SALON

Books

Thursday, Dec 20, 2001 8:22 PM UTC

The education of Little Fraud

How did a racist speechwriter for George Wallace turn into a "Cherokee" sage and author of a revered multicultural text? The weird tale of Asa ("Forrest") Carter.

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Twenty-three years ago this past June 7, Forrest Carter was laid to rest in the Carter family plot at D’Armanville Cemetery near Anniston, Ala. A short time later, family members yanked out the old headstone and put in a new one inscribed with the words “Asa Earl Carter, Sept. 4 1925-June 7 1979.”

Forrest must have been spinning in his grave. For the last few years of his life, he tried hard to kill off Asa. And if he had stayed off television, he might have pulled it off.

Forrest Carter was the bestselling author of “The Education of Little Tree: A True Story,” a literary phenomenon that was published 25 years ago this fall and is credited by many as the book that touched off the boom in what is still referred to in publishing as “Native American Lit.” Carter also wrote another famous book, “The Rebel Outlaw Josey Wales,” whose eponymous ex-Confederate superhero was played by Clint Eastwood in the most influential western since “The Searchers.”

But “Forrest Carter’s” most memorable creation was himself. “Forrest Carter,” revered author of the beloved “Little Tree,” was actually Asa Carter — virulent segregationist, former Klansman, speechwriter for George Wallace and professional racist. In both incarnations, Carter is the focus of new interest. Diane McWhorter’s critically acclaimed history of the civil rights struggle in Birmingham, Ala., “Carry Me Home,” has revealed more about the role of “Ace” as a warrior for white supremacy, while the 25th anniversary publication of Forrest’s “The Education Of Little Tree” — minus the “True Story” subtitle — continues to exalt him as a pillar of New Age wisdom and a multicultural hero.

For a man with just three slim volumes published in his own lifetime, Forrest Carter made a significant impact on American culture. (A fourth book, “Cry Geronimo,” published posthumously, has influenced two screen depictions of the Apache chief.) “The Education of Little Tree,” about an orphan boy named Forrest who learns about life from his sage Cherokee grandparents, has never been out of print since it was first published in 1976 to rave reviews in the New York Times, the Atlantic Monthly and elsewhere. According to an editor at the now-defunct Delacorte Press, the book sold more than a million copies in hard and soft covers before the University of New Mexico Press picked it up in 1985. Since then, it has become the biggest seller in the publisher’s history and one of the great publishing successes for any university press, selling more than 1,440,000 copies in paperback and at least 56,000 more in cloth.

The sales for “Little Tree” don’t begin to tell the story of the book’s influence. Schoolchildren have been so moved by it that they have formed Little Tree fan clubs. For years there were rumors in Hollywood that Robert Redford, Kevin Costner, and even Stephen Spielberg were interested in filming “Little Tree”; many think “Little Tree” helped shape the depiction of Indians in Costner’s “Dances With Wolves.” In 1991, 15 years after its publication and 12 years after Carter’s death, “Little Tree” won the coveted Abby Award and climbed onto the New York Times’ bestseller list.

Even though “Little Tree” was publicly exposed as fraudulent the very year of its publication, most readers simply refused to believe the evidence. This despite the fact that the Asa/Forrest Carter scandal was known far and wide, at least in academia: The distinguished African-American literary critic Henry Louis Gates wrote a widely discussed piece about it, for example. (In one of the many peculiar twists of the Asa-Forrest saga, some teachers acknowledge the controversy and include it in their lesson plans.) But while some know about the book’s peculiar history, years after the exposé many, perhaps most, new readers and fans who discover the book through the well-received movie version for young adults don’t even know there’s a controversy. That “The Education of Little Tree” was written by the same man who immortalized George Wallace by writing his racist manifesto, the famous “Segregation forever!” speech, is an inconvenient fact that hundreds of thousands of people seem willing to ignore.

Leading the way in the ignoring department is the University of New Mexico Press, which is apparently not about to do anything that might kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. Incredibly, UNM’s handsome new 25th anniversary edition (with a cover painting by the Oklahoma Cherokee artist Murv Jacob) makes no mention of Asa Carter or the controversies that have surrounded the book over the years — an omission that Diane McWhorter equates to “publishing a book of Hitler’s paintings without mentioning the word ‘Nazi.’” The specious “biography” that appeared on the book’s back cover in the original UNM edition, which moistly gushed that “Forrest Carter, whose Indian name is Little Tree, was known as ‘Storyteller in Council’ to the Cherokee Nations … His Indian friends always shared a part of his earnings from his writing,” is gone, as is the subtitle “A True Story.” Only the words “Young Adult Fiction” in small print on the corner of the back cover hint at the book’s stormy history. The introduction (which has remained unchanged since the first UNM edition in 1985) by Rennard Strickland, a professor of law at the University of Oregon, blandly tells us that Forrest Carter “wrote a number of important books,” and that “‘Little Tree’ speaks to the human spirit and reaches the very depth of the human soul.”

The University of New Mexico Press declined to comment about its nonacknowledgment of “Little Tree’s” unseemly provenance, referring a reporter to Rennard Strickland. Strickland said he was not consulted by the University of New Mexico about updating his introduction and that his purpose in writing the introduction was to “tell readers what they’d find in this book. I wasn’t doing a history of the controversy.” He added, “I have given my last interview on the subject.”

One of the remarkable things about Forrest Carter’s self-reinvention is how few reminders of his Asa existence still remain. Indeed, aside from a couple of slim pieces of physical evidence, it might be difficult to prove now that Asa and Forrest Carter were the same man.

A few years ago, Buddy Barnett, a childhood friend of Carter’s, produced a first edition of “The Rebel Outlaw Josey Wales” with an inscription in Carter’s handwriting that reads “Forrest (Asa) Carter.” Veteran Alabama journalist Wayne Greenhaw, who first broke the story of the Asa-Forrest Carter connection, had the handwriting in Barnett’s copy of “Wales” checked against the sample in Asa Earl Carter’s own biography, submitted when he ran for governor in 1970. They matched. In the biography, Carter said that he was born in Oxford, Ala., on Sept. 4, 1925. He claimed his parents, who were dairy farmers, had Cherokee blood in their background, which is either true or a “damn lie,” depending on which family member you speak to. Carter’s brother Doug insists that the family had no Cherokee ancestors, but Barnett claims that “Asa’s mother’s people were Cherokee, and Asa was proud of that fact.”

Some family members recall that while growing up in the Appalachian hills of north Alabama, young Asa Carter pestered older family members for details about Confederate ancestors on both sides of the family. One rode with Morgan’s Raiders, another was a guerrilla fighter with Col. Mosby, the legendary “Grey Ghost.” Maybe Carter had heard family stories of Cherokee ancestors, or maybe he heard stories about the Cherokee when growing up near Chocoloco Creek. Both “Wales” and “Little Tree” feature Cherokee Indians who were Confederate officers. In “Little Tree” the boy makes one of them into his own ancestor: “Granma and Granpa spoke of his Pa in his last years. He was an old warrior. He had joined the Confederate raider, John Hunt Morgan, to fight the faraway, faceless monster of “the guv’mint” that threatened his people and his cabin.” In “Little Tree” Carter brings together the two strains of his ancestry — one real and one, it would appear, assumed — to account for the famed “Rebel Yell”: “Exultation … brought the rebel Indian yell rumbling from his chest and out of his throat, screaming, savage.”

Carter graduated from high school in 1942, joined the Navy and became, like his future boss George Wallace, a boxing champ. He told friends he turned down the Army because he wanted to fight the Japanese rather than the Germans, his “racial kin.” After the war, Carter married Thelma India Walker, a high school sweetheart, moved to Colorado, and attended the state university. After graduating, he returned to Alabama and established a career as a full-time racist.

Around Birmingham, you can still find copies of the Southerner, a monthly magazine devoted to white supremacy, which Carter helped found. Collectors of civil-rights era memorabilia have copies of his radio broadcasts and pamphlets from his 1970 campaign for governor. In one of these, he warned white Alabamians about the prospect of black policemen: “Soon, you can expect your wife or daughter to be pulled over to the side of the road by one of these Ubangi or Watusi tribesmen wearing the badge of Anglo-Saxon law enforcement and toting a gun… but (he’ll be) as uncivilized as the day his kind were found eating their kin in a jungle.”

After getting fired from a radio station for criticizing National Brotherhood Week, Carter formed a group called the White Citizens Council, an organization that espoused the same fundamental views as the KKK. Carter’s association didn’t last; he couldn’t stomach the idea of making a common cause with anti-integrationist Jews, even to segregate blacks.

