The Ballad of Tom Dooley: A Ballad Novel

by Sharyn McCrumb

  “He may only be a common-law husband at that. Some poor old wretch from up the mountain who thinks a simpering young woman is a prize. I wonder what she told him about the child. I’d give worlds to know who its father is myself.”

  “I doubt she would ever say, if indeed she knows.”

  “The Foster women have an uncommon gift among the fair sex: they can hold their tongues. In the two years she has languished in jail, Ann Melton has not said one word in her defense or to accuse anyone else of the crime. She is a sphinx. And it has served her well. She will go free. I have no doubt of it.”

  “Tom Dula talked enough at the end, but he said nothing at all about her. Anyhow, I don’t think his preaching made him any converts. Nobody cared about the fine points of evidence by then. Most of the crowd believed him to be guilty, and they were ready to see him hang. At last, he ran out of words, and, giving his sister a tender farewell, he indicated to the sheriff that he was ready to proceed. It was half past two o’clock by then. A deputy threw the rope over the crosspiece of the gallows and tied it in place. Then at a signal from the sheriff, another deputy took hold of the horse’s bridle, and they led it away, so that the cart slipped out from under the prisoner’s feet.”

  I shook my head. “Wasson made a hash of it, didn’t he?”

  “Oh, yes. It was torture to watch. The drop was less than three feet—not enough to break the prisoner’s neck. So the end was not quick—or kind.”

  “We don’t know how to hang people in this country, I tell you. In England, now…”

  But Allison wasn’t listening. He was staring at the marble floor, but seeing the hanging happen again. “He did not struggle. It must have been agony for him to hang there while the rope slowly throttled him. I have wondered how long he was conscious during the ordeal, and if he could hear the roar of the crowd as he strangled. I hope not. I hope he passed out quickly. When I could no longer bear the sight of it, I closed my eyes and whispered a prayer for the repose of his soul. After thirteen minutes, Dr. Campbell pronounced him dead, but Wasson left the body suspended there on the gallows for ten minutes more, to make sure. And all the while, the rabble was cheering as if it were a horse race.”

  I shuddered, trying not to envisage it myself. “He is out of it now, poor devil. I suppose the sister and her husband took him back to Wilkes County for burial?”

  “Yes. They were going to bury him a mile or two from his mother’s place, on the farm of a prosperous cousin, I think. So he is at rest a good seven miles from the place where Laura Foster lies buried now.”

  “Oh, he won’t care about that, Captain. He always said that she meant nothing to him, and I believe him. This was always about Ann. I wonder where there’ll bury her. At a crossroads with a stake through her heart, if they are wise.”

  “She is but twenty-four, though. She may live to see the new century come in.”

  “No, Captain. Like Jezebel and Cleopatra, I think she will die young. And, like you, I see no hope of heaven for her, but I can well imagine their reunion in the hereafter—two troubled souls reuniting after death … Ann Melton and Tom Dula, together in the mists of that ridge next to Reedy Branch.”

  Captain Allison smiled. “You have grown fanciful, Governor Vance. If you knew Wilkes County as I do, you would never be able to imagine restless spirits in that quiet earth.”

  * * *

  I would have been content to let it rest there, with Captain Allison’s comforting epitaph ending the matter in a bucolic haze, but life is seldom so accommodating as that. Much as I might have wanted to forget the whole Wilkes County incident, and return to more profitable endeavors elsewhere, there was still the matter of the second defendant, Mrs. Ann Melton. Her trial was set for the court’s fall term, and, while it would be a brief and perfunctory appearance, thanks to Tom Dula’s confession, I was still obliged to attend and to confer with the prisoner about the state of her case. I took the train to Statesville to meet with her.

  All was peaceful at the depot when I arrived, with flies buzzing in the late summer sunshine. I found it hard to imagine that only a few months earlier thousands of spectators had thronged in the adjacent field to watch a man die. I shuddered to imagine it, and made my way as quickly as I could to the county jail to see my remaining client.

