The Ballad of Frankie Silver

Chapter Ten

SPENCER ARROWOOD left the prison a little after three in the afternoon. He had talked to the warden about the final arrangements in case a stay of execution did not come through. There was paperwork to sign, but it didn’t take long. Now he had six hours to kill—an idle afternoon for him, but for Fate Harkryder all the time in the world. He could still contact the newspaper or a local television station to reveal his theory about the murders, but he knew that he would accomplish nothing with such theatrics except to brand himself as a crackpot who balked at seeing a man executed. If he made any allegations about the Trail Murders, Charles Stanton would be asked to comment on them, of course, and Spencer had no doubt that the colonel would shred him with a few regretful, carefully chosen words. Stanton would not be cheated out of his long-awaited execution.

He could hear the colonel’s snide voice now. A few days ago, the sheriff was willing to believe that a recent homicide was committed by this mysterious killer. Now he wants to free a legally convicted man on the basis of this mythical evidence. I have every concern for the sheriff, who is a man injured in the line of duty, but I think the people of Wake County should ask themselves if he is still fit for the duties of his office.

No, he couldn’t fight Stanton, the master of the press conference. If Fate Harkryder had wanted him to oppose the execution, he would have tried, but he couldn’t fight both sides at once.

Spencer knew that he could expect no corroboration from the prisoner himself. Fate Harkryder had made it clear that he would say nothing on his own behalf, and he was right: a statement from a convicted killer would make no difference to the authorities. Even if the death penalty were set aside, Harkryder would not go free. He might not be a murderer, but he was not blameless. At best, he was an accessory after the fact, and Stanton would see to it that he never left Riverbend. If bringing the real killers to justice would have won him his freedom, he might have done it, but it wouldn’t—so, what was the point?

When Spencer reached the prison parking lot, television mobile units were already setting up their equipment in preparation for their coverage of the execution. The governor’s speech was probably already written, with neatly laser-printed copies in distribution to all the media people. Spencer could feel the tension in the prison, and the controlled excitement among the scrambling technicians in the parking lot. It’s going to happen,he thought. It has been gathering momentum for a long time, and nothing can stop it now. Not even the truth. The truth will be what they broadcast from this parking lot, not what happened on the mountain twenty years ago.

Knowing is one thing; changing is another.Nora Bonesteel was right about that.

He drove out of Cockrill Bend, right on Centennial, right on Briley Parkway, over I-40, and along White Bridge Road. He slowed down at Nashville Tech, thinking for one confused moment that he had reached another prison, but then he realized that it was a college. The prisons were all in his mind.

He saw a billboard for Opryland. Emblazoned across a picture of the amusement park’s roller coaster were the wordsRIDE THE HANGMAN ! Spencer looked away. The hangman. Death had even staked out the billboards.

Spencer had intended to drive around Nashville for a while, but the humid, stale air of the flatlands oppressed him, and when he saw the entrance to the Lion’s Head Mall on White Bridge Road, he turned in to the parking lot, finding a parking space near the theater. The movies were as good a place as any to kill the rest of the day. There was nothing he wanted to see, but at least the building was air-conditioned, and no one would expect him to make conversation. In the cool darkness of the theater, the sheriff stared up at the screen, registering color and noises, but afterward he could not say what film it was that he had seen. A comedy of some sort, he thought, or an action-adventure movie aimed at teenage boys. The

screen could not compete with his own thoughts. He kept running the possibilities through his mind as if they were alternate moves in a chess game. If I did this, then the governor would say that. . . .He could devise no scenario that would give him so much as a stalemate. Every hypothesis ended with the death of Fate Harkryder. Spencer began to wonder why he cared so much, in defiance even of the condemned man’s own intentions. Was it the condemned man who concerned him, or was he indulging his own desire to be blameless?

He remembered what Nelse Miller had told him long ago. You could have looked into Fate Harkryder’s cradle and told that he was going to end up in prison. If it wasn’t one thing, it’d be another.