Instead, he helped create a new and even more virulent organization, the original Ku Klux Klan of the Confederacy, whose members wore Confederate gray robes instead of white. In Carter’s view, the old KKK had become too soft and compromised. Various acts of violence were associated with the new Kluxers, the most famous being the assault on Nat “King” Cole at a concert in Birmingham in 1957. Less well known but far uglier was the 1957 abduction of a black handyman named Edward Aaron who had offended members of Carter’s group with inflammatory talk of forced integration. The abductors, never identified, sliced off Aaron’s scrotum and poured turpentine on his wounds. According to his childhood pal Buddy Barnett, Carter — who openly advocated violence in his speeches and articles — was appalled by the coldbloodedness of the attack. But Don Carter, who wrote a biography of George Wallace, took a darker view, saying, “[Carter] had a long history of violence, in fact, it’s not an exaggeration to call him something of a … psychopath.”

By 1958, disillusioned with the new Klan’s leadership, whom he called “a bunch of trash,” he quit the group. With few prospects and four kids to feed in Anniston, Asa Carter took an ill-advised turn into politics, running for state lieutenant governor. He finished fifth in a five-man field.

Alabama’s most powerful moderate in the second half of the decade was George Wallace. In 1958, stunned over his loss in the governor’s race to Klan-backed John Patterson, Wallace famously swore to an aide that he’d never be “outsegged” again. (Or, as some of Wallace’s less flattering biographers have phrased it, “outniggered.”) The solution was the talented but unstable Asa Carter, whom Wallace’s aides thought they could keep, as one of them now admits, “under wraps.”

Till the day he died, George Wallace denied that he ever knew Asa Carter. He may have been telling the truth. “Ace,” as he was called by the staff, was paid off indirectly by Wallace cronies, and the only record that he ever wrote for Wallace was the word of former Wallace campaign officials such as finance manager Seymore Trammell. “He lived out of back offices in Wallace’s headquarters,” says Wayne Greenhaw. “He’d see his wife and kids on weekends and be a family man. During the weekdays he’d hole up in his room with his typewriter, a quart of whiskey, a dozen packs of Pall Malls and a gun.” Adds a former campaign official: “A revolver, an Old West type of gun.”

From this back room, Asa Carter wrote the most famous racist rhetoric of the civil rights era, words that would reach and be remembered by more people than anything published by Forrest Carter. From the steps of the Alabama state capitol building, on Inauguration Day, 1963, Wallace delivered the speech that, for sheer grandiloquence, rivals Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream.” “In the name of the greatest people that ever tread the earth,” thundered Wallace, “I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny. And I say: Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!” Wallace’s national reputation was made.

When Wallace ran his wife, Lurleen, for governor in his place, there was talk of making Carter her press secretary, but cooler heads among Wallace’s advisors suggested that this might be too high-profile for a man with Carter’s past. He was kept on for a while as a speechwriter until Lurleen Wallace died of cancer. By 1968 Wallace was ready to run for president and had to clean up his rhetoric. All ties to “Ace” were cut. Deserted and, he felt, betrayed, Carter ran against Wallace for the governor’s seat in 1970. In his TV commercials, Carter looked large, thick-set and barrel-chested, with dark, thick, Russian-like hair and eyebrows. He looked like George Wallace’s bigger, meaner brother. Positioned in front of a Confederate flag, he railed against “race-mixing,” Communists in Hollywood and anything else he could tie to the “guv’mint” in Washington. He finished last.

Wales was born out of the ashes of Asa Carter’s political defeat, just as, in Carter’s novel, Wales rises from the ruins of the old Confederacy. In 1973 Carter and his wife, Thelma, sold their Alabama home and moved to Florida where Carter could get away from his political debacle. Within a year, a new Carter emerged, slimmer, darker (all that Florida sun) and with a new name: Forrest. The name was chosen in homage to Nathaniel Bedford Forrest, the infamous Confederate cavalry general and a founder of the Ku Klux Klan. And, like Wales, Forrest Carter went to Texas to begin a new life — one that was to definitively disprove F. Scott Fitzgerald’s claim that there are no second acts in American life.

From writing racist speeches, Carter turned to writing genre fiction. In 1973 Eleanor Friede at Delacorte Press accepted his first novel, “Gone to Texas,” for publication. Carter was now spending time around Abilene, visiting his sons (whom he referred to, for reasons that remain unclear, as his nephews) and making new friends. He told them that he was from Florida, that he had Cherokee family in north Alabama and that he was an official “story teller” and “oral historian” for the Cherokee nation. He dressed in jeans and string ties and affected a folksy speech pattern. He performed what he called Cherokee songs and dances for his friends. To the surprise of his friends and family, and probably Carter himself, “Gone to Texas” was published and, thanks to Friede’s clout, even got reviewed in publications that ignored westerns. It sold well, pleasing the vast readership of Louis L’Amour, but also impressing a handful of readers beyond the western audience that an intense new sensibility was at work in the tired and predictable genre. Carter was delighted to promote his book with personal appearances. An Austin bookseller recalls that “He was such a great storyteller that people who heard him, people who didn’t buy westerns, bought his books.”

What kind of people have bought Forrest Carter’s books? Certainly the Wales novels appealed to the readers of pulp westerns and action-adventure novels. But Carter also seemed to make fans of thousands who wanted something more from their pulp — and the story he told shared important themes with his lone wolf, white-supremacist past. The character of Wales is a superhero-like conflation of several Confederate guerrilla fighters of the Civil War and post-Civil War era, particularly Jesse James and Cole Younger. Wales is a child of the mountains, and “he preferred the mountains to remain wild, free, unfettered by law and the irritating hypocrisy of organized society.” Wales is white, but “His kinship . . . was closer to the Cherokee than to his social brothers of the flatland.” Like thousands of ex-Confederates, he hangs a “G.T.T.” sign on his door — “Gone to Texas” — and flees through Indian country, pursued, long after it would seem necessary, by federal soldiers and marshals. Before the novel ends, the Goya-esque landscape is cluttered with corpses, almost in anticipation of Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian.”

In contrast to the Wales stories, “The Education of Little Tree” is a sweet, sad idyll, a pastiche of pop Zen and New Age homilies crossed with a dash of down-home red-in-tooth-and-claw Darwinism. On the surface “Little Tree” is a story of peace and tolerance; at its heart it shares much with the bloody Wales books. Carter’s philosophy of implacable nature is displayed in a passage where Little Tree is saddened when a hawk tears a harmless quail to pieces. “Don’t feel sad, Little Tree. It is the Way. Tal-con caught the slow and so the slow will raise no children who are also slow … and so Tal-con lives by the Way. He helps the quail.” And so, in nature’s harmony, the dominant species rules. Man upsets the harmony by empowering the weak. Government corrupts nature by helping the weak.

In addition to wisdom from Granpa and Granma, Little Tree learns life lessons from a kindly Jewish peddler, “Mr. Wine.” Mr. Wine, anticipating Milton Friedman by half a century, says, “If you was loose with your money, then you would get loose with your time, loose with your thinking and practically anything else. If a whole people got loose, then politicians seen they could get control. They would take over loose people and before long you had a dictator. Mr. Wine said no thinking people ever had a dictator.” Fascists, of course, do not regard their leaders as dictators but as expressions of their own will.

Perhaps no two books by the same author have ever had so few readers in common. But scratch the surface of “Little Tree’s” Native American worldview and you’ll find a Confederate-minded noble savage. In fact, the Cherokees in both “Little Tree” and the Wales’ books are honorary Confederates, fighting the evils of what both Little Tree and Wales call “guv’mint.”

Sometime in late 1973 Bob Daley, a producer for Clint Eastwood’s Malpaso Productions in California, received a book with a note for Eastwood. “The letter spoke of Clint’s ‘kind eyes,’” says Daley. “I thought, ‘Who in the world thinks that Clint Eastwood has ‘kind eyes’? I was curious.” Daley didn’t read westerns, but he gave “The Rebel Outlaw Josey Wales” a try. Intrigued, he talked Clint into giving it a try; the next day Eastwood told Daley to buy it for Malpaso. Carter’s cut was $25,000 for screen rights — not bad for a first-time author writing in a pulp genre — with an additional $10,000 if the film was made.

A short time later Carter called to say he’d be in the area and wanted to stop by. “Fine,” said Daley, “where will you be? Los Angeles? He said, ‘No, I’ll be in Dallas.’ I just looked at the phone, wondering what kind of character we’d gotten involved with.” Daley had no idea. When Carter arrived, he was staggeringly drunk and proceeded to piss all over the office carpet. Daley had an assistant hustle him to a hotel.

