A Tree Accurst: Bobby McMillon and Stories of Frankie Silver (review)

Bobby McMillon and Stories of Frankie Silver. By Daniel Patterson. University of North Carolina Press, 1999. 264 pp. Cloth $49.95, paper $18.95

In the winter of 1831 Frankie Silver killed her husband Charlie with a blow to the head from an axe. His body was then dismembered, either by Frankie or someone else, and burned in the fireplace of the couple's cabin. What did not burn was hidden outdoors in the frozen woods to be found later by a search party. Frankie was arrested, tried, and hanged for the crime.

This is how the story has been handed down for generations in the Burke County, North Carolina, community of Kona, where the murder took place, and throughout the Appalachian region. Countless words have been invested in the Frankie Silver story, both on the page and in the oral tradition, but its staying power is rooted in something much deeper than simply the horrific details of the crime itself. Rather it reaches into the lives of individuals such as Bobby McMillon, who has from his childhood collected songs and stories from his native mountains. His relationship to the Frankie Silver story is both personal (as a Silver family relative) and artistic. The lore that surrounds Frankie Silver captured his imagination when he was a little boy:

Right down through the woods yonder, if you could see it through the trees and brush, is where the cabin stood that Frankie and Charles Silver lived in. And long after they were dead and gone the house fell in, and later another home was built over the foundations. . . . But there was a tree that grew near where the old house was.

They claimed if you got up in it, that you couldn't get out. And my mother said that she thought that when I was just a child and we went up there that I got up in the tree and they liked to have never got me out. I don't know if that was because of the curse or because I didn't want to be got out.

Like the accursed tree, the Frankie Silver story lingers, haunts. There could not be a more appropriate image to illustrate the intricate way the history of the murder when fostered by the narrative choices of storytellers like McMillon branches into the legend cycle, ballad variations, novels, and other works that still fascinate today.

Dan Patterson does a tremendous job in presenting a thorough and insightful look at the complex relationship between historical fact and the oral tradition. Through a biographical chapter on Bobby McMillon, Patterson shows how a deep connection with the old stories and the language of one's home landscape proved to be the early training of a skilled storyteller and ballad singer. One of the book's most engaging aspects is the experience of reading the Frankie Silver story as performed by McMillon, but not merely for the interest of the plot and the characters. To find a modern example of the Appalachian dialect accurately captured on the page is a welcome study in the patterns of word usage and rhythm of the language. It also allows the reader a practical example of the way in which a storyteller works out issues of timing and emphasis in an actual performance.

Patterson reconstructs the events of Frankie's trial from surviving legal records, contemporary letters, the work of local historians, and newspaper accounts. It is from this reconstruction that the reader moves closest to Frankie herself. She was in fact a young woman in her late teens or early twenties and from a family of meager means, standing trial for murder before a jury, none of whom, as Patterson points out, "came from her side of the mountains." Regional and class biases were not the only obstacles she faced during the trial. Tradition of the day declared anyone indicted for a crime automatically incompetent to testify for or against themselves. In addition...