He sat through that movie and two others before it was time to return to the prison. By then the sun had set, but it was still July in middle Tennessee, a breathless, shimmering heat unlike the cool evenings on the mountain up home. As he turned onto Cockrill Bend, he could see the lights of the prison, augmented now by the blaze of the broadcasters’ lights in the parking lot. As Spencer got out of the car, he took the visitor’s pass out of his pocket, but he didn’t put it on. He didn’t want the reporters to know who he was. A gaggle of protesters with picket signs and candles stood in the far corner of the parking lot, but they did not call out to him as he made his way toward the building. One of the reporters had approached them with a cameraman trailing after him, and their attention was focused on their few minutes of fame. At one of the mobile television units, Charles Wythe Stanton stood in a spotlight, speaking into the interviewer’s microphone. “This is not about revenge,” he was saying. “It’s about closure. The final chapter of the Trail Murders takes place tonight. My thoughts are with my daughter.”

It was a few minutes past ten o’clock. The execution was scheduled for 11 P.M., more to discourage demonstrators than to afford the prisoner every possible minute of his last day on earth. In the administration building, Spencer went through the same check-in procedure as before, and when the word owlwas illuminated in his hand, he was ushered through the sally port in the wake of the others attending the execution.

The witnesses walked through the empty visitors’ hall, to the door against the back wall. They were silent and walked alone, except for two young men, who seemed to know each other, and who spoke together in a low undertone. Spencer realized that they must be reporters sent to cover the execution. Colonel Stanton, fresh from his interview, was the last to enter. He had come alone.

No pleasantries were exchanged by the witnesses. They stood uneasily, like strangers in an elevator, unwilling to acknowledge one another’s presence. After a few moments’ hesitation, they took their seats in the metal chairs facing the plate-glass window, on which the blinds were now shut.

A uniformed guard came in behind them and stood near the door, obviously positioned to make a speech. “Good evening, gentlemen,” he said. “We are scheduled to begin in approximately fifteen minutes, so let me just go over a few things with you. First of all, I’d like to repeat: no cameras, no recording devices. Any questions?”

There were none. The witnesses stared at the guard uneasily, but their eyes kept straying to the closed blinds that covered the plate-glass window.

“Electrocution is the only form of execution used in the state of Tennessee. This chair has never been used in an execution, but it has been thoroughly tested. You should know what will take place when the time comes. In an electrocution, the prisoner is given an initial shock of two thousand volts, reduced seconds later to about six hundred volts, and keeping the current steady at that rate for fifty-seven seconds. The process is repeated a second time, followed by a third and final charge of two thousand

volts, and then the current is shut off. The doctor will check for vital signs, and if he finds that life is extinguished, the body will be left in place for thirty minutes, checked again, and then transferred to a gurney to be wheeled out of the building for the subsequent autopsy and burial. Or disposal of remains, I should say. I believe Mr. Harkryder has requested cremation.”

“Where is Harkryder?” someone asked.

“The prisoner has not yet left the quiet cell,” the guard replied. As if anticipating their thoughts, he added, “However, his head has been shaved earlier this evening, and he has had his last meal.”

One of the reporters called out, “What was his last meal?”

The guard consulted his notes. “Two cheeseburgers, a milk shake, and a slice of blackberry pie.”

“Did he eat it?”

“I believe so.”

Charles Stanton narrowed his eyes. “My daughter had her last meal twenty years and ten months ago. Let’s get on with it.”

The guard looked startled at this outburst. It was his first execution, of course, and he had been unprepared for emotional reactions from the witnesses. He decided to ignore the comment. He cleared his throat and resumed his speech. “About ten minutes from now, the ‘tie-down team’—a group of officers in helmets and black body armor—will enter Mr. Harkryder’s cell. They will manacle his legs, cuff his wrists in front of his body, and attach a belly chain to the handcuff links. At that time, the prisoner will be marched the forty paces or so from the quiet cell to the room beyond that wall, where he will be seated in the electric chair. At that time I will open the blinds on the observation window. Are you with me so far? If anyone wants out, now is the time to leave.”

No one stirred. The two young men in dress shirts and running shoes were making notes on pads of lined paper.

Spencer was sitting on the left aisle of the second row, with a good view of the door that led to the hallway where the quiet cell was located. He wondered if the area was soundproof. He could hear no murmur of voices, no sounds of doors closing or footsteps. If there had been screams, would he have been able to hear them?