The next day, sober, he made his way back to Daley’s office. “He no sooner got there,” Daley recalls, “than he said, ‘Well, it was fine meetin’ ye, but I reckin’ I’d better be gittin’ ta home.’ It took me a moment to realize that he was talking like Wales. I thought, ‘This is worse than I thought.’ I talked him into staying another night to have dinner with some of my people from the production office. Again, he showed up drunk, and he pulled a knife and held it to the throat of one of our secretaries. He later said it was all a joke.”

The film’s first director, Philip Kaufman, was not impressed by “The Rebel Outlaw Josey Wales.” “‘Fascist’ is an overworked word,” says Kaufman from his California home, “but the first time I looked at that book that’s what I thought: ‘This was written by a crude fascist.’ It was nutty. The man’s hatred of government was insane. I felt that that element in the script needed to be severely toned down. But Clint didn’t, and it was his movie.” Eastwood eventually fired Kaufman and went on to direct himself.

Then, the same year as the release of “Josey Wales” came the publication of “Little Tree,” and Carter was on the verge of superstardom. But Carter’s gift for promotion became his undoing. In 1975 Carter appeared on the Barbara Walters show, doing pre-publicity for the Eastwood film “The Outlaw Josey Wales” and Carter’s upcoming books, “Little Tree” and his second western, “The Vengeance Trail of Josey Wales.” He smiled, winked and squinted under the brim of his black cowboy hat, but moments after his appearance NBC was bombarded by calls from area code 205. A handful of his old cronies in Alabama had made him. Forrest Carter’s days were numbered.

The mask was crumbling, and 1976 brought with it a double blow from which Carter never recovered. First, his distant cousin Dan Carter, a historian and future biographer of George Wallace, wrote an Op-Ed for the New York Times blowing the whistle on the identity of the new literary lion from Texas. Shortly after, Carter’s nemesis, Alabama journalist Wayne Greenhaw, wrote a piece — also for the New York Times — digging even deeper into his sordid past. But neither story would have any effect on book sales; indeed, at first, it seemed as if the stories would have no effect on Carter’s career at all. Delacorte Press’s Eleanor Friede publicly denied any connection between Ace and Forrest; for Carter’s new friends in Texas, many of whom weren’t disposed to give the New York Times much credence anyway, that was good enough.

For two years, Forrest Carter hung on in Texas, playing the local celebrity and trying to let Asa Carter fade back into the past. In 1978, in Dallas, he appeared at the Wellesley Book and Author Patron Party, sitting on a distinguished panel including historians Lon Tinkle, Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey and, incredibly, Barbara Tuchman. He played the folksy noble savage to the hilt, winning over both the panel and the audience. Tuchman laughed out loud when Carter embraced her and called her “a good ol’ Jew girl.”

I met Forrest Carter shortly after that at the Houston airport, working on a profile for the Houston Post. He was lean and sunburned and had a bushy mustache; he reminded me of an old photo of Wyatt Earp. Wearing a broad Stetson, he looked like a figure in a Remington painting in sunglasses. As a student in Birmingham I had watched him on TV when he ran for governor, but I wouldn’t have recognized him as Asa if he had been pointed out to me.

I knew him only as the author of “The Education Of Little Tree,” a book that I had regarded as inconsequential when I first read it, and of “Gone to Texas,” which seemed a brutal but above-average genre piece. I vaguely remembered having seen something in the New York Times about Asa Carter’s having gone off somewhere and started a new life for himself, but I never connected the bellowing hatemonger on TV with the grizzled-looking urban cowboy who mumbled as if he was the character in Mel Brooks’ “Blazing Saddles” who spoke in “authentic frontier gibberish.” We talked about his second Wales novel and about his recently finished book on Geronimo. I asked him if Clint Eastwood would be involved in the rumored next movie about Wales. He looked at me warily from under his hat, puffed on a cigarette and said, “I think Clint’s had all he can take ‘a me.” He offered that “Robert Duvall kinda looks more like my Josey” and would make a “good ‘un.”

I told Carter that I thought his Wales novels were an attempt to win back the values on a mythical level that the Confederacy had lost on the battlefield. Carter squinted at me, smiled and said, “The values of a civilization never die so long as they’re kept alive in legend.”

I never got a chance to write my story. Shortly afterward, Forrest Carter was dead. Exactly how and why has never been made clear. Friends said that he had been drinking; rumors of Asa were starting to reach Abilene. One Texas friend said Carter aged 10 years between 1976 and 1978, largely because of his fear of the trickle-down from Dan Carter’s piece. Though it took a year and a half for Carter’s Op-Ed to have an effect, Carter began to feel the heat. A canceled speaking gig at a university here, a call from a local paper wanting to discuss the controversy there. By the summer of ’78, said a friend, “Forrest was a mess. None of us understood at the time, but after the tragedy we could see in retrospect he was turning into a nervous wreck.”

One night in June, Carter stopped off to visit one of his sons in Potosi, just south of Abilene. Perhaps two hours later, an ambulance arrived to pick up Forrest Carter’s body. The death certificate listed “aspiration of food and clotted blood” as probable cause. It also mentioned a “history of fights.” A story circulated that Carter had gotten into a drunken fight with his son and choked on his own vomit; one of the ambulance drivers said the scenario fit. An old friend from Birmingham conjectured that a fight between father and son broke out over the treatment of Carter’s wife, whom he apparently deserted in Florida. Thelma Carter later resurfaced in Alabama, and has gone into seclusion, refusing to discuss her years with Asa.

Most of Forrest Carter’s friends received a triple shock the next day when they picked up the papers. First was the news of his violent death. Added to that was the fact that many did not know he really was, or was suspected of being, the notorious Asa Carter. Finally, most had never heard Carter talk of having a son.

The question of whether the “The Education of Little Tree” represented a conscious attempt by Forrest Carter to rehabilitate himself can never be answered. In the essay mentioned above, Henry Louis Gates argued, as others have, that the sordid past of the author is irrelevant to the book’s message and theme, which is one of tolerance and acceptance. The problem is that when one scratches the surface of the idyllic world of “Little Tree” one finds a philosophy as harsh and unforgiving as the one Josie Wales lives, a world where even the mention of “guv’mint” inspires hatred, paranoia and fear. One might even question whether “Little Tree” is really the plea for racial tolerance that its supporters have always maintained. American Indian activist Vine Deloria Jr. long ago noted that white American men who would bristle at the suggestion that they had African or Asian blood are often quick to claim Indian ancestry so long as the connection is on the mother’s side (as Carter said his was) and Cherokee (also as Carter claimed). Why? Perhaps out of guilt at the deposal of the Cherokee from the eastern states, but more likely because it seems the safest connection to the “real” America, the one experienced by noble savages before the corrupting influences of civilization — of “guv’mint.” Like Asa Carter, many American males see a spiritual kinship between their ancestors, the savage Celts and Anglo-Saxons, and the American Indian, and to be born with Indian blood somehow better justifies being born with a chip on one’s shoulder than being born white.

There appears to be no simple answer to who Carter was, or exactly what his books are about, but for some the solution is to simply deny the apparent contradiction between the legacy of Asa and Forrest. Indeed, some continue to deny that they were even the same man. Eleanor Friede, who manages the Carter literary estate, no longer goes that far, but insisted to the New York Times after Carter’s death that “There was nothing anti-black or anti-Jewish about the man I knew.” (Friede, who is Jewish, says she is retired and declined, through a representative, to be interviewed for this story). To Buddy Barnett, his childhood friend, “Forrest wasn’t no bigot, just somebody who wanted to see right done to Indians.”

However his books should be interpreted, as works of the imagination they pale before the most remarkable creation of Asa Carter’s strange, short literary life: that half-breed ancestor of Confederate soldiers and Cherokee warriors named Forrest Carter.

Allen Barra's next book is "Mickey and Willie -- The Parallel Lives of Baseball's Golden Age," from Crown. More Allen Barra.

Sunday, May 20, 2012 9:00 PM UTC

“People Who Eat Darkness”: The disappearing blonde

A true crime story set in Tokyo illuminates the complicated truths behind media cliches

By Joji Obara and Lucie Blackman (Credit: Estate of Lucie Jane Blackman)

Lucie Blackman, 21, went out for the afternoon in 2000, phoning her roommate and best friend Louise to arrange a meeting later that night. Lucie never showed up, and within a few days she’d become one of those vanished blondes whose fates fuel headlines and hours of speculative media coverage. She was British, a former flight attendant, and she and Louise were living in Tokyo. They were also bar hostesses, a profession with a very specific meaning in Japan, difficult to explain to foreigners and not entirely clear to the Japanese themselves. Lucie both did and didn’t match the classic Missing Blonde profile, and for a while the mystery of what happened to her threatened to lapse into permanent obscurity.

