The Learning Tree: Personal History

Like the book, the screen adaptation of The Learning Tree is a coming-of-age story set in the 1920s in Cherokee Flats, Kansas, a fictionalized version of the rural Fort Scott. Parks’s stand-in, Newt Winger (played by Kyle Johnson), is a fourteen-year-old with plans to go to college. The film follows him over the course of a year, as he spends time with his friends and family; confronts his nemesis, Marcus (Alex Clarke); and deals with an America still plagued by segregation and Jim Crow. Newt also learns about sex (in an early seduction scene that would raise eyebrows today), death, romance, and heartbreak. The latter two lessons come courtesy of a young Cherokee Flats transplant named Arcella (a heartbreaking Mira Waters).

Marcus’s resentment of Newt stems from an early scene where he and Newt’s crew steal apples from the orchard of Jake Kiner (George Mitchell). Kiner reacts violently upon catching them, and Marcus’s act of self-defense lands him in a brutal prison. Meanwhile, Newt’s mother (Estelle Evans) insists he work for Kiner to offset the cost of the apples he stole. It is during his duties that he witnesses Kiner’s murder by Marcus’s father, Booker Savage (Richard Ward). When an innocent white man is accused of the crime, Newt faces a hard choice that paves the way toward his maturity. He must also confront a vengeful Marcus once he’s released from jail.

Though laced with tragedy, the film is not a wallow in misery. There are many scenes of joy and even defiance; the Black people presented here have self-respect and pride, and are unafraid to talk back to their oppressors. Even the proprietor of the brothel where Marcus goes to work after his release from prison, Chappie (Jimmy Rushing, Count Basie’s longtime vocalist), is depicted with dignity.

To the contemporary viewer, The Learning Tree may not seem at all radical in its themes or execution. However, one must keep in mind that, in 1969, such a complex, knowing, and compassionate portrayal of African American characters was rare outside of the nonstudio work of Oscar Micheaux and Spencer Williams or the occasional independent feature, such as Robert M. Young and Michael Roemer’s 1964 drama Nothing but a Man. In midcentury Hollywood films, such characters were rarely afforded a backstory or a separate life unless it was pertinent to the white main story. Even an excellent film such as In the Heat of the Night treats Poitier’s Virgil Tibbs as a very skilled visitor from a planet only he seems to occupy. In his 1959 remake of Imitation of Life, director Douglas Sirk took a pointed swipe at this phenomenon: when Lana Turner’s Lora expresses surprise that her Black best friend of many years, Juanita Moore’s Annie, has a life outside their interactions, Annie simply replies, “Miss Lora, you never asked.”

Hollywood never asked either. But Parks interrogated, and provided answers about, the lives of his characters. This is what makes The Learning Tree such an important film. From behind the camera, Parks was able to communicate in ways a screenplay page alone never could. By framing compositions, a director tells the audience where to look and what to focus on, and for how long. For the first time on a studio feature, the eye atop the viewfinder had a firsthand, lived-in knowledge of the African American lives being depicted in front of it, and could determine how we were to feel about them.

Thankfully, this film had one of the all-time greats of still photography looking through the camera. The Learning Tree is full of shots that evoke Parks’s Life magazine work. His 1963 photograph of young boys swimming and frolicking in a river, taken in Fort Scott and originally published in a feature timed to The Learning Tree’s appearance in novel form, are recalled in a rare, carefree moment of peace between Newt and Marcus. Scenes of Newt walking around while lost in thought reflect many of Parks’s photographic essays on Black life. As in those pieces, here Parks’s camera invites the viewer to gaze upon the unspoken inner workings of his characters, to understand “how it feels to be Black,” to borrow the title of that 1963 Life feature. Sometimes, there’s an aura of mystery surrounding these contemplative images. Other times, they convey the characters’ feelings so powerfully that no explanations are necessary.

Helping Parks transition from still photography to the moving image was his cinematographer, Burnett Guffey. Guffey was a master of black-and-white cinematography who started his career in the same decade in which The Learning Tree takes place. He shot film noirs such as Framed (1947) and In a Lonely Place (1950) before winning an Oscar for From Here to Eternity (1953). The Learning Tree was shot in color, but Guffey had by the sixties proved himself a master of that as well, particularly with Bonnie and Clyde (1967), for which he won another Oscar. He and Parks do a superb job lighting the skin of the actors, who often look like the photographic subjects from Parks’s 1956 Life series on the segregated South in motion.

Each season in the film is represented by sumptuous vistas and vibrant colors: the brown leaves of October pop as vividly as the red apples hanging from Kiner’s trees in September. A snow-covered winter landscape is as vast and blindingly white as the fields of springtime daffodils are green and yellow. Into these locations, Parks places his actors in positions that are often off to the side, so that the camera doesn’t hit them head-on. Light flows in unexpected directions, highlighting just how well-crafted these images are, both from a distance and in close-up. A recurring motif is the color red, which always portends violence and often accompanies it.

