As literary subjects go, nobody’s hotter than Harry Potter—but
Frankie Silver is also in demand. In the past five years alone, a
novel, a nonfiction book, several films, a ballet, and at least two
websites have been devoted to the story of the young Western North
Carolina woman hanged in July 1833 for the murder of her husband.
Prominent among these are Sharyn McCrumb’s novel The Ballad
of Frankie Silver (Dutton, 1998), The Untold Story of Frankie
Silver by Perry Deane Young (Down Home Press, 1998), and Appalachian
filmmaker Tom Davenport’s documentary The Ballad of Frankie
Silver (produced in association with the UNC Curriculum in Folklore,
1998). In addition to these treatments, The North Carolina Folklore
Journal recently devoted an entire issue (Winter-Spring 2000)
to Tom Davenport’s film.
On the heels of these projects comes Daniel Patterson’s book
A Tree Accurst: Bobby McMillon and Stories of Frankie Silver.
It is certainly worth asking, now that Sharyn McCrumb has given the
novel a high-quality literary treatment and Perry Deane Young has
helped establish the facts of the crime, is there room for another
account? There is when it’s Patterson’s.
McCrumb’s novel mixes known details of the Silver
case with a fictional present-day plot designed to
parallel the theme of the 1830s account—stick with
your family, no matter what. Young, a journalist, pored
over official documents of the case and papers of
involved parties to establish a clear distinction between
fact and folklore.
Patterson, a folklorist and retired UNC professor, is
interested in the legend of Frankie Silver and that
legend’s longevity in the imaginations of Western
North Carolinians for over 150 years. He is especially
interested in its life in the imagination of one North
Carolina mountaineer— singer/storyteller Bobby
McMillon, featured in Tom Davenport’s film.
Foremost among the strengths of Patterson’s book is
the filter of McMillon, a descendant of Charlie Silver
who as a boy first heard the tale of Frankie and Charlie
from relatives. An avid transcriber of folktales and
ballads, McMillon, born in 1951, heard of his
ancestor’s demise from his grandmother’s uncle
Lattimore Hughes, born at the turn of the century. He
heard the ballad attributed to Frankie Silver from
“Granny” Lou Hopson, the grandmother of his
first cousins.
McMillon is a rare individual who can both collect folk
material from those around him and analyze it from a
critical distance. McMillon’s reference to the
Frankie Silver case as “a story that happened”
is dead-on in its characterization of material which
sometimes seems to defy classification. His insistence
that a legend’s aesthetic effect is preeminent,
superseding its didactic or purely historical value,
reveals his awareness of folklore’s artistic
strategies. McMillon manages, simultaneously, to be folk
and folk artist, and in the dual perspectives he brings
to the legend cycle, he is indispensable to Dan
Patterson. He is, as Patterson says, a “traditional
historian” (p. 163), as opposed to an academic one.
In addition to the presence of McMillon, Patterson’s book is
shored up by the professor’s own expertise in North Carolina
history and folklore. An especially good chapter traces the evolution
of the broadside ballad “Frankie Silver’s Confession.”
The ballad is not, as some say, related to “Frankie and Johnny”
but to a “confession” written in Kentucky around 1824 by
Jereboam Beauchamp (subject of Robert Penn Warren’s novel World
Enough and Time). Patterson deftly reconstructs the trail between
Frankfort, Ky., and Morganton, N.C., and explains how the ballad circulated
again in Burke County 30 to 40 years after the execution as a substitute
for Frankie’s “real voice ... silenced by circumstance.”
His account of Frankie’s actual ballad and the subgenre of 19th-century
crime literature in particular convinces a reader that his classroom
must have been a fascinating place.
If Patterson’s book has a flaw, it is an apparent
logical inconsistency concerning Governor David Swain,
who dominates the last third of the book. Confronted with
the opportunity to pardon Frankie Silver just before her
execution, Swain chose to give the impression that his
hands were tied by time. Patterson speculates that
Swain’s decision was motivated instead by the
nonconformity of his own wife and daughters. An example
Patterson cites is the marriage of Swain’s daughter
Ellie to the Union commander of troops occupying Chapel
Hill in April 1865. The behavior of the Swain women,
Patterson argues, frustrated the governor’s
assumption that women should be submissive and obedient,
leaving him “singularly ill equipped to deal with
such a convention-defying act” as a wife’s
ax-murder and dismemberment of her husband (p. 148).