One thing made a difference: The actions of Lucie’s father, Tim Blackman, who arrived in Tokyo to join his other daughter, Sophie, in publicizing the search and prodding the police. Richard Lloyd Parry, Tokyo bureau chief for the Times of London, covered the case as it unfolded, first over the course of several months while Lucie’s whereabouts and abductor remained unknown, and finally for the six years it took to try the man accused of killing her, Joji Obara. The book Parry wrote about the case, “People Who Eat Darkness,” is an exceptionally perceptive and nuanced look at a terrible crime, one that put nations, institutions and family members at odds, and often into bitter and toxic conflict.

Unlike Truman Capote, author of “In Cold Blood,” the most celebrated true crime narrative of all, Parry is in essence a reporter; this is no “nonfiction novel.” But like Capote, he’s less interested in dishing the eerie or lurid details than he is in exploring the penumbra of the crime, the complex factors that fed into it and the unpredictable effects it had on an ever-spreading network of people. The true crime genre has a (mostly well-earned) reputation for trashiness, but it fascinates for legitimate reasons, as well. Transgression, justice and punishment speak to the very heart of what a society is, how it holds its people together and how they decide who lies beyond the pale.

Because Lucie Blackman was a foreigner, and one employed in an industry that the Japanese view as disreputable, the Tokyo police were inclined to dismiss her disappearance. Bar hostesses get paid to talk to and flirt with customers, and they are expected to go on (paid) dinner dates with them outside the clubs where they work, but it’s an arrangement that usually stops short of actual sex. Nevertheless, the Japanese think of most foreign hostesses as irresponsible, drug-loving backpackers who might well run off without telling anyone or get mixed up with dangerous people. Whether or not a Westerner would call what bar hostesses do a part of the sex industry, for the Japanese, these women belong to that category of “bad” girl who can expect little help or concern from authorities should she get into serious trouble.

Crime is not what it was in Capote’s day. In addition to finding and building a case against the perpetrator — jobs for law enforcement authorities — there’s handling the media, a task usually left to the victim and his or her relatives. Lucie’s father proved, initially at least, to be a master at this. Tim could detach himself emotionally from the horror of his situation and strategize. He was able to capitalize on a G-8 summit meeting being held in Japan around the same time Lucie vanished and parlay it into the intervention of British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Blair publicly asked Japan’s prime minister to front-burner the investigation, and met with Tim and his younger daughter Sophie while he was in Tokyo.

The police, who had been dragging their heels on Lucie’s disappearance, found this development (which made perfect sense in the political context of Britain) flabbergasting. Still, it worked: Lucie, who might have been written off as one of those “disposable” women of dubious virtue, was conclusively cast as an innocent girl, “naive perhaps, out of her depth,” but an adventurous daughter rather than a reckless slut. Tim was driving the narrative, as an electoral campaign manager might put it, and he was good at it. He liked talking to the press, even the tabloid press, and they liked him.

But if Tim was good at telling Lucie’s story, he was less successful at telling his own. Some of the most penetrating passages in “People Who Eat Darkness” concern what Parry refers to as the “script” expected from bereaved parents. Years later, Parry covered a press conference given by the father of another murdered girl and recognized in him “everything the world expected of a man in his situation: broken, helpless, turned inside out by loss.”

Tim, however, was composed, which aroused a formless popular suspicion regarding his sincerity. In similar cases, this uneasiness frequently takes the form of outside observers suddenly deciding that the parents might be implicated in their child’s disappearance or death. Tim, halfway around the world when Lucie vanished, was immune to that, but when he quarreled with the rich businessman funding the private search for his daughter, accusations of self-interest and even exploitation surfaced.

Lucie’s mother, Jane, on the other hand, behaved exactly as a grief-stricken mother is supposed to. In some respects, the truth about her parents’ failed marriage is as unknowable as the events of Lucie’s final hours. Unamicably divorced, Tim and Jane avoided even being in the same room together throughout the crisis. Was Jane, who seems to fall for every kind of supernatural hokum that crosses her path, pathologically vindictive, or was Tim as big a shit as she claimed? Just when you think you’ve made up your mind on that question, a new development comes along to knock you into the other camp.

As for the perpetrator himself, he remains something of a cipher to Parry, who was never able to interview him. Obsessively camera shy, Obara deftly avoided being properly photographed even after his arrest. He was clearly demented, as a long, self-justifying self-published book (disguised as the work of concerned supporters) amply demonstrates. Resolutely confident and unrepentant, Obara was also utterly unlike the vast majority of Japanese criminal defendants. (Parry explains that the justice system there depends almost completely on the ability of police investigators to shame suspects into confessing.) They simply didn’t know what to do with him. The Japanese blamed Obara’s recalcitrant behavior on his Korean ethnicity.

The Blackmans and Obara, Western-style players, descended on a criminal justice system unprepared to cope with them. “The inadequacy of its police force is one of the mysterious taboos of Japanese society,” Parry writes, “a subject that the media and politicians strain to avoid confronting, or even acknowledging.” The blunders of the police were many, but they could also be dogged investigators. Their real problem, according to Parry, is that they are good at dealing with “conventional Japanese criminals,” but when faced with the unexpected, they’re “sclerotic, unimaginative, prejudiced and procedure-bound.”

Obara behaved like a British or American criminal — taking charge of his defense, actively contesting the prosecutors, formulating a counternarrative to account for Lucie’s death. Watching how Japanese institutions responded to him, as well as to the Blackmans’ efforts to influence the investigation, proves fascinating. Since true crime, at its best, serves as a window on what a society cares about — how it constitutes not only what’s right and wrong but what’s sympathetic, reasonable, acceptable and important — the Obara trial was a most illuminating culture clash.

Parry doesn’t, however, forget what lies at the root of this drama: the death of a young woman who, whatever her doubts or flaws, had every reason to hope for a wonderful life. As the investigation would eventually reveal, this tragedy was eminently preventable. The people who tried to tip off the police about Obara were dismissed as not worth listening to. Let’s hope they’re not the only ones to learn from that mistake.

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Laura Miller

Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com. More Laura Miller.

Friday, May 18, 2012 11:45 AM UTC

Corporate criminals gone wild

The maker of the documentary film "Inside Job" has a new book excoriating Wall Street -- and President Obama

By A detail from the cover of "Predator Nation"

“Inside Job,” Charles Ferguson’s Oscar-winning documentary film on how government, Wall Street and academia colluded to deliver us the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, made a powerful case that something was very very rotten at the heart of the American political/economic nexus. His follow-up book, “Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America,” can be considered the legal brief that dots every “i” and crosses every “t” in his argument. A tightly argued, profusely footnoted and deeply enraged castigation of everyone involved, “Predator Nation” isn’t just a factually unchallengeable account of how Wall Street blew up the global economy. It’s a denunciation, a call for justice and a warning: After getting away with the crime of the century, Wall Street still isn’t satisfied.

“If you have already got 96 percent of what you want,” Ferguson told Salon, “why not take the remaining 4? That’s where the culture of American finance is right now, and I think it’s really dangerous for the country.”

For at least 30 years the United States has been headed on the wrong track, handing over more power and wealth to a tiny percent of the American population at the expense of everyone else. But Ferguson’s story isn’t just focused on the greed and recklessness of the elite. It’s also about their criminality. The bankers who wrecked the financial system broke the law. And yet, amazingly, not only have the vast majority of responsible parties not been convicted of any crime — they haven’t even been charged. There have been a few settlements of fraud allegations with the Securities and Exchange Commission and other regulatory bodies and a smattering of slap-on-the-wrist fines, but nothing that comes close to a proper reckoning for the massive hardship and economic destruction that they caused.

Ferguson’s glowering rage spares neither political party. Clinton gets the blame for completing the process of financial sector deregulation, and George W. Bush is lacerated for his general incompetence. But Barack Obama is showered with a particularly aggrieved contempt. Obama, writes Ferguson, came into office with more hope invested in him than in any recent leader, and then proceeded to “betray” and “screw” his supporters by declining to bring Wall Street to account for its misdeeds.

“Predator Nation” hits bookstores on Monday, just in time to cash in on the headlines generated by the latest banking atrocity — JPMorgan Chase’s massively failed derivatives bet.

“Predator Nation” is an angry book. Were you this angry before you started making the film “Inside Job”?