He looked at his watch. Two minutes had passed since the last time he checked it. He looked around at the other witnesses, wondering if any of them would be unable to handle the strain of watching a man die in the electric chair. Would the doctor standing by attend to fainting witnesses, as well as checking to see that the condemned man was dead?

Spencer could feel his heart beating, and his breath was coming in gulps. He wondered if he had overtired himself too soon after surgery, or whether he was feeling the anxiety that Sheriff John Boone had felt when the time came to hang Frankie Silver. He thought that Boone’s anguish must have been worse: in 1833 the Burke County sheriff had been executing a nineteen-year-old girl whom he knew to be innocent of first-degree murder. In those days, innocent people could and did go to the gallows, but nowadays, only the most heinous of crimes is punished by the death penalty: rarely a first offender or a single-victim killer, rarely an upstanding citizen driven beyond emotional endurance. With few exceptions, today’s death row is the pit of the sadist and the psychopath, the paid assassin, and the refuse of the drug

world. No innocent young girl defending her child would ever reach death row today. It was harder to feel charitable toward these men than to feel sorrow for the plight of Frankie Silver. Their appeals for mercy were not the shining arguments of innocence but the specious claims of technicalities, loopholes, and political maneuvers. He could wish mercy for some of them, but he could not pity them, even as he grieved for a girl who died a century before he was born. She was not one of them.

Spencer heard the two reporters in the front row whispering to each other. “This is way cheaper, man,” one of them was saying. “North Carolina claims that it costs $346.51 to kill a prisoner by lethal injection. But the chair uses only thirty-two cents’ worth of electricity.”

“It’s more painful, though,” the other reporter said.

“Nah. Two thousand volts. You’re unconscious in two seconds. You never know what hits you.”

“You sure about that?”

“Guess we’ll find out tonight. See if he yells or anything.”

It seemed to Spencer a long time before the hall door opened. Fate Harkryder, hunched over his chains, shuffled into the room, surrounded by guards in black padded armor. A man with a Bible trailed the procession, reading aloud in a steady monotone. No one paid him any mind.

The condemned man wore carpet slippers covering his bare feet. The legs of his trousers were slit to the knee, and he had a close-cropped buzz cut that in any other setting would have made one think of boot camp. He was pale, with beads of sweat on his forehead, and his eyes kept darting around the room, looking for a familiar face, or perhaps a way out.

With practiced ease, the tie-down team backed the prisoner into the wooden chair and fastened the airplane seat belt straps to his wrists, legs, and chest.

“That was fast!” muttered the reporter in the front row. “Wonder who they practiced on.”

“Do they still call the chair Old Sparky?” his companion whispered back.

Spencer looked at his watch. Less than two minutes had elapsed since Fate Harkryder had entered the death chamber. They had made him wait twenty years on death row, but at least the end, when it finally came, would be mercifully quick.

The warden, who had been standing beside the right-hand doorway, approached the chair and said a few words to the condemned man. The witnesses could not hear what was said, but they could see Fate Harkryder’s face, and he appeared to make no reply. He was staring at the glass window in front of him, squinting a little, as if he were trying to make out individual faces. The guard dimmed the lights in the witness room.

As the warden turned to walk away, a member of the tie-down team placed a dark leather cap on the prisoner’s head. The top of the cap contained the metal fitting to which the wire would be attached. The current would enter the body through the headpiece. It was fitted with a snap-on flap that covered the top half of the prisoner’s face. Now he was merely a human figure, pinioned in a wooden chair.

As the warden took up his old position beside the control-room doorway, the peal of a telephone broke the silence. One of the reporters yelped and grabbed the arm of his companion. Charles Stanton held up

a photograph of Emily. Spencer gripped the sides of his chair. He was holding his breath.

A voice from the other room said clearly, “No. This is the death house.” Then silence.

“Wrong number,” another witness muttered, with a giggle that was somewhere between embarrassment and terror.

The execution itself began without Spencer’s at first being aware of it. He knew that the room lights would not dim, as they did in old black-and-white gangster movies, but he had expected a loud buzzing noise, or some other indication that high voltage had been turned on. He let his eyes stray for a moment to the stricken face of the chaplain, and then a gasp from behind him made him look again at the man in the chair. Fate Harkryder had stiffened, and he appeared to be straining against the straps, or perhaps the force of the current had thrown him forward against them. For about a minute, although it seemed much longer, the current surged through the prisoner’s body, keeping him rigid against the restraints, and then the body slumped back.

