The Ballad of Tom Dooley (34 page)

•  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.

One of the most underestimated characters in the story is James Melton, the husband of Ann. Because he seemed indifferent to his wife’s affair with Tom Dula, storytellers have cast him as an elderly man, a mere farmer who was no match for Tom the soldier. The facts indicate otherwise. As I noted in this novel, James Melton was only six years older than Tom and Ann—still in his twenties at the time of the murder. His war record was far more impressive than that of Tom, the malingering musician. James Melton did, indeed, carry the colors of the 26th North Carolina at Gettysburg, where he was wounded. He did spend the waning weeks of the War in a prison camp at Point Lookout, Maryland, and, as I said in the novel, he was incarcerated there at the same time as Tom Dula. Here is a synopsis of the war record of James Melton. (Note that in 1866 he would have been only twenty-eight.)

James Melton, of Wilkes County, NC, enlisted at the age of 23 on June 12, 1861, mustered in as a private in Company C, 26th North Carolina Troops. Present or accounted for until wounded in the left shoulder and right leg
with the colors of the regiment at Gettysburg
,
Pennsylvania, July 1, 1863. Melton returned to duty sometime between July and December 1864. Present or accounted for until wounded in the right leg at Hatcher’s Run, Virginia, March 30, 1865.

He was hospitalized in Richmond, Virginia, where he was captured by the enemy on April 3, 1865. Transferred to Point Lookout, Maryland, May 2, 1865. Released at Point Lookout on June 26, 1865, after taking the Oath of Allegiance.

Once I began to study it in depth, one of the most striking facets of this story was its close parallel to Emily Bronte’s classic English novel
Wuthering Heights,
set in a similar remote and rugged place. In my construction of the paradigm, Heathcliff and Catherine, the star-crossed lovers of
Wuthering Heights,
are Tom Dula and Ann Foster Melton, so that James Melton is cast as the gentle and patient Edgar Linton, and Laura most closely corresponds to Isabella Linton, whom Heathcliff wooed and tormented (to punish Catherine for marrying Edgar), but did not care for. The narrators, the servant girl Nellie Dean and the aristocratic tenant Mr. Lockwood are, of course, Pauline Foster and Zebulon Vance. Alert readers will find echoes of Emily Bronte’s prose, deliberately inserted here and there in
The Ballad of Tom Dooley.

Zebulon Vance was exactly who he said he was: a poor mountain boy who became Governor of North Carolina, fought in the Civil War as Colonel of the 26th North Carolina regiment, and ended his days in Washington, representing his home state as one of its most beloved Senators. When the funeral train brought his body back to Asheville in 1894, a detachment of National Guard troops was needed just to unload the accompanying funeral wreaths. In his brief hiatus from public service in 1866–68, when he practiced law in Charlotte with Clement Dowd, Vance did indeed spearhead the defense of Tom Dula and Ann Foster Melton. It was the inspiration of Vance’s meteoric rise from poverty, his success as a statesman, and his wisdom and humanity that made me decide to write this story. For those cynics who characterize Appalachia as a land peopled only by the likes of Tom and Ann, I offer the remarkable life of Zebulon Baird Vance as evidence to the contrary.

I’m sure that a great many superficial readers will see this work as a crime story and spout a lot of nonsense about “solving the case,” as if it were an episode of
CSI
, but I wish they wouldn’t. It can hardly be a mystery when practically anybody in Wilkes County will tell you on first acquaintance that “Ann did it.” I agree. So there was no case to solve. My concerns lay elsewhere.

While I wanted to understand the motivation for the tragedy, I was more interested in the characters of the persons involved, and in re-creating the world of the post-War mountain South. As a writer, I relished the challenge of crafting a novel in which the principal narrator is a sociopath—one who feels nothing—and the beautiful heroine is a narcissist linked with an amiable ne’er-do-well. If the resulting narrative appears effortless, I assure you that it was not.

I did want to know what really happened in Wilkes County, North Carolina, in 1866, and, although my version of the events can never be proven, I am satisfied with the answers I got. Whether or not you agree with my findings, I want you to understand that I did not invent anything: every conclusion I made stems from a fact in the original trial transcript, which is on file at the North Carolina Archives in Raleigh.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The story of Tom Dula, Ann Melton, and Laura Foster has been a carefully tended legend in Wilkes County, North Carolina, for well over a century. To sort out the real story at the heart of the folk song, I needed to go to the source.

Appalachian State University historian John Foster West wrote two nonfiction accounts of the Tom Dula story, and I consulted these books as the basis for further investigation. Although West’s account of the case was thorough and meticulous, his research, conducted more than thirty years ago, did not have the benefit of the resources that modern technology has made available and accessible to scholars today. When I began to study Mr. West’s scenario, I felt that the facts did not add up to a satisfactory explanation, and I went back to the original trial transcripts and began to put together a theory that would make sense of the case.