No, I absolutely was not. I remember the first time I got any kind of inkling of what was to come was in August or September 2007, when Charley Morris sent me a copy of a galley proof of his book, “The Trillion Dollar Meltdown.” It was scary and powerful, but I couldn’t bring myself to believe it. I remember calling Charley and saying, “You lay out a very convincing case but really, these people aren’t that crazy, they aren’t that stupid. They are regulated. Can it really be this bad?”

And he said: “You just wait.” And boy, he was right.

It’s not that I thought that investment bankers were like Mother Teresa. I knew that they weren’t. But the degree of nakedness and extremity of the dishonesty and its pervasiveness was a huge shock to me. It turned out that many banks, on a very large scale, and without any disclosure, had created and sold securities with the intent of betting on their failure. And this was done with the knowledge and approval of senior management of all these banks, including the oldest and most traditional.

How do you explain this behavior? How did we get to a point where it was routine for Wall Street bankers to behave in ways that most Americans would consider frankly immoral?

I think this has its roots all the way back in the 1970s and the beginning of the era of deregulation. But there was a kind of inflection point during the five-year period between 1997 and 2003 — the late Clinton and/or early Bush administration — when all the rules just went away. You went from a period, a regime, where people did have at least some concern about going to jail, to a point where everything is legal, and derivatives couldn’t be regulated at all and nobody went to jail for anything. And looking back I would say that this period definitely started under Clinton. You absolutely cannot blame this on George W. Bush.

You say that everything is now legal, but in your book you dismiss Obama’s argument that he could not prosecute Wall Street bankers for criminal behavior because what they did was technically not illegal as “complete horseshit.”

I should be more precise. I should have said, “where everything was perceived as being legal.” There was no perception that, even when you were in fact violating the law, that there would be any legal jeopardy or legal consequence to what you were doing. And that was part of my surprise when I was making “Inside Job.” I really was surprised that people would so overtly and explicitly do things that 20 years previously probably would have gotten them landed in prison.

One can certainly argue that the penalties and prosecutions following the S&L [Savings and Loan] and insider scandals of the 1980s were vastly insufficient. No doubt about that. But there still were consequences. I don’t know whether [junk bond king] Michael Milken would have still done everything he did, if he knew that he was going to spend two years in prison and have about half of his wealth confiscated. Maybe he still would have made that bet, but still, clearly he had a few unpleasant days. And now, nothing, just nothing.

In your book, you have a laundry list of things you believe the bankers could be prosecuted for, everything from securities fraud to perjury to RICO Act violations. And then you point out, more than once, that during the Obama administration there have been no arrests or indictments of any firms or senior executives “related to causing the bubble or the crisis.” What’s your explanation for this? Is it as simple as the Obama administration being captured by the financial sector?

I’m not President Obama’s psychoanalyst, so I can’t speak to what goes on inside his head. But that is what I would say of the Obama administration generally. In the book I go through the list of his personnel appointments and it’s pretty clear.

But how do we square that with the negative Wall Street reaction to bank reform? You devote only one sentence in your entire book to Dodd-Frank, calling it “weak and ridiculously complicated.” But even so, House Republicans have introduced nine bills trying to repeal parts or all of it, Romney is campaigning on repealing the whole thing, and Wall Street hates it and has tried to kill every last part of it. There is clearly antipathy against Obama from the financial sector now, from Jamie Dimon on down, that wasn’t there when he got elected. If he was truly captured, why the antipathy?

Well, there is some antipathy. But he just held a very successful fundraiser at the home of the president of private equity group Blackstone. So the antipathy is not universal.

But you know, when I was in academia and also when I was running a software company I had a fair amount of contact with portions of the financial sector, investment banking industry, and the venture capital sector. And certainly they were already pretty rapacious and pretty politically conservative. But they would never then have said and done the things that they say and do now. I recently was at a dinner in New York City and one of the people there was a very, very successful man who is on the borderline between venture capital and private equity. And this guy went into an extended rant about how he was at a disadvantage because he had to pay 15 percent capital gains taxes. When I was first dealing with venture capitalists in a significant way, the capital gains tax rate was 28 percent, and nobody was complaining. Then they got them reduced to 20 under Clinton, and then later 15 under Bush. Plus, they got a rollover provision so if they took the proceeds of a venture capital investment and rolled it over into a new venture capital investment it was tax-free. At that point, we’ve reached nirvana, what more could there be?

But now we’re in this environment where this guy was loudly and aggressively complaining that he has to pay 15 percent to the government. And if that’s where you’re at, then of course you are going to complain about Dodd-Frank. You are going to complain about everything. If you have already got 96 percent of what you want, why not take the remaining 4? That’s where the culture of American finance is right now, and I think it’s really dangerous for the country.

Do you find it alarming that even after this huge crisis and even with a lot of populist anger on both the right and the left focused on Wall Street, Mitt Romney is running for president while promising to further deregulate Wall Street and repeal Dodd-Frank, and the polls show him neck and neck with Obama?

That is true, but I don’t think that Romney is going to get votes primarily or even secondarily for that. Most of the votes he is going to get will be because he’s religious, he’s against gay marriage, et cetera, all of these allegedly “values” issues — things like that and wanting to reduce taxes. That’s why he is going to get a substantial fraction of the popular vote. The reason he says he wants to roll back Dodd-Frank is not to get votes, it is to get money.

Ninety-nine percent of your book tells a story of how we’ve gotten ourselves into a bigger and bigger mess, and then you’ve got about a page and a half discussing what could be done to fix it. But your solutions — a legitimate third-party alternative, controlling the influence of money in politics, real tax reform, fixing education — it’s just really hard to see how we get from our current problems to those bullet points.

Yes. And we’re not. Not right now. I think it’s going to take things getting worse, either slowly or fast. Either we continue to melt away for another 25 years and then finally people wake up, or there might be another crisis. And maybe that will be sufficient. We’ll see. I don’t know. I’d be interested in your own view of this. I’ve had debates with several of my friends on this question. If Obama had really had the balls to try to do the various kind of things that he’d promised to do, or kinda sorta almost promised to do during his campaign, if he really made an effort, how far do you think he could have gotten in 2009?

At this point, I’m in the camp that believes that American government is completely broken. And we didn’t really find out how broken it was until Obama came in. In your book, you talk about Obama coming in withoverwhelming majorities, but he really only had 60 votes in the Senate from July 2009, when Al Franken was finally sworn in, to January 2010, when Scott Brown took over Ted Kennedy’s seat. And even the things that Obama did get through had to pass muster with a handful of very conservative Democrats. Nebraska’s Ben Nelson had control over the entire government. It’s a completely dysfunctional system. I think Obama severely underestimated what he was facing when he came in, and picked the wrong strategy of trying to go bipartisan, but it’s not as if he had the freedom to do what he wanted that Roosevelt enjoyed when he became president in 1932.

But there are an awful lot of things that the president can do even without the Congress. He didn’t have to choose the people he chose. He didn’t have to choose the attorney general he chose or the head of the criminal division of the Justice Department that he chose. I think that if he had said, I’m going to allocate $500 million to a special prosecutor’s office, and we’re going to find out what the fuck happened here, he could have done that.

There’s some talk now that JPMorgan’s disastrous bet on credit default swaps might lead to tighter regulation. I have to say, it was bizarre to be speed-reading your book while the Morgan news was causing post-traumatic stress flashbacks to the worst days of the financial crisis. Does what happened there fit into the narrative of “Predator Nation”?

I rather think so, yes. Mr. Dimon has long been largely correctly regarded as the best, most judicious, most careful steward of a major global bank. That he and his bank could make a mistake like this does not bode well. One thing that has actually not been widely discussed, somewhat to my surprise, in the commentary about all of this, is that this mistake — which it appears will cost them between $2 billion and $5 billion — this occurred in a very forgiving economic environment. If they made a mistake like this in September 2008, then things could look really quite different.

Does it qualify as criminal behavior?

There is some suggestion of criminality in the lack of honesty on disclosure of the positions and their potential implications. I can’t say; we don’t know enough yet. It certainly is the case that JPMorgan, although more prudent than many other banks over the last decade, has frequently been just as dishonest. It has done a number of extremely unethical things, some of which I mention in the book. So it wouldn’t be a surprise if they had not been forthcoming about this.

Do you think it will make any difference in how banks are regulated?

I fear not. Honestly. I’m sure that Mr. Dimon is momentarily chastised, and that JPMorgan will not be making any similar bets in the next couple of years. But is it going to change the overall posture of bankers and banking and is it going to change the regulatory environment in any significant way? I tend to doubt that. Unfortunately.