  The years of incarceration had been kind to Mrs. Melton. Her beauty was as striking now as it had been when I had first set eyes on her in October of 1866. Her hair was glossy and well brushed, and her skin glowed like polished ivory. The simple blue dress she wore was not new, but it was clean and well-kept, and I wondered who did her laundry and her mending. If she missed her children or her lover, I saw no evidence of the ravages of grief. She received me with that same regal courtesy that I remembered, as if she were a duchess and I a courtier come to do her bidding.

  I sat down across from her at the little oak table in the jail, and prepared myself for a difficult interview with a distraught woman. I did not get it.

  “Mrs. Melton, I am here to speak to you about your forthcoming trial, and I hope to effect your release shortly thereafter.”

  She nodded, as if this was no more than she expected. “Thank you, Mr. Vance. I hope you will send word to my husband, so that he will bring the wagon to Statesville to collect me.”

  “I will see to it. Have you been keeping well?”

  She shrugged. “I get mortally tired of soup beans and corn bread. Have the apples come ripe yet?”

  I considered it. “I think they lack a week or more yet, but the last of the summer tomatoes are still to be had. Perhaps I could arrange for a bag of tomatoes to be sent to you here.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Vance. I’d be partial to some hard candy as well. There ain’t much to do in here.”

  I nearly offered to send her some books, but then I recalled that, elegant as she was, Ann Melton could neither read nor write. In a way, all the world was her prison. I wondered what I would have done in my own incarceration if the pleasures of reading and correspondence had been denied me, but, as she knew no better, she would never miss it. I promised to get her some penny candy, mostly as expiation for all the pleasures my education had afforded me that she would never know.

  I waited for her to ask after her family, or for some news of the outside world, but she remained silent, without a trace of distress or anxiety, patiently waiting for me to state my business.

  “Let me tell you what you can expect when we go to court. Your trial will be so brief that it hardly merits the name. We will present the new evidence to the court and ask for your release.”

  “New evidence?”

  “Yes.” I hesitated to bring up a sensitive matter, for fear of disturbing her elegant serenity. “You know that Tom Dula was executed in May?”

  Her expression did not change. “Yes, I do know that. They ought not to have done it. They had no witnesses, nor ary weapon, nor one whit of proof. We never said one word to those lawmen, and we ought to have been safe. It ain’t fair.”

  Technically, I agreed with her, but as an officer of the court it did not behoove me to speak ill of its decisions. “Tom Dula died bravely, though,” I told her. “They tell me that he spoke for nearly an hour, exhorting people to live right, and that in his final moments he died like a soldier.” I had thought to quote lines from Macbeth—Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it—but Shakespeare would have been lost on her, for all that she might have had in common with the lady of Glamis and Cawdor.

  I waited for a storm of weeping, but Ann Melton only shrugged. “No point in fighting what you can’t change. At least he didn’t give any satisfaction to them that come to see a sorry spectacle.”

  “He left a confession, you know. He dictated it on the eve of his death to my colleague, Captain Allison.”

  “He’d have done better to use the time trying to escape.”

  “He had already tried that. They found a sliver of glass in his cell, and took it from him. He had been trying to wear away the ir
on shackles with it. It was only when they took it away from him that he sent for Captain Allison. He wrote a few words on a scrap of paper, saying that he alone was responsible for the death of Laura Foster.”

  “Well, he was. He shouldn’t have been having to do with her in the first place. He had no call to go chasing after Laura Foster, when he had always sworn that he loved me.”

  “His confession will save you, though. His dying declaration proclaimed your innocence.”

  Ann nodded, satisfied. “He owed me that. I have spent two years of my life locked away in this cell, and if he hadn’t fallen in with that no-account Laura Foster, none of this would ever have happened.”

  I tried again. “He did a noble thing, Mrs. Melton. He gave his life for you.”

  “Yes. But it doesn’t matter to him anymore, does it? He couldn’t save himself. He is dead and buried, back in Wilkes County. No use in both of us dying for the likes of her.” She twisted a stray lock of her dark hair. “You won’t forget about those sticks of candy you promised to send me, will you? I’m mighty partial to peppermint sticks.”

