Eenie, meenie, minie, mo.... This book is so irritating that I'm being forced to choose at random to decide which flaw to describe first. Indeed, it's so bad, with so many interlocking defects, that it's hard to delineate them.

First, the facts as we know them. In 1892, a North Carolina native named Alexander Whitley, then living in Arkansas, was accused of murdering "Bert" Tucker. Tucker was not only dead, his body had been dismembered. Whitley, obviously in trouble, left Arkansas to return to North Carolina. He was taken into custody there, for extradition to Arkansas. But a mob broke into the jail and lynched Whitley. At least two poems commemorate the event, one, by E. P. Harrington, was called "Lines Written on the Assassination of D. B. Tucker," and was probably prepared as a broadside to be sold at Whitley's execution. The other, known as "Alex Whitley," has no known author; it was published, much later, by Heath Thomas and presented as a traditional folk song about the Whitley lynching.

I've read Thomas's article in North Carolina Follkore, as well as an article by Bruce E. Baker in W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Under Sentence of Death: Lynching in the South, University of North Carolina Press, 1997, pp. 219-245. These seem to be the only sources for the two poems. Harrington's, contrary to the assertions of Hartsell, shows no evidence of being a folk song, and certainly not to having been sung at square dances -- where one generally does not sing ballads in any case! (And definitely not murder ballads. Square dances are supposed to be fun!) Thomas's piece does look rather folk-like, in the sense that I suspect it has lost its beginning, but it is not very informative and is impossible to date; its authenticity can neither be proved nor disproved.

Hartsell, the great-granddaughter of Alexander Whitley, seems to have published this book to try to clear her ancestor's name. So one of her approaches is to go after the two poems. With arguments that are really non-sequiturs. She has no understanding of folklore whatsoever. No one expects folklore to preserve details exactly; what is remembered is what is dramatic. But as soon as a piece of what she calls "folklore" contains an inaccuracy, she not only sets it aside, she seems to assume that the reverse of every word of the folktale is false!

Hartsell is fond of pointing out that no one ever actually convicted Whitley of anything. That is not the same as saying he was innocent. For instance, almost the only actual information we have about the murder of Tucker is that Whitley's half-sister Judy Burris testified that Whitley hit Tucker shortly before Tucker's death, but that Burris never knew what happened after that. I leave it to you to judge what the probabilities are about Tucker's death. Hartsell seems to think Tucker died miraculously and then miraculously dismembered himself after death. Further, she thinks Burris's account is not evidence of anything, because Burris might have lied. (Yes, she might have, but she's the only testimony we have.) And she doesn't understand the legal system. When a Grand Jury investigated Judy Burris, they failed to find a true bill against her. That is not an acquittal. It is a failure to indict.

Hartsell makes no serious attempt to determine what actually happened to Tucker, or whether the various other accusations leveled at Whitley were true, even though he was clearly suspected in North Carolina of many things, including possibly killing his wife and father-in-law. She just goes after the sheriff who failed to prevent Whitley's lynching, and Whitley's father J. C. Burris who didn't protect him (or didn't marry his mother, or didn't fly to the moon on horseback, or something...), and Heath Thomas, and anyone else who done Whitley dirt.

In the end, what we have is about fifteen pages of actual evidence (Judy Burris's statement and some newspaper accounts), fifty pages of things that have nothing to do with the case, and sixty pages of special pleading. (The book is only 136 pages, which shows you how little actual evidence there is.) Hartsell clearly has an obsession with proving Whitley's innocence -- yet there seems to be no exculpatory evidence. (To be sure, there isn't much incriminating evidence, either. After a century and a quarter, it's too late to know the truth.) Since she is trying to "prove" something when she has no evidence and no counter-proposal, naturally the result is full of nonsense.

Or take the term "lynching." Hartsell correctly traces the term back to the American Revolution. But that's just the word. Does she really believe that there were no extra-judicial mob killings before that, or that none would have happened after that had the term gone un-invented? I doubt it. Certainly it would have been better if Whitley had faced a trial court rather than a mob. But if Hartsell wants to condemn lynching, she should write a book about lynching, not a book that purports to be about Whitley!

To top it all off, the book is disorderly and poorly written -- so disorderly and incoherent that it's reduced me almost to incoherence in writing about it . This is just plain a lousy book. I don't know what else to say about it.

[Correction 4/18/2021: changed "about Whitley's death" to "about Tucker's death."] ( )