So where does this leave us? Your book is filled with a strong sense of personal outrage. How do you personally feel about the prospect that the only thing that could get us out of the mess we’re in is yet another crisis, perhaps even worse than the one we just lived through?

Personally, I am very fortunate. I have a very blessed life. I made some money earlier, I’m basically pretty financially secure. I can’t have private jets and private islands but I don’t have to worry about having a roof over my head or being able to eat well, unlike many people in this country going forward. And I do work that I love. I love making movies, I love writing books. Personally I’m fine.

But the country is not. But this happens to countries. This is not the first country it’s happened to. It’s not even the first time it happened to the United States. We’ll see whether we come out of it. Last time it happened we came out of it, eventually. It took a long time and it was very painful but eventually we came out of it. Will that happen again or not, I don’t know, I honestly don’t.

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Andrew Leonard

Andrew Leonard is a staff writer at Salon. On Twitter, @koxinga21. More Andrew Leonard.

Thursday, May 17, 2012 12:00 AM UTC

Can you identify?

Science shows that the only way around some readers' prejudices is to trick them

By (Credit: Shutterstock/Salon)

The news of recent research documenting how readers identify with the main characters in stories has mostly been taken as confirmation of the value of literary role models. Lisa Libby, an assistant professor at Ohio State University and co-author of a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, explained that subjects who read a short story in which the protagonist overcomes obstacles in order to vote were more likely to vote themselves several days later.

The suggestibility of readers isn’t news. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s novel of a sensitive young man destroyed by unrequited love, “The Sorrows of Young Werther,” inspired a rash of suicides by would-be Werthers in the late 1700s. Jack Kerouac has launched a thousand road trips. Still, this is part of science’s job: Running empirical tests on common knowledge — if for no other reason than because common knowledge (and common sense) is often wrong.

A far more unsettling finding is buried in this otherwise up-with-reading news item. The Ohio State researchers gave 70 heterosexual male readers stories about a college student much like themselves. In one version, the character was straight. In another, the character is described as gay early in the story. In a third version the character is gay, but this isn’t revealed until near the end. In each case, the readers’ “experience-taking” — the name these researchers have given to the act of immersing oneself in the perspective, thoughts and emotions of a story’s protagonist — was measured.

The straight readers were far more likely to take on the experience of the main character if they weren’t told until late in the story that he was different from themselves. This, too, is not so surprising. Human beings are notorious for extending more of their sympathy to people they perceive as being of their own kind. But the researchers also found that readers of the “gay-late” story showed “significantly more favorable attitudes toward homosexuals” than the other two groups of readers, and that they were less likely to attribute stereotypically gay traits, such as effeminacy, to the main character. The “gay-late” story actually reduced their biases (conscious or not) against gays, and made them more empathetic. Similar results were found when white readers were given stories about black characters to read.

What can we do with this information? If we subscribe to the idea that literature ought to improve people’s characters — and that’s the sentiment that seems to be lurking behind the study itself — then perhaps authors and publishers should be encouraged to conceal a main character’s race or sexual orientation from readers until they become invested in him or her. Who knows how much J.K. Rowling’s revelation that Albus Dumbledore is gay, announced after the publication of the final Harry Potter book, has helped to combat homophobia? (Although I confess that I find it hard to believe there were that many homophobic Potter fans in the first place.)

Absurd as this tactic may sound, many publishers are already kind of doing it — and catching hell. Although the term “whitewashing” is most often used to describe film and TV adaptations in which white actors are cast as characters who were people of color in the original book, something similar also happens with book graphics. Novels about black or Asian characters have been given cover art that features white people.

Controversies over cover-art whitewashing, and other attempts by agents, editors and publishers to downplay or even eliminate minority characters, have roiled the world of young adult literature in recent years. The author Justine Larbalestier (who is white) wrote a YA novel, “Liar,” with a black heroine in 2009, but her publisher insisted on using a photograph of a white teenager for the cover. Larbalestier took their disagreement public and the ensuing scandal persuaded the publisher to back down. Ursula K. Le Guin, a revered science-fiction and fantasy author who has often chosen dark-skinned people as her protagonists, has had to put up with seeing them depicted as white in cover art and film adaptations for decades.

Publishers argue that they’re only trying to make sure their authors’ books find the widest possible audience. What they mean is that a certain percentage of white (or straight) readers will summarily conclude a book isn’t for them if the face on the cover fails to resemble their own. Sad to say, the publishers are probably right about that. While the readers in the Ohio State study didn’t get to choose the stories they read, many of them were deciding how much to invest in the protagonist and his experiences — how much to identify — on the basis of his sexual orientation or race.

Authors, fans and observers are rightly disgusted by the practice of cover-art whitewashing. It shouldn’t have to be that way. But some commentators on the controversy seem to think that if publishers act as if race or gender or sexual orientation isn’t a factor in what many people decide to read, somehow it will simply stop being a factor. This seems unlikely. If it were so easy to rid people of their prejudices, the world would already be a much pleasanter place. It takes regular exposure to different types of people in the course of everyday life — at school and in the military, the workplace and the neighborhood — plus a whole lot of time and peer pressure to wear bias down.

Well, it takes that — and maybe the magic of storytelling? The readers in the Ohio State study did become more understanding of gay and black people after they were (let’s not put too fine a point on it) tricked into identifying with them. This type of sleight-of-hand is something only a non-visual medium like prose fiction can pull off. It can firmly lodge readers inside an imaginary person’s head without ever showing them his or her face. In Neil Gaiman’s “Anansi Boys,” for example, the narrator never explains that all the principle characters are black, and each reader will come to that realization at a different stage in the narrative. It’s Gaiman’s way of tweaking the very common readerly assumption that defaults all major characters to white unless their race is otherwise specified. (And sometimes not even then, as quite a few young fans of “The Hunger Games” demonstrated by being astonished when a supporting character, clearly described as black in the novel, was played by a black actress in the film.)

Of course, not all readers are white or straight, and the ones who aren’t deeply appreciate novels that advertise the diversity of their characters. It’s about time they got heroes and heroines who looked like them, and novels that speak to their distinctive experiences. They have been identifying with characters across the boundaries of race, gender and sexual orientation from time immemorial, and are masters of the art, but understandably they’d like to give their ninja skills a rest. Furthermore, there are also white readers who prefer variety in their fiction or are deliberately trying to correct the imbalances of the past.

Nevertheless, if you believe, as many Americans have since the days of the Puritans, that books ought to morally improve their readers, then maybe there’s a place for a little judicious whitewashing in the writing and publication of fiction. It has literally been demonstrated to change hearts and minds, at least for a while. That’s more than many consciousness-raising efforts — including righteous lectures delivered by the enlightened — can say.

Further reading

Ohio State University’s research blog on the study of the experience-taking while reading stories

The Booksmugglers blog on notable recent instances of book-cover whitewashing in YA.

Ursula K. Le Guin writes for Slate about the changes made to the race of major characters in the TV adaptation of her “Earthsea Trilogy.”

Hunger Games Tweets, a Tumblr compiling and discussing the response of some fans to the casting of a black actress as a supporting character in the film version of Suzanne Collins’ novel.

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Laura Miller

Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com. More Laura Miller.

Sunday, May 13, 2012 9:00 PM UTC

“The Aleppo Codex”: The bizarre history of a precious book

A reporter traces the shadowy fate of the definitive version of the Hebrew Bible

By Matti Friedman

An ancient and priceless book, a murky history of evasions and coverups, an underground of sinister and possibly violent dealers, a former spy who drops tantalizing hints and a wily 84-year-old millionaire who says stuff like, “The problem with this story is that it could damage your health”: Are these the ingredients for a cheesy, improbable historical thriller? Yet “The Aleppo Codex,” Matti Friedman’s account of his attempts to learn the history of one of the world’s most precious books, sports all of these assets, and it’s nonfiction. If reporting this story damaged Friedman’s health, it probably happened when he realized what he’d stumbled into and his reporter’s heart started beating in doubletime.

The Aleppo Codex is the most authoritative version of the Hebrew Bible, produced in the 10th century by the great rabbi Aaron Ben-Asher and the scribe Shlomo ben Buya. Friedman, who lives in Israel and has covered the Mideast and the Caucasus for the Associated Press and other publications, explains that the codex’s significance to Jewish faith and identity is more than symbolic. As a people scattered across the globe, “instead of being bound by a king, a temple, or geography, [Jews] needed to be bound by something else, something portable. What emerged was the idea that a people could be held together by words.” Yet in the centuries before printing, when words were transmitted orally and by copyists, it was all too easy for mistakes and variations to creep in, and “Jews could not be held together by a book if they were not reading precisely the same one.”

