by Kip Gayden
Walter and Anna’s daughter, Mabel Dotson, continued to adore her mother until her untimely death from tuberculosis in 1919. She was nineteen. Their son, Walter Scott Dotson, became a successful physician like his father, practicing medicine in Westmoreland, Tennessee, but also died at a relatively young age.
After Walter’s relatively premature death in 1926, Anna moved to Westmoreland, close to her childhood home, in a house on the Lafayette-to-Westmoreland road. She lived out her life in virtual solitude, occasionally being seen downtown, usually accompanied by two large dogs on leashes.
Anna Dotson remained unmarried after the death of her husband, and died in 1948 at the age of sixty-eight. The Dotson family is buried together in a simple plot in the Gallatin cemetery, marked by a center monument with the Masonic symbol engraved on the top.
PAUL CHRISTIAN DID SEE Anna Dotson once more. It was almost a year after the trial, on a pleasant Saturday in May 1914. He was covering another news story: an account of the first suffrage parade in the South, held in Nashville. Suffragettes from all over the nation started the parade from lower Broadway and were marching westward up the street, four miles to Centennial Park. Leading the parade was the famous Nashville suffragette, Anne Dallas Dudley; she was going to be the lead subject of Christian’s story.
Ironically, the parade went past Jackson’s Barbershop. Christian was standing on the southwest corner of Broadway and Eighth Avenue, a few doors up from the place, observing the suffragettes. As the long lines of women marchers passed by, all wearing white lace dresses with yellow sashes around their waists, many carrying signs and placards proclaiming support for an equal suffrage amendment to the United States Constitution, he noticed one particular woman. There was no mistaking that blonde hair, those blue eyes. In his wildest imagination, he would have never dreamed he would ever see Anna Dotson again, let alone walking down Broadway, although he had spent many a day and night thinking about her. Well, there she was, marching with the gait of a queen, strolling next to her best friend, Elizabeth Jennings.
As the women passed by, several men behind Christian were shouting. “She-males!” they hollered. “Why don’t you stay home, where you belong?”
And then suddenly, Anna looked over toward the corner and noticed him standing there, not far from the barber pole in front of Jackson’s. She stumbled a bit, but quickly regained her balance. And then, she smiled. Christian smiled back. Not exactly having journalistic distance from the subject, he didn’t include that memorable encounter in the story that ran the next day. Instead, he focused on Anne Dallas Dudley. But in a strange way, Anna Dotson had probably affected the course of women’s lives as much as Mrs. Dudley—though she certainly never intended to.
As Anna turned away and marched up Broadway with the other demonstrators, Paul Christian kept watching her. A few seconds later, with the men around him still yelling their epithets and insults, he tipped his hat.
Author’s Note
The central characters in this 1913 murder story are real, as is the text of the newspaper articles. Although much of this novel involves actual historical events, I have taken certain storytelling liberties in order to fill in gaps circumscribed by the actual 1913 trial testimony as reported in the three local newspapers: The Tennessean and American, the Nashville Banner, and the Nashville Democrat. In the parts where the story fictionally connects the testimony I have tried to portray things and events that would reasonably have occurred, remaining faithful to the characters and to the events as they actually happened.
This tragic murder occurred during the worldwide, tumultuous struggle as women sought rights historically denied to them by men. In America, women were demanding the right to vote (and thus the right to sit on juries). As the suffrage movement grew, World War I broke out and women’s suffrage went on the back burner. Soon after the hostilities subsided, the movement reappeared with renewed zeal and the attempt to amend the U.S. Constitution to allow women the right to vote eventually centered on the state of Tennessee.
The amendment that would grant women the right to vote required approval by three-fourths of the (then) forty-eight state legislatures, or thirty-six states. The postwar attempt had garnered approval from thirty-five states; nine states had voted against and three other states did not appear prepared to vote on the issue. Tennessee became the battleground for the friends and foes of women’s suffrage. By a margin of one vote, the state of Tennessee became the linchpin state that ushered into law the nineteenth amendment to the U.S. Constitution, granting women the right to vote.
Although my research did not reveal any overt suffrage activity by Anna Dotson, there is nothing to indicate that she did not have an interest in the women’s suffrage movement. The desire for independence and recognition are two common denominators connecting Anna Dotson and the women’s suffrage movement. In this novel I have attempted to weave the actual events surrounding the movement during the early years of the twentieth century as essential elements for an independent-thinking woman of the times. Anna Dotson, it seems to me, was such a female; indeed, her independent proclivities might be characterized as a microcosm of this contemporary women’s revolt against repression and perceived insignificance.
On the other side of the coin, this story also reflects the conflict men of the times were experiencing through their own struggles in accepting women on equal footing. The conflict was particularly manifested by the landmark verdict of the all-male jury in Anna’s case; the verdict jolted conventional thinking anchored in the Victorian past.
Many observers of the trial said that the verdict was a “miscarriage of justice,” while many others thought the perpetrator of the murder got only what was deserved. The opinions were closely divided, akin to the one-vote margin of victory for the suffrage movement in Tennessee that led to the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Was this a “miscarriage of justice?” I invite you to be the judge.