The Tom Dooley Tragedy

The legend lives on from Deep Gap on down of the tragic crime of Tom Dooley. The legend, it is said, never resolves the question of who killed Laura Fonda on a mountainside in the Blue Ridge, back in 1866. . . even though a guilty verdict had been laid upon a young veteran of the Civile War, Tom Dula. I first heard about the Tom Dooley tragedy in the 1960’s.from the Kingston Trio. “Hang down your head, Tom Dooley; hang down your head and cry. Poor boy, you’re bound to die.“ In the early 1980’s, my bride and I moved to Boone, about 20 miles up the road from where it happened. A couple of weeks ago, I attended a meeting of our High Country Writers group, to hear a presentation from author Sharyn McCrumb. After our meeting, I bought her book:

Sharon’s authorial coverage of this historic murder consists of personal monologues from two people: Zebulon Vance, Tom Dula’s defense lawyer, and Pauline Foster, a crusty mountain woman who was, more than likely, the real killer in the story. But we’ll never know for sure. The story that McCrumb distills from a sour mash of hillbilly ignorance and licentiousness is a tale to be told, which is why songs have been sung about that fateful love triangle in a mountaineer household that had no ole time religion to keep them on a blessed path, a path that might have saved Laura Foster’s life and Tom Dula’s as well. The tale unfolds in an Appalachian mountain community, Elkville, in Wilkes County, which is the the first county my bride and I drive through when we’re traveling “down the mountain”, out of Boone, to go eastward, through the Piedmont.

I don’t know, but I been told that this story is almost century and a half old, so I’ll not try to reveal all the details about a hillbilly love triangle that had turned fatal. I’ll just drop in some snippets about the fascinating historical background behind this legend, a profound story that. . . if Shakespeare were alive today. . . he could have written one hell of a profound tragedy. It’s an Appalachian tragedy that emerges from the foothills of time. So I’ll just drop a few details and gem quotes from Sharon’s characters: Zebulon Vance, defense attorney: “I had to practice a little law after the (Civil) War ended, before those same trifling government bureaucrats saw fit to let me back into the Congress again. I shall die here, protecting the interests of my fellow Tarheels for as long as God grants me breath and strength.” Pauline Foster, older sister of the deceased Laura Foster, and possibly a partner in crime with her sister Ann, but we’ll never know for sure. Pauline says “I reckon that, to a scared and lonesome soldier, any scrawny gal of twenty can pass for a beauty, though there is handsomess in the Foster line that some say I got a touch of.” Could there be a slightly jealous tone in Pauline’s reckoning? But the older Pauline did not, it seems, get enough “touch of” the beauty to truly win Tom’s love, even though he did lay with her at some point in time. . . and that it was probably her “poc” syphilis that infected Tom, and then the other two sisters, due to the nocturnal adventures of Tom Dula. The closest she ever got to Tom’s love was an occasional roll in the hay with him because Tom’s hankerin’ for friggin’ was a little more than he could manage with one girl, even if he loved that one special girl, aka Laura Foster, her sister, the deceased. Murder mystery, you say? Yep! Sharyn McCrumb weaves, skilfully, some historical background into the saga. Pauline said this about the Civil War, the war that both Zeb Vance, defence layer, and Tom Dula had fought in, back in the day, on the losing side: Pauline’s judgement about the Civil war: “But they never asked our opinion about secession, and most folks up here said it was a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.” Pauline might have been right about that. The slave owners of the South were a lot richer than those hillbillies in Elkville, Wilkes County, North Carolina. “When you see a baby-faced fellow eyeing you like a starving dog, you know that he may not live to see another spring, he wants you to give him all the springtimes he’s ever going to miss in one gulp.” So Tom Dula’s libido must have so fierce that he couldn’t settle for just the girl he loved, Laura. . . but had to give in to her older sisters who were either jealous or in heat, or both. The legend of Tom Dooley is a mysterious tale that will never be concluded. Three women in a hillbilly household. . . two sisters, one cousin. . . all three being lovers with the same hansom/horny man; the syphilis creeping in, brought in by Pauline, the teller of the tale in Sharyn’s story. . . literally, a clusterf***! If Tom Dula (Dooley) killed Laura Foster, then how was it that Pauline and Ann both knew where the shallow grove was? Why did Ann go crazy with nightmares and hallucinations, and died screaming about seeing black cats on the walls? It’s a mystery that will never be uncovered.

When I finish reading Sharyn McCrumb’s “The Ballad of Tom Dooley” maybe I’ll have more to write about that ole story that happened in a mountain holler that I heard friends of mine talking about, back in the day. (THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS, an imprint of St. Martins’s Press 2111) maybe I’ll have an update. But meanwhile, back at the Blue Ridge, The Ballad of Tom Dooley. How can there be an update? The answer to the big question, who really killed Laura Foster? And why did Tom Dula, while he was standing at a the gallows with a noose around his neck, say that he had never touched a hair on that girl’s head? Glass Chimera