The codex was the perfect version of the Bible, a sort of atomic clock of Judaism, and intended to be the model for all subsequent copies. Its early history was fraught: captured by Crusaders in the fall of Jerusalem, ransomed by the Jewish community in Cairo and consulted by the fabled sage Maimonides, it was eventually taken to the Syrian city of Aleppo. There, it resided for half a century. Although it was well-cared-for by Aleppo’s Jewish community, it had come to be revered as a relic or treasure; few were allowed to see it and no one was allowed to copy it.

All that changed in 1947, when the establishment of the state of Israel by a United Nations resolution led to unrest in the Arab world and the harassment and persecution of Jewish communities in Muslim nations. In Aleppo, this took the form of riots and the sacking of the synagogue. The codex — commonly referred to as the Crown — was supposed to have been consumed in a fire set by the mob.

It was not, and in 1958, the Crown was smuggled into Jerusalem by a cheese merchant who was one of the few Syrian Jews to receive official permission to emigrate to Israel. Friedman became interested in this “lonely treasure and millennium-old traveler” in 2008, when he decided to write an article about it. He imagined the piece would be “an uplifting and uncomplicated account of the rescue of a cultural artifact,” but what he discovered instead was a thicket of conflicting reports, missing records, puzzling omissions, stonewalling officials and obsessed amateur sleuths.

The mysteries surround not the ancient history of the book, but what happened to it between 1947 and the mid-1970s, although even establishing where things got dodgy proved to be a challenge. Friedman relates each piece of the story as he untangled it himself, and part of the pleasure of “The Aleppo Codex” is getting to tag along on the heels of a real-life investigative journalist as he does his detective work. Those years spent writing wire copy have not eroded the author’s eloquence, either, as the book’s headier touches attest: “Down in those streets, the stores now shuttered, the women of the manzul were receiving clients, and the men were submerged in cafe smoke like deep-sea divers, tubes between their lips, inhaling the rose-scented oxygen of water pipes.”

While the official story simply states that the Crown was presented to the president of Israel, Itzhak Ben-Zvi, upon its arrival in Jerusalem in 1958, Friedman unearthed evidence that this was no simple handoff. Most of the Jewish community of Aleppo had immigrated to Israel, and their rabbis insisted that the Crown was supposed to have been delivered to them. The cheese merchant maintained that the rabbis still living in Aleppo, the ones who had passed him the book, told him no more than to give it to “a religious man.” (The Syrian government prevented communication with the Jews in Aleppo, so his story could not be confirmed or disproved.) The Aleppo rabbis decided to take their complaint to court.

This dispute embodied major tensions within the newly formed state. The Aleppo rabbis had presided over what was, as Friedman writes, “an old community by the time Roman legions destroyed the Jewish temple in Jerusalem in AD 70.” The Israeli leadership, “largely secular European socialists,” did not strike the Aleppo Jews as “representing the entire Jewish people.” Why should these interlopers be allowed to appropriate a book that had been the focal point of Aleppo’s venerable Jewish community for half a millennium?

The codex lawsuit was also a dramatic example of what Friedman describes as a “largely untold story” concerning the migration of the Jewish Diaspora to Israel after the formation of the state. Along with the movement of people, there was also a “great migration of books.” Jews from all over the Muslim world were forced to leave neighborhoods their families had inhabited for centuries. Not only did distinctive local cultures vanish overnight, but so did many of their treasured texts, left at docks and airstrips with the promise that they would be forwarded on to their owners in Israel, and then never seen again. Well, not exactly never: Some of these books and scrolls turned up later in state archives and even in booksellers’ shops.

If that were all there was to the story of the Aleppo Codex, it would be fascinating (and dismaying) enough, but after wrestling with the shadowy story of how the Crown got to Jerusalem, Friedman turns to a second and even more disturbing question: Where is the rest of it? About 200 pages, some 40 percent of the Crown, are missing. These are the most important parts of all: the first five books of the Bible, also known as the Pentateuch and the Torah. Again, the official story holds that portions of the Crown were burned in the 1947 fire, but this has since been disproved. A couple of single pages have been found in places as far-flung as Brooklyn, N.Y., where they were carried around by Aleppo old-timers as good-luck charms. The bulk of the Torah, however, remains MIA.

This is where Friedman’s investigation gets especially lively, as he consults with a former Mossad case officer and secretly records an impromptu interview with one of the dozen or so men rich enough to have bought the missing pages. Supposedly, this collector and his daughter were approached by two dealers with a briefcase at a Jerusalem book fair in the 1980s. They were shown an old codex identified as part of the Crown, but the collector says he refused to buy it because the price was too high. One of the dealers later turned up dead in a Tel Aviv hotel room registered to a man who didn’t exist.

Friedman has his suspicions about the collector’s story: Would this man really consider $1 million too much to pay for a supposedly priceless text? He devotes most of his energy, however, to getting to the bottom of who is responsible for ripping out the heart of the Crown and selling it on the black market. As he settles on three likely culprits, “The Aleppo Codex” builds to a moral crescendo more impressive than the climactic fight scene in any thriller. “A volume that survived one thousand years of turbulent history was betrayed in our times by the people charged with guarding it,” Friedman writes. “We might file this tale between Cain and Abel and the golden calf, parables about the many ways we fail.”

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Laura Miller

Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com. More Laura Miller.

Saturday, May 12, 2012 7:00 PM UTC

Augusten Burroughs: Conquer trauma by letting it go

Salon exclusive: The best-selling memoirist says past horrors haunt us because we think about them too much. Stop

By Augusten Burroughs
Excerpted from "This Is How" by Augusten Burroughs. Copyright © 2012 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Press, LLC.

Many people continue to feel influenced and even controlled by the things that happened to them a long time ago. Sometimes, people harbor dark, traumatic memories from childhood. Or fragments of memories — incomplete scenes, uncomfortable feelings, perhaps even a sense of certainty that something specific and terrible happened to them, but little more than this.

Others experienced something traumatic in adulthood that continues to affect them day to day many years later. Maybe an assault has left a person afraid to leave their home or enter a particular neighborhood.

For a certain kind of person this will be the end of the story. What ever experience they endured essentially continues to this day, ever present in the background, shaping the choices made on a daily basis, affecting the quality and range of their life. This kind of person might be angry all the time or feel guilty or afraid. They just accept these states as a part of themselves.

Then there are people who are keenly aware of their experiences, who are psychologically ambitious; they wish to “get over” these historical traumas and might see a therapist to help them.

The therapeutic process takes time, commitment, and funding. Then, insight leads to understanding, which leads to choice. At last, they are free to move on.

It’s such a clean, well-defined structure for the process of healing. Almost like a paint-by-numbers portrait where all those black outlines are confusing at first, but in time, as you apply the correct colors in the right areas, the tangle of lines resolves into a perfectly clear image.

Unfortunately, our brains tend to color outside the line. First, there is the matter of understanding our past and the events that transpired.

Understanding what happened in the past is rarely truly possible. Because true understanding must incorporate context. Not merely what we experienced, but why. And the why requires knowing the motivations of the other people involved. Without the perspective of this context, our understanding will always be biased; it will be from a single perspective: Ours. And therefore, not necessarily accurate or true.

If you are on a highway and you drive past a car accident so severe that the hood of the car has been crushed up against the windshield, you may very well assume the occupants are dead. And perhaps this will haunt you because as you passed by the car, you glimpsed a little girl’s doll on the shelf behind the backseat. One look at that accident was all anybody would need to know what “unsurvivable” looked like. And you have never been able to forget that doll or the little girl who must have loved it and who died in such a terrible crumple of steel and glass. Let’s imagine that you are haunted by dreams where you come upon the accident and you see the doll and you do nothing.

Let’s say that what was unknown to you was that the car was a high-end Mercedes that featured crumple zones designed to absorb the impact of a crash while protecting the occupants within a safety cage. And let’s say that the two occupants inside the car were sitting there as you drove by and the man in the driver’s seat was on his cell phone.

“No, I mean totally like, trashed, totaled. We’re waiting; they’re supposed to send a tow truck. She’s good except she has to pee so she’s—”

“Oh my God, did you just tell Jason that I have to pee? Now he’s going to imagine me peeing. Don’t forget to tell him we found the doll at a tag sale but we need to buy wrapping paper. At least we think it’s the doll.”

“You hear that? Yeah, don’t think about her peeing. And we’re pretty sure it’s the right doll; we had to spend like three hours on Craigslist to find one.”