No one moved.

Fate snuggled against his brother Ewell in the darkness, shivering in the crisp July night, watching the sky and breathing grass scent. He was four years old—maybe five—not the youngest child in the field, but surely the only one out alone with his older brothers instead of cradled on a blanket between doting parents. It was late. Daddy usually chased them off to bed before now, so they had learned to slope off before he started his serious drinking, knowing that as long as the boys were out of sight, the old man did not care whether they were in bed or not. It was better not to be home before the rage took him. They had scars to remind them to find somewhere else to be.

Fate couldn’t remember Mama being around; maybe she had already started running around by that time. She died when he was eight, but as far as Fate was concerned, she’d been gone much longer than that.

Tom gave him brown sugar on bread for breakfast, and Ewell made him trucks out of scrap wood and bottle caps. And they took him with them, like a cute but useless puppy, wherever they went. His brothers grew up loving to roam the night, as free as the raccoons and the possums, and often as destructive. Later, in adolescence, they would take to Daddy’s ways—drinking themselves into that state just before insensibility, when they became strangers even to themselves. He would come to dread going with them. Afterward, they never remembered the things they had done. He never forgot.

Not tonight, though.

Tonight Tom and Ewell had brought little Fate down the mountain, to the Wake County High School football field, where no one noticed them among the laughing crowd in the dark. They had bought him a package of cheese crackers and a grape Nehi with money swiped from the old man’s coin jar, and they’d helped themselves to his stash of beer for the road. It was a night of celebration.

Fate willed himself to be still, but inside he was squirming with impatience to see the wonders his brothers had promised. He held his breath, thinking that surely the magic could not happen unless you kept very still for it and wished ’til your teeth hurt. “Is it time?” he whispered to Tom. He saw a bright flashing speck among the stars far up overhead. “Is that it?”

Tom laughed, and ruffled his hair with an ungentle shove. “Naw,” he sneered. “You’ll know.”

“But what will it—”

A roar. A thunderclap.

Suddenly the sky exploded into a burst of red streaks and white stars, like a fiery dandelion blown apart by the night wind, and for that instant the field was as bright as day. He was so startled that he jerked away from Ewell and struggled to his feet, but then he heard his brothers laugh, and a strong arm pulled him down again to the grass, and he snuggled against the warmth of Ewell’s musky sweatshirt, and watched the stars wink out and the red streaks fade to black.

An instant later the second charge began.

Spencer looked away. He saw that the warden’s gaze was fixed on the clock high on the cinder-block wall at the back of the room. He was watching the second hand with the careful attention of a man who does not want to see what else is happening around him. Spencer heard one of the witnesses groan, but he did not turn around to look at the man. He knew that it was not Charles Stanton. He had just begun to reflect on the unreality of the scene before him, so familiar from films that it seemed to be merely a staged illusion, but before he could reflect further on the meaning of his own detachment, the people in the death chamber began to move around again, and he realized that it was over.

The people in the observation room stood up, avoiding one another’s eyes.

The doctor examined the body and nodded to the guards that it was indeed all over. There had been a wisp of smoke where the leather helmet met flesh, but no flames about the face mask, no smell of burning flesh that he could detect, no malfunction of the equipment. Tennessee’s first execution in three decades had gone off without a hitch, Spencer thought. Unless you count the fact that the prisoner was innocent.

“Gentlemen, you may leave whenever you’re ready.” The guard was opening the rear door of the observation room, allowing the witnesses to pass through the visitors’ lounge, and then back through the sally port to the administration building. To freedom. They filed out as silently as they had come, still careful not to make eye contact with one another. Even the two young reporters were silent. Spencer was walking directly behind Colonel Stanton, who was still clutching the picture of his daughter, but he could think of nothing to say to the man except, “Was it worth it?” There could be no answer, and he left the question unsaid.

The other witnesses filed out of the building and into the parking lot full of lights and cameras. Spencer was told to wait.

After a few minutes, an assistant warden came out and shook his hand. “I’m glad it’s over,” he said.