The problem with this assertion is that several of
Patterson’s examples involve Swain’s
daughters’ conduct in the 1860s — 30 years in
some cases after he declined to pardon Frankie Silver. As
Patterson points out at the end of chapter six, “A
Tale of a Governor,” when Swain received the
petitions requesting Frankie’s pardon, he had been
married less than ten years. Ellie, who was 21 at the
time of her marriage, wasn’t even born. Thus, it is
hard to argue the effect of her “radical” act
on a decision Swain made three decades before. Patterson
probably means to suggest that the Swain daughters’
behavior reflected Eleanor White Swain’s own
nonconformity, a tendency which was present from the
outset of the marriage and which influenced her husband
in 1833 in deciding Frankie Silver’s fate. The
arguments about Swain’s attitudes toward women are
instructive but belabored and not always logical. In
chapter six, Patterson needed the advice of an attentive
editor.
Patterson devotes 47 pages in a 163-page book (appendices
excepted) to David Swain. His interest in the governor is
hinted at when he describes Swain’s failure to
pardon Frankie as “of all the issues in the case,
... the one least susceptible of explanation” (p.
145). Patterson’s other arguments for Swain’s
prejudice against Frankie, based on class and ethnic
origin (Swain was English; the Stewarts Scots-Irish),
have been offered by others, such as McCrumb and Young.
Perhaps in his eagerness to offer a novel theory,
Patterson got carried away.
Whereas Perry Deane Young’s book and the Frankie Stewart Silver
website include a number of official court records, Patterson’s
appendices provide several transcribed variants of the legend. In
addition to “Uncle Latt” Hughes’s interview with McMillon,
Patterson reprints the account of Lucinda Silver Norman, half-sister
to Charlie Silver (1826-1927). “Aunt Cindy” was Muriel Early
Sheppard’s primary source for the chapter devoted to the Silver
story in Cabins in the Laurel (1935; reissued by the UNC Press,
1991). Patterson’s appendices also include a version told to
Charlotte Daily Observer reporter H.E.C. Bryant in 1903 by
Charlie Silver’s half-brother Alfred. The most remarkable aspect
of the Hughes, Norman, and Silver versions is the consistency of detail
in the accounts of three tale-tellers whose lives, collectively, span
150 years. In fact, one of the book’s most useful aspects is
Patterson’s outline of major components in the legend cycle and
his exploration of which account, when confronted with conflicts,
Bobby McMillon chose, and why.
Despite Patterson’s expertise, his book is marred by
an occasional amateurish turn. Discussing Thomas Worth
Wilson’s poor handling of Frankie’s defense,
Patterson writes, “I myself suspect, however, that
Wilson’s greatest disservice to his client Frankie
Silver resulted less from his ineptitude than from an
injury unintentionally inflicted. At a more appropriate
point in the story—Chapter 6—I will offer my
speculation about what this injury may have been”
(p. 64). This sort of teaser is better suited to
prime-time television than a scholarly book.
From time to time, Patterson also cites Bobby McMillon’s notes
on the manuscript of A Tree Accurst, a technique which, though
used sparingly, seems awkward, if not self-congratulatory. Late in
the conclusion, he writes, “I sent Bobby a draft of this passage
with a note, ‘This is what I feel when I hear your words—am
I pushing it too far?’ Bobby’s reply was, ‘No. You
hit the nail on the head.’” There is a more graceful way
to work in McMillon’s analysis, and, fortunately, Patterson often
finds it.
Just as Bobby McMillon has fashioned a legend from oral tales, a person
seeking to understand Frankie Silver must sift through the growing
body of accounts, searching, as McMillon does, for both the plausible
and the pleasing. For the most part, A Tree Accurst satisfies
on both counts. It explores the folkloric elements of the legend as
well as folklore in general, particularly in its revelation of a community’s
qualities and quirks. More significantly, it offers the analysis of
both a deeply-rooted storyteller and an expert academic. It transcends
the more pedestrian arguments about fact to explain why the story
has endured, and how.
LANA WHITED
Lana Whited teaches English and journalism at Ferrum
College and has done extensive research on murder
narratives. She recently established a website devoted to
Frankie Silver resources—
http://www.ferrum.edu/lwhited/silver.htm . A memorial web
site is also maintained by Frankie Silver’s
great-great-great granddaughter at
http://www.frankiesilver.com .
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