Imagine that after the tow truck arrives and our couple has been safely installed into a rental vehicle, they don’t really ever think about that crash again except both are pleased with the new car’s color. Neither liked the wrecked Mercedes’ particular shade of red.

In this example, you can see how your entire perception of what happened — and you were a witness — is completely distorted by your point of view.

So, if you were to enter therapy over being disturbed by this wreck, you could spend years discussing why the sight of the doll was so upsetting, and how impotent you felt being unable to stop and help but even if you could stop, what could you have done?

Possibly, the therapist would have you write letters to the dead little girl.

What this really accomplishes is the creation of a sort of personal myth. A series of well-remembered events with finely honed details. As accurate as they may be, they are accurate from only one perspective.

For many years, I believed that one’s past had to be fully understood in order to move through and beyond it. I see now that I was wrong about this. I know now that scrutinizing one’s past and trying to gain understanding and “make peace” with it is a kind of addiction that keeps one focused on the past and not on the present.

As with any addiction, the first step to overcoming it is to see it.

And once you see it, you have to stop it.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - -

Once the current moment moves into the past, it is entirely gone. It ceases to exist except in documents, photographs, and an impression left in a sofa cushion. The past — and all the moments it contained — are no longer sharing this world with us.

They are no more real than Cinderella.

To spend time — year after year — in therapy or on your own thinking about your past and forming conclusions and stitching the elements into a narrative that you can name, “the truth,” in order to be “free” of it, is not how you become free from your past.

The past does not need to be reconsidered in the present and given a structure. The events of the past cannot be understood when you are the only element of the past actively engaged in reliving it.

When somebody says, “Therapy has been really helpful to me in terms of resolving some of my issues from the past,” what does this actually, in practical terms, mean?

Or somebody is “haunted” or controlled by their past. How is this possible?

When I first moved to New York, I became friends with a guy who seemed to be exactly the guy I wanted to be. He was very outgoing and had lots of friends and they probably all felt as I did: Like his best and closest friend.

After we’d been friends for almost a year, one night we were out drinking and he told me he had a confession to make, something he wanted me to know about himself.

I nodded and tried to look very sincere and open, while inside my mind it was the Kentucky Derby, with most of the money being placed on female-to-male transsexual. That wasn’t it.

He proceeded to tell me in great detail about the utterly atrocious physical abuse he’d experienced at the hands of his father and mother during his childhood. It was well beyond anything I myself had ever come close to experiencing.

After this evening, my friend spoke of his past abuse frequently. And I realized that all the time we’d been friends, all those moments prior to his revelation had probably been, in his mind, moments leading up to The Telling.

Only after The Telling could he be fully himself with me. His story of his past abuse was a large part of his identity. It was a protected secret that was kept out of view for acquaintances and coworkers. Only after a measure of trust and intimacy had been formed would there be almost a ceremony in which he detailed his abuse. Rather like unwrapping, slowly, an extravagant gift one knows is going to blow the mind of the recipient.

When we first became friends it had amazed me that he was single. I now understood that he was single because of
how guys reacted when my friend finally revealed his history. It was like encountering a new person. And my friend’s abuse was now like a third person with us wherever we went.

Who could blame him? It was a wonder he was still alive.

Today, I see it differently.

My friend is a dramatic example of somebody who is haunted by their past. But because the past is gone, how does it haunt? Of course, it does not. The past does not haunt us. We haunt the past. We allow our minds to focus in that direction. We open memories and examine them. We re-experience emotions we felt during the painful events we experienced because we are recalling them in as much detail as we can.

We enter therapy and discuss our past. We formulate opinions about what happened. We create a rich, detailed world. In therapy or on our own, we focus our attention on something that no longer exists in order to understand or have perspective or acknowledge or own what has happened. And only after we decide this understanding or recognition has taken place do we stop worrying that particular tooth with our tongue.

For years, I believed this was how to live.

I was wrong. It’s how to stagnate.

I know now how to get over the past. It has worked for me in a deeper, more enduring way than any therapy I have ever had.

Writing six autobiographical books is what freed me from my past.

If the books had been cookbooks I expect I would feel just exactly as free. That I wrote six books about my past is the red herring; nothing I have written has in any way altered the past or healed me clean, so no scar remains.

Perhaps the process of writing — being fully in the moment, while I write letter by letter — has soothed me because it’s kept me busy. When you’re busy, you lack the time to fondle your emotional baggage. And if that sounds too reductive, remember we crawled from the swamp. Simple isn’t such a terrible thing to be in this respect.

For the same reason, being out of a job and just hanging around is depressing in a thousand different ways. All you have is time. Sooner or later, you end up wandering around bad neighborhoods inside your head. Neighborhoods like, “They never should have fired me, those assholes.” Which may be true or it may be untrue but it’s irrelevant to everything. It is through work that challenged me and required continuous freshness that I began to occupy not the past but this, right now. My advertising career had not been challenging. Being busy is not the same as being focused. Being focused means being here.

And this, here, this line, that comma.

That’s what freed me from the past. The present kidnapped me. I climbed into its car when it held up its hand and showed me the candy. I hopped right in.

When something from my past upsets me here in my present, it’s because I let my mind think back to the past and grab hold of something.

This is how the past haunts us. We think about it.

Therapy could be of tremendous benefit to “getting over” one’s past if the therapy is focused on specific ways to stop submitting to the temptation to obsess.

Many people with difficult histories carry these histories with them, burnishing the past with each retelling. Sometimes, a particular trauma may be the largest thing we have ever experienced. So we kind of move into it, make it our home. Because there’s nothing in our lives on the scale of that loss or that trauma.

So, you need a larger life. Something that can successfully compete with your past.

To live with your mind in the past — in the name of healing or understanding or overcoming — is to live in a fantasy world where nothing new or original is created. To “understand” one’s past is to handle clay that no longer exists and shape it into a bowl nobody can ever see or touch.

Denial of the painful events in one’s past is the same as obsessing over one’s past. To actively refuse to discuss or think about, if need be, what happened is to imbue it with power. Recycling the past into a new business, a not-for-profit to help others, a workshop, a painting, a book, a song — these are ways to explore the past in the context of the present. These are things people who are actively alive do.

You must never allow something that happened to you to become a morbidly treasured heirloom that you carry around, show people occasionally, put back in its black velvet pouch, and then tuck back into your jacket where you can keep it close to your heart.

Then, when asked to join the pole vaulting club, pull the coach aside and whisper, “I can’t. See” — and remove your gem from your pocket — “this is my terrible thing and as I expected, showing it to you has taken your breath away and made you sympathetic. So I will be excused, I assume?”

Other people will allow you — they will never blame you or challenge you — to use your past as an excuse to not face the normal fears everybody has when facing their future. Even if you were brutally physically assaulted, you must not withdraw because you are afraid it will happen again. This is not a valid exit.

Your fears that it might happen again are perfectly reasonable and justified: It might happen again.

Many people believe that if something really bad happens to them, they have paid their dues and nothing else really bad can happen again. But on the day you attend your mother’s funeral or declare personal bankruptcy, there is no law in the universe that prevents you from also getting a speeding ticket and your first grey hair.

When multiple bad things happen, it can feel like “life is out to get you.” It’s not. And it’s not a sign, either. What you do is, you keep going. You stop waiting for fairness.

- – - – - – - – - – - – -

You do not need to work through your past so you can heal. You need to move forward and then you’re as healed as you’re likely to be.

Unless.

Unless you experienced something so unspeakably terrible, something so out of scale in magnitude that it simply doesn’t fit into the past. It is too large to be contained by time or space. And if this is you, the thing you can do for the duration of your existence is to tell your story over and over. So that other people can hear you tell it and they can be moved, changed by it. This can help others.

Which is the single comfort for people who will always remain locked in their history, inside something that is really a different species of awful.

I met somebody whose grandfather had survived the death camps in Germany.

He told me that his grandfather was a very quiet, broken man. He rarely spoke and when he did, he told the same stories about how he survived.

I told him, “Do you listen, every time he tells you?”

He said, “No, I just kind of let him talk and do my thing; I’ve heard it all a thousand times.”

I wondered if he had ever truly heard it once. I suggested he listen, hang on every word and try to see visuals in his mind of the story his grandfather was telling him.

Some stories must be carved into the present and the future by telling and telling again and then again until the story is part of us.

From “This Is How” by Augusten Burroughs. Copyright © 2012 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Press, LLC.

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Augusten Burroughs' many books include "Runnning With Scissors," "Dry," "Sellevision," "Magical Thinking" and "Possible Side Effects." His latest book is "This Is How." More Augusten Burroughs.

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