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:
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.)
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
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
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
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;
