puppy, really—he’s following you as you stroll around the railed garden in the middle.

  Well, he’s not following you—he’s following Princess Caraboo.

  MONDAY, JUNE 9, 181
7

  ALMONDSBURY, ENGLAND

  It’s the next morning, and you’re back at the Worralls’.

  After Dr. Wilkinson accompanied you back to the gathering crowd at the Pack Horse, two women suggested to him that their home would offer you more privacy. Your new hosts had you carried there in a sedan chair. When Mrs. Worrall caught up with you—Dr. Wilkinson must have sent word to her—you were entertaining a more reasonably sized crowd in their drawing room.

  As you wordlessly discoursed in all things Caraboo, these people knelt before you, wanted to touch you, drove you dangerously close to a fit of laughter that would have given yourself away. At the sight of Mrs. Worrall, however, you were the one falling to your knees, begging forgiveness for running away.

  She forgave you. You managed to keep up the charade for another day. But as your fame spreads, in person and through the newspapers, how much longer can it be before someone pieces “Princess Caraboo” together with the person you were before the day you wandered into Almondsbury? For all the kindness she has shown, doesn’t Mrs. Worrall deserve to be the first to know the truth?

  You approach Mrs. Worrall’s dressing room. She invites you in, and you lock the door behind you. And you tell her...

  Nothing.

  You just can’t.

  Not while you still have a choice.

  WHAT HAPPENED NEXT?

  MARY BAKER HAD only one more day as “Princess Caraboo” before testimony from her former Bristol landlady and the dull young man she’d traveled with exposed her as a fraud. She cooperated—mostly—with an investigation by rightfully skeptical journalist John Matthew Gutch, who published a full account of her life that August. By then she’d left for a short-lived, unsuccessful bid for American fame. Back in England, she made her living selling leeches to hospitals until she died in 1864.