  * * *

  The next day I stood up in open court, and, in as steady a voice as I could manage, I read out Tom Dula’s confession, exonerating his codefendant Ann Foster Melton. The court dismissed all charges against her, and pronounced her free to go. I saw a fleeting smile of pure triumph cross her face, and then she resumed her expression of cold indifference. She swept out of the courtroom on my arm, amid murmurs from the spectators. No one cheered or approached her as she passed.

  Once outside, I handed my client over to a subdued and somber James Melton. Without a word, she linked her arm in his, and they walked away without a word of thanks or a backward glance.

  But people will remember that she was beautiful.

  Ann Foster Melton was released from prison, but died of an illness—perhaps syphilis—a few years later. Local legends say that on her deathbed she screamed that she saw flames and cats around her bed. After her death, in 1875, her widower James Melton married Louisa Gilbert, and lived on peacefully into the twentieth century. John Anderson moved back to Caldwell County and married a woman of color named Jane, with whom he had a son. Laura Foster is buried in a marked grave in a pasture on the site of her father’s tenant farm in Caldwell County. No one knows the name of the man Pauline Foster married. After the second trial of Tom Dula, Pauline left Wilkes County and vanished from history.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I do understand and sympathize with the reader’s reaction to any novel based on a true story: What in this book is true? And the answer is: As much as I could possibly verify. Where I differed from traditional accounts of the case, it is because I chose to place weight on certain statements in the trial record that other people had dismissed—but the evidence for my version is there.

  The first thing to discount in the study of this incident is the catchy but irrelevant Kingston Trio version of the folk song, “Hang Down Your Head, Tom Dooley.” The young man’s name was Dula, not Dooley. He was not hanged in a lonesome valley from a white oak tree, but from a specially constructed T-shaped post in a field beside the train depot in Statesville, North Carolina. The song mentions someone named Grayson—“If it hadn’t been for Grayson, I’d a been in Tennessee.” That is true enough, but Grayson was simply the farmer who hired Tom as a laborer when he fled in June 1866. A more authentic version of the song, made famous by North Carolina mountain musician Doc Watson, is more faithful to the facts of the story, although it, too, supposes that Tom Dula is guilty. Most people who are familiar with the case think otherwise.

  When a story has become as steeped in legend as the Tom Dula incident, the first thing a writer has to do is question all the assumptions that have become attached to the narrative over the years, because rumor, conjecture, and wishful thinking taint the story. Over the years dozens of people have offered to tell me the “real story” of Tom Dooley—the one their grandmother heard from the storekeeper/the postman/the doctor, etc. No two are the same. The story as it is generally told did not ring true to me. When I worked on an article about “Tom Dooley” for Blue Ridge Country magazine, my travel companion and I went through all the possibilities inherent in the love triangle. None of them worked.

  • Tom killed Laura Foster because she gave him syphilis. There is no evidence that she did. Patient Zero was Pauline Foster, with whom Tom had sexual relations. It is more likely that he gave the disease to Laura instead of vice versa.

  • Tom killed Laura Foster because she was pregnant. There is no evidence that she was. Dr. Carter did not note the presence of fetal bones in the autopsy. Besides, Laura had a reputation for promiscuity. Judging by the example of Ann’s mother, who had five children and no husband, pregnancy in that place and time would not have made marriage compulsory. If Tom had dallied with a planter’s daughter or a lawyer’s sister—sure. But not with an unchaste tenant farmer’s daughter.

  • Ann Foster Melton killed Laura Foster because Tom loved her and was planning to elope with her. Tom said more than once that he “had no use for Laura Foster,” and I believe him. If Ann had killed the woman he truly loved, would he have written a confession exonerating Ann on the eve of his execution?

  • Tom and Ann killed Laura Foster. Motive unspecified. Why? She had no money, no hold over them, and apparently no malice toward them.

  • James Melton or Pauline Foster killed Laura Foster. Neither was ever suspected of involvement in the death of Laura Foster, and neither of them had the slightest motive to dispense with her. Besides, if either of them had done it, Tom Dula and Ann Melton would certainly have saved themselves by denouncing the real killer. They did not.