The Kansas location sets The Learning Tree apart from many African American–themed films, which often take place in the South. No film before had so honored the legacy of the Exodusters, the tens of thousands of African Americans who, in the late nineteenth century, moved west of the Mississippi River, primarily to Kansas—among them Parks’s ancestors. With its scenes of horse-riding and saddle maintenance, this often feels like a Hollywood western. However, the same racial issues were present here as in the South, issues Parks faced when he returned to Fort Scott to scout locations. The hostile, sometimes violent responses from white residents of the town stopped when the mayor informed them how much revenue that local businesses would get during shooting. Suddenly, folks wanted to be extras!

By 1968, Gordon Parks had become a world traveler, taking pictures of the famous and the infamous for Life. Like the protagonist of his next movie, Shaft (1971), he could easily cross between Black and white worlds. So it must have felt bittersweet recreating his humble beginnings on film, with actors uncannily portraying real people. “Entering Fort Scott was like driving into my past,” he wrote. Of his own on-screen avatar, Parks wrote “his manners, looks, and voice smelled of my childhood. He was me.” Evans, so magnetic and wonderful as Newt’s mother, Sarah, was also perfectly cast: “Her smile, like my mother’s, resembled the opening of a rose,” the director recalled. It is her character who explains the film’s title. “Let Cherokee Flats be your learning tree,” she tells Newt, in a line based on a piece of advice Parks’s own mother had given him, about how his experiences in Fort Scott would influence his life going forward.

In making The Learning Tree, perhaps Parks felt like Dorothy Gale returning to Kansas after visiting Oz, which might help explain why the film opens with an idyllic day suddenly breached by a tornado. It’s the first of many times the movie suddenly shifts from joy to terror. A shot of an anthill being blown away by the storm is a symbolic warning of how life can suddenly be snuffed out by vengeful forces beyond one’s control. The day can start with a carefree frolic with friends at the local swimming hole, and end with the same swimmers having to dredge up the underwater corpse of an innocent man shot in the back by the resident racist cop, Kirky (Dana Elcar, who earned the role after barging into Parks’s office yelling “I’m your ornery killer sheriff!”).

Like life itself, The Learning Tree veers unexpectedly between triumph and tragedy with a casual nonchalance; it just happens, and the audience, like the characters, must roll with it. There’s time to mourn, to be angry, and to feel heartbreak, but all the while life still barrels forward. The film’s tragic figures, Marcus and Arcella, are victims of a horrific system of racism, and Parks presents them with such dignity and love that their fates hurt even more.

Despite his status as the movie’s antagonist, and his violent lashing out at Newt in the climax, the film aches most for Marcus. Superbly played by Clarke, he evokes the motherless child of the old Negro spiritual, an allusion presented by Newt’s mother in an earlier scene. His harsh treatment by his widower father and the prison system have hardened him, but he’s still a kid capable of love. Meanwhile, Arcella and Newt’s love story gets a romantic, lyrical montage heretofore unseen for Black characters before she makes the mistake of trusting the local rich white boy. When she’s forced to leave town as a result of his vile treachery, the film’s heart breaks along with Newt’s.

I discovered The Learning Tree after seeing three other Parks films: Shaft, Shaft’s Big Score! (1972), and his weird, Joseph Wambaugh–style police story The Super Cops (1974). By then, I was already familiar with Joseph Manduke’s Cornbread, Earl and Me (1975), which would make a great double feature with The Learning Tree. Both films end with a Black kid risking no end of societal trouble to “do what’s right” before a court of law. The debut of Laurence Fishburne III (as he’s credited in Cornbread) remains the swiftest, most memorably brutal cinematic kick to the emotional ribs that I experienced in my childhood. But its unflinching sense of dignity for its African American characters has precedence in the portrayal of the Wingers and their fellow Kansas denizens. Realizing that much later, as an adult, made me love The Learning Tree even more, and gave me an even greater respect for its director.

On the first day of shooting in Kansas, Gordon Parks said to his lead, “Kyle, I lived it and wrote about it. Now I’m turning it over to you. Good luck.” As author Nelson George has noted, the protagonist of Parks’s next movie bears more than a passing resemblance to the director himself, from his clothing to his ease in moving between Harlem and Greenwich Village; perhaps it is not so far-fetched to imagine that he also gave Kyle’s advice to Richard Roundtree on their first day of filming Shaft in Times Square. As in that film—which remains the one for which Parks is best remembered—one might find such autobiographical allusions throughout his multifaceted work. But nowhere did he use his own experience more powerfully than in his film of The Learning Tree, as beautiful a coming-of-age story as has been told on-screen.