Slippery Characters

In the 1920s, black janitor Sylvester Long reinvented himself as Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance, and Elizabeth Stern, the native-born daughter of a German Lutheran and a Welsh Baptist, authored the immigrant’s narrative I Am a Woman — and a Jew; in the 1990s, Asa Carter, George Wallace’s former speechwriter, produced the fake Cherokee autobiography, The Education of Little Tree. While striking, th...