  I concluded that there was a missing piece of the puzzle, because one could not construct a plausible scenario with the traditional collection of facts.

  When I read the trial transcripts and the newspaper coverage of Dula’s execution, I found three references to a black man, a detail roundly ignored in other studies of the case—but he was real, and he was there.

  • As depicted in the novel, when Laura Foster went missing, Pauline Foster says to Wilson Foster: “Maybe she ran off with a black man.” You might dismiss this as a taunt, except that instead of becoming angry Laura’s father agreed that this might be so. In the 1866 Reconstruction South, Wilson Foster’s reaction is astounding. He should have been enraged by that suggestion. Why wasn’t he?

  • When Eliza Anderson, Wash Anderson’s sister, takes the stand in the second trial, a defense attorney asks her if she is kin to a man of color named John Anderson. She says no. Census records show that John Anderson had been a slave of her family, and that in 1866, he was still working on their farm. John Foster West interprets the kinship question at the trial as an attempt to discredit the witness, a young, unmarried white woman. This question is too volatile to be used in 1868 on an unimportant witness, especially if the witness is an unmarried girl who is suspected of nothing. Why was John Anderson mentioned at all? I considered this for a while, and then I asked Wilkes Community College research librarian Christy Earp to find out where the Andersons lived in 1866. We found them—living on property adjoining the Bates’ place, where Laura Foster was killed.

  • When a New York newspaper reporter came to Statesville to cover Tom Dula’s trial, he dismissed the state’s chief witness, Pauline Foster, as a depraved woman, commenting that she had recently married a white man and had given birth to a black child. Whose child was it? We will probably never know for sure, because the name of Pauline’s husband is never given, and she vanishes from history after the second trial. But she worked as a servant girl on a farm within sight of the Andersons’ place, where John Anderson lived and worked. This is not proof of their involvement, but it is a plausible theory.

  • Pauline’s suggestion—that Laura Foster ran off with a black man—makes more sense than speculating that she was eloping with Tom. Both Tom and Laura were of legal age and unmarried: there was no
reason for them to elope. No sneaking around was required. Laura’s father, who had caught her in bed with Tom, would have been relieved. If Laura really was sneaking off to get married, what bridegroom would require such subterfuge? Not Tom.

  • But if Laura wanted to plight her troth to a man of color, they would be forced to go elsewhere. I think that John Anderson, who was listed on the census records as mulatto, was light-skinned enough to pass for white in an area where he was not known—in other words, anywhere but Wilkes County. The elopement of John Anderson and Laura Foster makes perfect sense.

  • And another thing—if you were running away with Tom Dula, would you arrange to meet him a mile away from his house and five miles from your house, but within sight of the home of his jealous married lover? But John Anderson lived right beside the Bates’ place. It was the logical place to meet him.

  Most romanticized versions of the Tom Dula legend make a dewy heroine of Laura Foster. I don’t see any evidence for that. When she went missing, her father declared that he didn’t care if he ever saw her again or not, but he did want his horse back. Tom Dula said he had no use for Laura Foster. The people who searched for her seemed to be disinterested community members who were inspired by the thought of an unmarried young girl who had come to harm. Within days of her disappearance, the real Laura Foster vanished into a moonlit haze of sentimentality, in which she remains to this day. I saw her more as a situation than a person: a springe to catch woodcocks. Inciting jealousy over the casual sexual relationship of Tom and Laura would be the perfect weapon for someone intent upon destroying Ann Melton.

  Pauline Foster is generally dismissed as “the servant girl,” and some people I talked to thought that she might have been mentally deficient, but—since she managed to bring about the deaths of three people, and to emerge unscathed from the incident and the trials—I decided to take her seriously. If Pauline had intended to harm those people, she succeeded admirably. If she had been a malicious and scheming malcontent, she could easily have manipulated the vain and passionate Ann into precipitating the downfall of everyone. After months spent studying the heartless Pauline, who brought venereal disease and tragedy to Wilkes County, and the cold narcissist Ann Melton, who cared for nothing but herself, I ended up feeling deeply sorry for Tom Dula, and I wish his sacrifice could have been made for a more deserving person.