“Yes.”

“You’ve agreed to take Mr. Harkryder’s remains back to the mountains?”

Spencer nodded. “He asked me to. He said he didn’t have anybody else.”

The assistant warden looked away. “The family was contacted. They expressed a desire not to be involved.” He sighed. “A sad life, Mr. Arrowood. A waste.” After a moment of silence, he went on, “The body has been taken for autopsy now. A strange formality, I always thought.” He shrugged.

Spencer did not reply.

“Anyhow, then we have arranged for the crematorium to receive the body and to process it at once. If you could come back here tomorrow morning . . . Around ten?”

The sheriff looked uneasy. “Are you sure I should do this? Maybe his family—”

The assistant warden shook his head.

“Or one of his lawyers—”

“Well, we asked them. They hadn’t been on the case very long, you know. One of them is stuck in Washington, and the other has to be in court tomorrow. They said as long as it isn’t out of your way . . .”

Spencer nodded. “Tomorrow. Ten o’clock.”

He went out into the starless dark of a city night, walking past the waiting reporters without sparing them a glance, and sat for long minutes in the parking lot, his head resting on the steering wheel. It was midnight. He had made reservations at a Nashville motel, so that he could rest before he began the long drive back to east Tennessee, but now he wished that he did not have to spend another hour in the breathless heat of a Nashville summer. If he drove all night, he could be back in the mountains by sunrise. But he had promised to come back tomorrow, and so he would. He would take Fate Harkryder home. He could have wished for other company on his long drive back to the mountains.

The summer haze lay across the distant mountains like a pall of white smoke, but the nearer hills were tangled skeins of green—the oaks and maples holding their own. The locust trees had already given way to the rusty brown of autumn, the first tinge of death on the wind. Soon the nights would turn cold, and summer would be gone.

In crisp October on this hill, facing eastward, Spencer could see Celo Mountain and beneath it the ridges and valleys of North Carolina. But not today. The humid summer air shrouded the distant peaks now, so that turning toward them was more of an act of faith than a fulfillment of a vision.

Through a glass darkly . . .

He wondered if he ought to say words before he began the task.

The pain in his gut reminded him that he ought not to be climbing hills yet, and he shouldn’t have come alone, but he wanted to be released from his promise, so that it would not loom over him in the idleness of his convalescence. He looked down at the small wooden box, not as heavy as it ought to have been to contain the mortal remains of a man, but Fate Harkryder had burned twice, he thought, once alive to satisfy the law, and once by the fires of an impersonal crematorium. The little that was left inspired in him neither anger nor pity, only a vague regret that a life had been spent to so little purpose, and that no one had cared to mourn his passing. Spencer wondered if anything besides duty would take people to his own graveside one day. He put the thought out of his mind.

He would do what had been asked of him, no more. No hymn, no prayer, not even a word of valediction for the dead. He hoped, though, that this would be an ending, that all of the victims of that long-ago night of violence—Charles Stanton, Mike and Emily, and Fate Harkryder himself—could rest in peace. It was not justice, perhaps not even mercy, but at least it was over.

He set the box on the ground and opened it. Then he carried it gently to the side of the hill and emptied

its contents into the wind.

Author’s Note The story of Frankie Silver is true, and the account of it given in this novel is as accurate as I was able to make it at a remove of 164 years from the events themselves. Burgess Gaither, the young clerk of court, and all the other persons mentioned in the narrative were real people. Their actual names are used, and the circumstances of their lives and kinships are faithfully recorded.

My research on Frankie Silver really began when I was a child. In 1790 my ancestors settled what is now Mitchell County, home of the Silvers and the Stewarts. My great-great-grandmother’s first cousin Sarah Honeycutt married Swinfield Howell, who was the brother-in-law of Jackson Stewart, the older brother of Frankie Silver. I say that Frankie and I are “connected”; to call us related would be overdoing it.

