Gone to Texas

Originally published in 1973 by Whippoorwill Publishers as The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales, reprinted in 1975 by Delacorte Press as Gone to Texas, reprinted in 1980 by Dell as The Outlaw Josey Wales, and in 1989 as Josey Wales (publisher unknown), this was the basis for the 1976 Clint Eastwood movie The Outlaw Josey Wales. I read the sequel, The Vengeance Trail of Josey Wales, before I read this book, and I actually liked the sequel somewhat better than the original.

Josey Wales is a Tennessee mountain man whose wife and child were killed by pro-Unionist "Redleg" marauders from Kansas a few years before the American Civil War; enraged and thirsting for vengeance on all "bluebellies," he serves under "Bloody" Bill Anderson in the latter's guerrilla war against the Redlegs and, subsequently, Union troops. This short novel (228 pgs.) follows Josey's frequently violent adventures as he sneaks out of a too-hot-to-handle Missouri after the defeat of the Confederacy and drifts to southwest Texas, into Comanche territory.

The action is suitably rough (though not as rough as in Vengeance Trail), the historical details are deftly sketched (I would've been happy with a little more background information, actually), and the plot advances quickly enough to forestall any doldrums; but Carter's prose is even more amateurish here than in Vengeance Trail and his punctuation choices -- chiefly the over-reliance on ellipses -- are more annoying and puzzling. Carter manages to be more trite in his "deep thoughts" than I remembered him being in Vengeance Trail, as well as more sexist; he also sneaked in a perhaps unconscious bit of male chauvinism in a symbolic passage: "out of the hush that followed, a male thrush sent his trilling call of life across the valley" (p. 202 [Chapter 20]).

Perhaps Josey's philosophy is best summed up in one of his lengthier speeches, addressed to the elderly leader of a Comanche war party, Ten Bears (a real person whose real name was Paruasemana), towards the end of the book:

"'What ye and me cares about has been butchered...raped. It's been done by them lyin', double-tongued snakes thet run guv'mints. Guv'mints lie...promise...back-stab...eat in yore lodge and rape yore women and kill when ye sleep on their promises. Guv'mints don't live together...men live together. From guv'mints ye cain't git a fair word...ner a fair fight.'" (Chapter 20; p. 199)

I said it in my review of Vengeance Trail, but I'll say it again: ultimately Carter himself may well be more interesting than anything he's written: Forrest Carter was the nom de plume of an Alabama segregationist named Asa Earl Carter who was a white supremacist DJ who was fired for being too racist (he also broke with the Alabama Citizen's Council because he refused to tone down his anti-Semitic screeds, whereas the ACC preferred a strictly anti-Negro focus); he went on to become Governor George Wallace's speechwriter, and also founded an independent Ku Klux Klan group and the pro-segregationist monthly The Southerner. As "Forrest Carter" he wrote a fictional "memoir" titled The Education of Little Tree, which purported to relate the life of a part-Cherokee Indian; Oprah Winfrey withdrew her recommendation of the book after she learned of the author's past, thirteen years after blessing it with her imprimatur.

Carter's two Josey Wales novels are little more than the output of a competent and promising, though still unpolished, writer of pulp fiction; Carter's action scenes never quite rise to the heights attained by the likes of Robert E. Howard and Edgar Rice Burroughs at their best (and I can't help but contrast Carter's references to the murderous violence along the Missouri-Kansas border in the 1850s and 1860s with Charles Portis's allusions to same in his novel True Grit), but these books do make acceptable diversions, if one is willing to set Carter's problematic (to put it kindly) past aside and let his work stand alone. (As I noted in my review of Vengeance, I can't help but wonder if Carter was, in some way, trying to atone in his later years -- he would die in 1979 -- with his books that sought to present people of good character who didn't share his skin tone or cultural background.) ( )