The Learning Tree by Gordon Parks

First published: 1963

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Domestic realism

Time of work: Mid-1920’s

Locale: Cherokee Flats, a small town in Kansas

Principal Characters:

• Newton Buchanan Winger, the protagonist, a young boy
• Sarah Winger, Newt’s mother, the keystone of the Winger family
• Jack Winger, Sarah’s husband and Newt’s father, willing to do whatever work is necessary to keep his family together
• Arcella Jefferson, Newt’s first love
• Jefferson Cavanaugh, a white judge, the pillar of the community of Cherokee Flats
• Marcus Savage, a slightly older contemporary of Newt

The Novel

The Learning Tree relates two crucial years in the life of Newt Winger. It opens with a terrible tornado that causes death and destruction in the small Kansas town of Cherokee Flats and leads to Newt’s sexual awakening as he is comforted during the storm by Big Mabel. The novel concludes with the deaths of Newt’s mother, Sarah, and of Marcus Savage, whose last act before his own death is his attempt to murder Newt in revenge for Newt’s testimony against Marcus’s father.

Although death plays an ever-present role, The Learning Tree is also about growing up in small-town America in the early part of the twentieth century. Cherokee Flats, with a population of six thousand, is home to both African Americans and whites. Although African Americans cannot compete with whites in athletic events or eat in the same ice cream parlor, black and white children often play together. The high school is integrated, but the lower grades are not.

Some experiences transcend racial boundaries. The rural nature of Cherokee Flats gives Newt and his companions the opportunity to hunt, swim, and experience the joys and sorrows that befall all children. Like most mothers, Sarah encourages Newt’s academic pursuits. She dreams that he will eventually find a better life. She expresses her faith that the next generation of African Americans will make a new world for themselves, a world different from that of their parents. Sarah, a strongly religious woman, impresses upon Newt that good people and bad people come in all colors, and that all, regardless of color, have the possibility of experiencing redemption, even Marcus Savage, who was sentenced to reform school for beating up a local white farmer, and even Clint, her drunken son-in-law, who constantly threatens to kill his wife. Although Sarah hopes that Newt will eventually get away, she notes that the town is like a fruit tree, with good fruit and bad fruit, and “you can learn just as much here about people and things as you can learn any place else. . . . No matter if you go or stay, think of Cherokee Flats . . . till the day you die—let it be your learnin’ tree.”

Newt’s first love is Arcella Jefferson, and she is to be the only love of his life. Arcella, however, turns from Newt to Chauncey Cavanaugh, an older white boy whose father is Judge Cavanaugh, an important figure in the community. Arcella never explains her decision, but Newt ruminates that it might have been Chauncey’s money or his automobile. Perhaps she might even have liked Chauncey. Whatever the reason for her change of affections, the “only thing wrong with her for Chauncey was her color.” Chauncey gets her pregnant.

Rural Kansas is not the Deep South, but racial differences still matter. Newt fears death and worries that interracial violence might destroy the black community. His fear culminates in the murder of Jake Kiner, a white farmer, by Booker Savage, Marcus’s father, who then places the murder weapon in the hands of a drunken white man, Silas Newall. Newt, who had been working for Kiner, secretly observes the killing, but he remains silent, concerned about what might happen if he reveals that a black man had murdered a white in Cherokee Flats. His conscience compels him to confide in his mother. At Silas Newall’s trial, Newt courageously relates what he witnessed. Booker, in the courtroom at the time, attempts to flee. Some whites threaten to lynch Booker, who commits suicide rather than surrender.

Marcus, Booker’s son, blames Newt for his father’s death and vows revenge. Sarah, who had been in failing health for some time, dies first. Her last action is to calm her drunken son-in-law Clint, who had threatened to shoot his wife and anyone else who got in his way. Before she dies, Sarah gives her blessing to Newt, who is to move to Minnesota to live with one of his older sisters. His mother’s last words to Newt are to make a man of himself and do the right thing. On her deathbed, Sarah sees Minnesota as Newt’s promised land.

In the novel’s conclusion, Marcus Savage steals a gun and attempts to kill Newt in revenge for Newt’s testimony. In the resulting fight, Newt, who is winning, lets Marcus flee as the police close in. Newt secretly hopes that Marcus will escape, but there is no escape. The novel begins with death in a tornado and ends with Marcus’s death in a fall down a cliff. Newt considers hunting for Marcus’s body but instead heads for home and a new life in Minnesota.

The Characters

The Learning Tree is written in the third person, but the tale is related primarily through the eyes of Newt Winger. It is Newt’s life that readers experience, and it is through Newt that the world of Cherokee Flats comes alive. Gordon Parks, a famous photographer, has the literary ability to allow readers to “see” that world through his words. Newt is both typical and atypical. With his young friends Beansie, Jappy, Skunk, and Earl, he loves to hike, to hunt, to swim, and even to steal fruit from a local farmer’s peach trees.