I became interested in the case as a topic for a novel in 1992, when I went to Mitchell County to research She Walks These Hills.Jack Pyle and Taylor Reese, two fellow writers who live near Bakersville, took me all over the county. We went up to Kona and saw Charlie Silver’s three graves, and I photographed it. I referred to the case of Frankie Silver in that novel (on page 438 of the paperback edition [Dutton, 1995] of She Walks These Hills,Nora Bonesteel says to Jeremy, “The next time you come down the trail, you want to go to Kona . . .”). This reference to Kona in She Walks These Hills was understood by a number of North Carolina readers who were familiar with the story. Carolyn Sakowski, president of Blair Press and a native of Morganton, wrote to me quoting the line about Kona. “So you’re going to do Frankie, are you?” she said. I owe a great debt of thanks to Carolyn, who was enormously helpful in the research into the case. She accompanied me to Morganton, and we visited the hill where the hanging took place; we interviewed a descendant of Sheriff Boone, who hanged Frankie; and we found the grave of Frankie Silver near the site of the old Buckhorn Tavern (long gone). I am deeply grateful to attorney Robert Byrd of Morganton for making his files on the case available to me, and for all his insight into the Morganton side of the story.

I have made several visits to Mitchell County, talking to Wayne Silver, who is the Silver family curator, visiting the cabin site, and discussing the case at the Silver family reunion and with various acquaintances/cousins in the area. My cousin Professor Lloyd Bailey of Duke University has been arguing back and forth with me about the legal aspects of the case in letters for years. (We each remain unconverted by the other’s logic.)

My research into the documents of the case led me to old census records, microfilm copies of old newspapers, collections of the private papers of North Carolina statesmen, and written accounts of the case by people like Manly Wade Wellman, Muriel Early Sheppard, and Perry Deane Young. Mr. Young did much of the research into the documents in the case, and he sent me a copy of his recent efforts to secure a posthumous pardon for Frankie Silver. Filmmaker Tom Davenport and Professor Daniel Patterson of the University of North Carolina recently completed a documentary on the legend of Frankie Silver, and they very kindly sent me a copy.

Dean Williams, the Appalachian Studies Collection librarian at Appalachian State University in Boone, was very generous with his time, and most helpful in locating census records and biographical information about the lawyers and governors concerned in the case. Rob Neufeld, of the Pack Library in Asheville, was my source for much of the information on Nicholas Woodfin. Tonia Moxley, of Virginia Tech’s University Library (Newman), borrowed microfilm and documents from the North Carolina State Archives in Raleigh, from the University of Alabama law library, and from repositories of documents in half a dozen other states. Dr. Frank Steely, a law professor at Northern Kentucky University, diligently

searched Kentucky’s Supreme Court records in an attempt to verify the hanging of Blackston Stewart. We were unable to document his hanging, but given the incomplete nature of nineteenth-century Kentucky court records, we are not prepared to say that the story is false. The search goes on.

To understand the intricacies of 1830s North Carolina law (based on English common law), I consulted many lawyers, all of whom were extraordinarily patient and helpful in trying to make sense of a system of law no longer used in this country. Jay Brandon, a fellow author and a former district attorney of San Antonio, considered the case as if he were prosecuting it, and walked me through everything from grand jury selection to the appeals process. He even accompanied me to Seguin, Texas, where we consulted tax rolls, census records, and old newspapers, trying to figure out why Thomas Wilson would have given up a twenty-year law practice to relocate to a small town a thousand miles from home. (We concluded that whyever Wilson did it, the result was a disaster for him.)

Robert F. Johnson, district attorney of Burlington, North Carolina, enabled me to see the 1832 Morganton attorneys in the Silver case as real people, working together behind the scenes to solve a public relations dilemma without damage to their own reputations. Mr. Johnson solved to my satisfaction a key question among scholars in the Frankie Silver case: Who represented her at the trial? Senator Sam Ervin of Morganton, whose father was a friend of Burgess Gaither’s, said that Nicholas Woodfin defended Frankie Silver, but in letters to the governor asking for clemency, Thomas Wilson clearly states, “I defended Frankie Silver.” The record of the trial does not name her attorney. Rob Johnson’s explanation, based on current North Carolina law in capital cases, is the one I have used in the novel.

British barrister Sarah Cockburn (a.k.a. author Sarah Caudwell), Virginia attorney H. Gregory Campbell, and James G. McAdams III of the U.S. attorney general’s office, all considered various aspects of the legal side of the case, and I thank them for all their help.