Ever since I first began writing novels about the history and folklore of the Southern mountains, people have been asking me to tell the story of Tom Dula, but I had thought that the story was too sordid and unexceptional to make a good novel. I revised my opinion in 2005 when Cara Modisett, editor of
Blue Ridge Country
magazine, asked me to research the legend for an article for the magazine. One summer day, armed with maps and a copy of John Foster West’s book, I traveled to Wilkes County, North Carolina, with my old friend David McPherson, and together we tried to make sense of that long-ago incident. Thank you, David, for listening, and for agreeing with me that what we had been told wasn’t making sense.

A few miles from where it all happened, Edith Ferguson Carter has kept a “Tom Dooley” museum within the grounds of her Whippoorwill Academy for the past half century. Besides preserving artifacts from the case—a lock of Laura Foster’s hair, Tom Dula’s fiddle, and his original headstone—Ms. Carter also keeps track of the genealogical records, and her museum is a repository for all the stories that have grown up around the case. It was to the Whippoorwill Academy that I went when I began to study the case, and I owe a great deal of thanks to Edith Ferguson Carter for her time, her generosity, and her patience. The Zebulon Vance part of the story was enriched by the encouragement and assistance of David Tate and the staff of the Zebulon Vance Birthplace in Reems Creek, Madison County, North Carolina.

Three scholars at Wilkes Community College shared their expertise and gave me the pleasure of their company in the course of my research. Professor Julie Mullis, chairman of WCC’s Department of Arts & Communication, who teaches a course on the Tom Dula story, led the expedition to Ferguson one bright fall day, and we visited the places where the Dula, Foster, and Melton houses once stood. We photographed the Bates’ place, climbed Laura Foster Ridge, where the body was originally interred, and scaled a high fence in order to get in to the pasture that contains the grave of Laura Foster. WCC Research Librarian Christy Earp searched genealogical records and census data to pinpoint the residences of the Andersons, the Scotts, etc., and to track the people in the case through the years. The most exciting moment of the research was when I asked Christy to locate:

•  a light-skinned man of color (mulatto), probably named John Anderson;

•  in 1866 he would be younger than thirty, probably early twenties in age;

•  he would live either close to Laura’s home in German’s Hill or close to the Bates’ place.

Within hours, Christy Earp had found him in the 1870 Caldwell County census. John Anderson, mulatto, was twenty-one—the same age as Laura—in 1866, and at the time he lived on the Anderson farm (Eliza’s, with her widowed mother and her brother Wash, who was Tom’s best friend). When we discovered that the Anderson farm adjoined the Bates’ place, I got chills. We knew we had found a crucial piece of evidence.

WCC-Ashe professor Shannan Roark was my connection to the experts in Wilkes County, and she went along on our trek to Ferguson, photographing sites and measuring the distance from one place to another, as we tried to make sense of what really happened.

Mr. Zelotese Walsh of Wilkes County has amassed detailed genealogical records of Wilkes County’s people, and he sorted through the Foster “begats” for me, in an attempt to pinpoint the lineage of Pauline Foster.

Dr. Randy Joyner of Wilkes County, a descendant of the Andersons, checked family records for me in connection with Wash and Eliza Anderson, provided me with a number of physical details about the county that helped me to construct the narrative, and took me to the grave of Tom Dula. My thanks, too, to genealogist Andy Pilley for his help with the background and photographs relating to the people in the story and to attorney David Hood of Hickory, North Carolina.

Michael Hardy, North Carolina’s Historian of the Year for 2011, is an author of North Carolina regimental histories and an expert on the Civil War. It was he who tracked down the war records of Thomas Dula and James Melton, discovering connections between them that had not previously come to light.

My thanks to my son Spencer McCrumb who spent a morning at the North Carolina Archives in Raleigh, obtaining for me the trial transcripts and any relevant documents concerning the case of Tom Dula.

When I realized that the Tom Dula story was an Appalachian parallel to
Wuthering Heights,
Elizabeth Baird Hardy, a Western North Carolina English professor and author, heard me out, leaping to the connections as fast as I did, and we had a wonderful time finding a literary template for this most famous of mountain legends. I am grateful for her encouragement and her friendship.

The psychological aspects of the story were important. While most people have dismissed “the servant girl” as a minor character in this incident, I concluded that the catalyst in this story was Pauline Foster, and that her malice and discontent caused the deaths of Laura Foster and Tom Dula. Ann Melton’s narcissism made her indifferent to the suffering of other people. To understand Pauline’s sociopathic disorder and Ann’s narcissism, I was fortunate to receive guidance from Forensic and Consulting Psychologist Dr. Charlton S. Stanley of Tennessee, who helped me understand the psychology of these two pivotal characters, and to determine how their mind-sets would be manifested in their behavior. Dr. Martin E. Olsen, director of OB/GYN at East Tennessee State University, helped me to determine whether an autopsy would have showed if Laura Foster was pregnant.

It took many hours of talking to a great many people to enable me to sort out the facts and the personalities that shaped this story, and I am grateful to everyone who listened.

Also by Sharyn McCrumb

THE BALLAD NOVELS

If Ever I Return, Pretty Peggy-O

The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter

She Walks These Hills

The Rosewood Casket

The Ballad of Frankie Silver

The Songcatcher

Ghost Riders

The Devil Amongst the Lawyers

THE NASCAR NOVELS

St. Dale

Once Around the Track

Faster Pastor
(with Adam Edwards)