42 pages • 1 hour read
Forrest CarterThe Education of Little Tree
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 1976A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “Little Tree”
Content Warning: These analyses discuss racism, racist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), and racist speech.
A young boy’s mother dies, and the family must decide where the boy is to go now that he is an orphan. Nobody in the family can agree until the boy clings to his grandfather’s leg; seeing this, everyone decides that he can go with his grandparents. The boy, Little Tree, and his grandparents board the bus home after dark; the driver and passengers laugh and make fun of the three, but Little Tree does not understand this and mistakes it for friendliness. When they arrive at the cabin in the wilds of Tennessee, Granma soothes Little Tree to sleep by singing him a song about the woods welcoming “Little Tree” to them; this song is where Little Tree gets his name.
Chapter 2 Summary: “The Way”
Granpa and Little Tree go into the upper mountains to trap turkeys. While they are out, Granpa uses this time to teach his grandson about “The Way,” which teaches that nature weeds out the weak and allows the strong to thrive. This principle strengthens all creatures, because the strong must continually become stronger to survive. Little Tree’s understanding of “The Way” is put to the test when Granpa asks him to pick which turkey from their trapped choices that they should take home. Little Tree chooses the weakest-looking turkey, and Granpa praises Little Tree’s ability to work within “The Way.”
Chapter 3 Summary: “Shadows on a Cabin Wall”
As part of Little Tree’s education, he and Granpa regularly visit the library where they pick up books that Granma reads to them. They learn about classic books, such as Shakespeare’s plays, and they also read about historical figures. Granpa likes George Washington because Washington convinces him that good politicians can exist. Granma accidentally shatters the illusion by reading part of a book that reveals that Washington implemented an added whiskey tax. Afterwards, Granpa loses respect for Washington but claims that he must have had a head injury and been in an uncertain mental state to put the tax in place after all the good he did before that moment.
Chapter 4 Summary: “Fox and Hounds”
Little Tree watches the hounds and the fox play a game in which the hounds hunt the fox, and the fox works to throw off the hounds. To do this, the fox runs in wide circles around the mountain and slowly makes the loops smaller, drawing itself closer to its den for safety. When the hounds get close, it uses the creek to disguise its scent and hide its comings and goings, and it even uses the rocks in the middle of the creek to trick the hounds to fall into the water. Granpa explains the game and the process to Little Tree so that he can understand what he is seeing and develop an appreciation for the wisdom and cunning of nature’s wildlife.
Chapters 1-4 Analysis
Presented in memoir format, The Education of Little Tree is broken up into chapters, and each chapter reflects one specific moment that Asa Earl Carter wants to highlight as a significant moment in the character’s life. These moments range from Little Tree’s arrival and many learning opportunities with Granpa and include his experiences when he finally leaves the mountain. The novel is also a bildungsroman, or a Coming of Age story. These first four chapters set the stage for the journey that he will undergo by providing a basis upon which he builds new lessons and experiences as the years go by.
Chapter 1 brings Little Tree to his new home and introduces him to the mountain that symbolizes the journey he must undergo to grow from a child to an adult. Carter introduces Little Tree as a shy character who speaks little and only expresses his desires through actions, such as clinging to his grandfather’s leg and refusing to let go. He is also naïve, because he misinterprets the intentions behind the words and actions of the other passengers on the bus; he also has no idea how to survive the wilderness he is entering. He must learn the lessons that both the mountain and his grandparents, have to teach him so that he can embody the nature-oriented themes and morals of the narrative.
Chapter 2 teaches Little Tree the first and most important lesson he will learn: the Respect for Nature, which is shown by respecting what his grandfather calls “The Way.” “The Way” is an understanding that the weak cannot survive to give birth to weak creatures; by this process, all of nature is strengthened. As he learns and grows, Little Tree becomes comfortable in the wilds of the mountain. His need to respect nature comes to the forefront as his grandfather teaches him about the ways in which the principles of wildlife work. His first lesson on the behaviors of animals occurs in Chapter 4 when he observes his family’s hounds chasing a fox around the upper areas of the mountain. As the fox plays a clever game with the hounds, the chapter explores the wily side of nature’s animals, for the fox learns the habits of the dog and adapts his behaviors to account for what he knows the dogs will do. Little Tree, too, must learn to become like the fox and adapt to new situations by learning how others behave. The battle of wits between fox and hounds therefore becomes a microcosm of the situations that Little Tree will one day meet when he faces the people of the settlement.
Chapter 3 introduces the wisdom of the novel’s second “Sage” character archetype, Granma. Whereas Granpa is wise in the ways of the woods, Granma has more traditional learning to pass on to Little Tree. Carter chooses to make the family’s primary reading sources classic literature, such as the works of William Shakespeare, and he gives Granpa a role model in George Washington. This stylistic choice creates a contradiction in viewpoints. On one hand, Little Tree must learn what Carter presents as being the ways of the Cherokee tribe, by learning “The Way” and becoming one with nature. On the other hand, Carter’s inherent bias is betrayed in the fact that Little Tree and his grandparents have “white savior” characters to serve as their role models. They do not discuss people of their own tribe who would easily fill those same roles. Instead, Carter makes the choice to use the mainstream classics—the men who took the land from the Native American people—and makes these figures the people that Granpa and Little Tree are supposed to look up to and admire uncritically.
Thus, although the story follows the memoir format, it is a work of pure fiction that displays a range of problematic biases and cannot be read as a typical memoir. However, it can be read with a critical awareness of the challenges that Carter’s perspective brings to the characters he writes. Rather than standing as authentic portrayals, the characters become caricatures that look and act a certain way to fill roles that reflect the author’s ingrained prejudices rather than his enlightenment. This fact is made abundantly clear in Carter’s stylistic choice to force his caricatures to look up to the heroes of the American nation rather than the heroes of the Cherokee people.