Becky Councill of Boone lives in a log cabin that dates from the same era as Frankie’s cabin, and it was built only ten miles away from Kona. She allowed me in to photograph it, turn off the electricity, pace the floor, peer up into her fireplace. This was most helpful in allowing me to visualize the crime scene. I learned that even on the brightest day, the interior of a log cabin is extremely dark: bloodstains would be difficult to spot.

For various psychological insights into the case, I am indebted to Charlotte Ross, Sergeant J. A. Niehaus, Laura Wilson Ford, and Becky Huddleston for hearing me out and sharing their wisdom with me; and to Appalachian scholar Loyal Jones for providing me with a copy of the Bascom Lamar Lunsford recording of “The Ballad of Frankie Silver.”

The modern component of this novel centered on Riverbend, the maximum-security prison in Nashville. I am grateful to my fellow author Steve Womack for arranging a tour of the prison, and for going with me. Warden Ricky J. Bell, Assistant Warden Thomas A. Joplin, and Bill Smith, who escorted us on our tour of Riverbend, were all generous with their time and information. William Groseclose, who is an inmate on death row in Riverbend, helped me with the characterization of Fate Harkryder, and very graciously provided me with information about prison routine and other details concerning Riverbend and its surroundings. Tennessee attorney Michael McMahan was my guide to modern Tennessee law concerning the court system and the death penalty, and he provided me with excellent material pertaining to Tennessee law. Author David Hunter, a former Knox County deputy sheriff, advised me on police procedure, patiently listening and offering suggestions through many months of planning as I worked my way through the case of Fate Harkryder.

When I began researching the life and death of Frankie Silver, I thought I was looking into a fascinating riddle concerning a long-ago murder on the frontier, a tragic incident but only a minor curiosity in North

Carolina’s pioneer history. As I delved deeper into the story, I began to think that the case was really about poor people as defendants and rich people as officers of the court, about Celt versus English values in developing America, about mountain people versus the “flatlanders” in any culture. This is why I was careful to include all of the names in the Morganton story—to show the ties of blood and common interest that bound all the town folk and the plantation gentry—a world in which Frankie and her frontier community had no connections at all. I concluded that Frankie Silver had much to tell us about equal justice under the law, and that not much has changed since she went to her death on a bright July afternoon 164 years ago.

BIBLIOGRAPHY I have several hundred pages of source material on the case, on the individuals involved, and on nineteenth-century law. Below is a list of the more useful volumes, and some more accessible to the reader.

Abbott, Geoffrey. Lords of the Scaffold: A History of Execution.London: Headline, 1992.

Avery, Clifton K. Official Court Record of the Trial, Conviction and Execution of Francis Silvers, First Woman Hanged in North Carolina.Booklet reprinted from articles appearing in the Morganton News Herald,1944.

Cotton, J. Randall, Suzanne Pickens Wylie, and Millie M. Barbee. Historic Burke: An Architectural Sites Inventory of Burke County.Morganton, N.C.: Historic Burke Foundation, 1987.

Dictionary of North Carolina Biography.

Drimmer, Frederick. Until You Are Dead: The Book of Executions in America.New York: Pinnacle, 1992.

Ervin, Senator Sam J., Jr. Burke County Courthouses and Related Matters.Morganton, N.C.: Historic Burke Foundation, 1985.

The Heritage of Burke County.Edited by H. Russell Triebert, Jean Conyers Ervin, and Marjorie Miller Triebert. Morganton, N.C.: Burke County Historical Society, 1981.

Holland, Eliza Woodfin. “A Grand-Daughter’s Tribute to Her Grandfather.” Article published in the Asheville Citizen,May 3, 1921.

Sakowski, Carolyn. “The Life and Death of Frankie Silver.” Article, privately printed, May 1973.

Sheppard, Muriel Early. Cabins in the Laurel.Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1935.

Silver, Wayne. Frankie’s Song: A Collection from the Kona Baptist Church Library.Privately printed, n.d.

Stockton, Dennis. “Diary of a Death Row Inmate.” Series of articles published in the Roanoke Times & World News,July 26–September 28, 1995.

Toe River Valley Heritage.Edited by Lloyd Richard Bailey, Sr. Marceline, Mo.: Walsworth Publishing, 1994.

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