Newt is more reflective than any of the other characters. Possibly this is because it is Newt’s story, told mainly through his experiences. Hunting, swimming, and even stealing peaches were part of many boys’ experiences in the small towns of early twentieth century America, but other aspects of Newt’s character are unique. One of his ambitions is to go to college, an unusual goal for an African American in the 1920’s. Chosen to make the graduation speech at his all-black grade school, Newt asserts that “We are proud to be black. . . . Our class does not expect life to be easy. We only expect it to be better, and we are determined to help make it so by contributing something to it ourselves.” It is not easy to be an African American in Cherokee Flats. Once, while Newt is selling brooms door to door with his blind uncle, who populates his unseen world with people of all different colors, a white boy refers to Newt as “nigger.” When Newt hits him in retaliation, the boy’s mother cries to Newt, “You are a nigger! . . . Nigger! Nigger! Nigger!” On another occasion, a circus comes to town and the promoter puts on a round-robin fight featuring Newt, several of his friends, Marcus Savage, and two Mexicans. The audience is largely white, and during the fight Newt hears taunts about “niggers,” “greasers,” and “Sambos,” even from small children. There is no escaping the significance of color.

Most of the other characters are not so well developed and are more stereotypical. Marcus Savage is so offended by the white world that when visited in reform school by an African American minister, Marcus cries, “You and your white God, git the hell out’a here!” There is little redeeming in Marcus’s character other than his wish to avenge his father’s death. Newt’s father, Jack, is something of a stock figure, never understanding his talented son, always in awe of his wife’s ability to handle crises, but nevertheless a noble and solid citizen. Even Sarah, Newt’s mother, while more developed as a character, is also predictable. She is the strong African American woman who is the engine that drives the family onward and upward. In Newt’s world, Sarah is the deus ex machina, the earth mother who will solve the problems besetting her world by comforting and motivating Newt, disarming her drunken son-in-law, and preventing the segregation of the high school. Her almost self-sacrificing death allows Newt to leave Cherokee Flats for Minnesota, a land Sarah and he hope offers greater opportunity.

The characters portrayed in The Learning Tree are not complicated. They are predictable, and in their predictability they reflect the perception of a young boy such as Newt. Parks’s novel, even with its many adult aspects, is an adolescent boy’s story.

Critical Context

The reviews of The Learning Tree were supportive but not enthusiastic. Whitney Balliett called it an old-fashioned melodrama, but with an African American rather than a white hero. Comparing it to Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), Balliett complained about excessive “blood, blood, blood.” David Dempsey also noted the melodramatic nature of the novel. Arguing that it was too much an adventure story, Dempsey disapproved of the plot. He found the significance of The Learning Tree in its portrayal of a time when African Americans were more concerned with their personal problems than with racial justice. Another reviewer, Nat Hentoff, called it a book for boys, not adults. Placing it in the literary tradition of works about small-town life by such writers as Mark Twain, Sherwood Anderson, and Thomas Wolfe, he noted the moralistic nature of the work and its characters, contrasting that with the moral ambiguities portrayed by Ralph Ellison and William Faulkner.

The reviewers reflected their own time. When the book was published in 1963, the Civil Rights movement was fighting racism on many fronts. Parks’s portrayal of African Americans in the different world of the 1920’s did not strike a familiar chord with the literary and social critics of a later time. The author writes of a society and a family in which traditional religious and moral values were accepted without question. By the 1960’s, much had changed.

The Learning Tree has had little impact upon later African American writers, and later critical commentaries rarely discussed its significance as a work of art. Nevertheless, it has remained in print almost continuously since it was first published, and in 1969 it was made into a successful film directed by Gordon Parks, who became the first African American to direct a major Hollywood film. If not widely praised by critics, then or since, the novel has been read avidly by more than one generation of Americans.

Bibliography

Balliett, Whitney. Review of The Learning Tree, by Gordon Parks. The New Yorker 39 (November 2, 1963): 209. Calling Parks’s novel an old-fashioned melodrama, Balliett wishes that it had focused more on the Wingers’ home life rather than on the violent incidents that too often confronted young Newt.

Dempsey, David. “Witness to a Killing.” The New York Times Book Review, September 15, 1963, 4. Dempsey’s review of The Learning Tree was the most negative of the major reviews. His comments reflect the militant idealism of the Civil Rights movement, and he implies that art should serve politics. Parks was found lacking in this respect.

Hentoff, Nat. “‘Sorta Like Fruit.’” New York Herald Tribune, August 25, 1963, p. 6. Hentoff believed that boys would get more from the novel than would adults. He urged that The Learning Tree be placed on high-school reading lists, claiming that white children could learn much from Newt Winger’s story and that black youths could identify with it more than with some other required literary works.

Moore, Deedee. “Shooting Straight: The Many Worlds of Gordon Parks.” Smithson-ian 20 (April, 1989): 66-77. A general article about Parks and his many accomplishments, written shortly after Parks was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Ronald Reagan, an award that suggests the magnitude of the changes that took place during Parks’s lifetime.

Yoder, Edwin M., Jr. “No Catch for the Hawk.” Saturday Review 49 (February 12, 1966): 40. Yoder favorably reviews Parks’s A Choice of Weapons (1966). Not disguised as fiction, this work tells of the barriers Parks faced after leaving Kansas. The reviewer called it an excellent introduction to what it meant to be black, poor, and ambitious in the years between the two world wars.