9
Alec Whitley: The Man and the Ballad
In 1958, Thomas first published his story containing the ballad “Alec Whitley.” Earlier that same year he had republished an article entitled “Condemned by Exodus 21:28—Biblical Death of Pharoah the which told of the barbaric 1880 stoning of a bull, deemed to have gored a man in the Stanly community, killing him. Pharoah was tried and convicted by Stanly’s elders, who applied biblical law to his case and sentenced him to death by stoning. Historians agree that although Stanly had never had a lynching before then, the stoning of Pharoah in 1880 demonstrates an existing propensity for the mob violence in Stanly County that erupted in
Another significant item in the article is the description of a black man: “Old Alec, a black man freed from slavery these 15 In the course of the Pharoah story, Alec is described as “savage.”
Perhaps this thought, impossible for the black man to put into words, unleashed in the Negro the same savagery that was spawned millenniums ago in the hot groin of Africa. The black man brandished a knife and ran forward. He stooped and began cutting out chunks of flesh from the quivering body. He threw the chunks of flesh to the dogs, and the dogs snarled and fought one another for the red meat … Two men pulled the black man
The two “Alec” characters—the first discovered by Thomas in the Pharoah story, the second created by Thomas for his ballad—are strikingly similar, both described as savages carving flesh. It is suspicious that Thomas published two stories with a character named “Alec,” both depicted as evil and vicious, and that he happened to discover fragments of a new song with the same name as the title of his story, “Alec Whitley.” His “Alec” remains part of the landscape of folklore and has the appearance of authenticity, but before Heath Thomas wrote about him, “Alec Whitley” did not exist.
The
The story “Alec Whitley: The Man and The Ballad,” submitted to the North Carolina Folklore Society in 1960 by Heath Thomas, differs from the original 1949 version. This fact is significant in determining how much Thomas embellished his story.
The later version begins with a recitation of a ballad, “Alec Whitley,” which Thomas claimed to have discovered as a “collection of a few raw fragments and one His vague description of the discovery of this ballad provided no supporting documentation for either an author or date of origin. Without stating a source, Thomas also asserted that the tune for his song is based on the hymn, “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?” It is unclear whether “Alec Whitley” was composed in 1892, decades after the lynching, or specifically for Heath Thomas’s story.
Ballad analysts determined that “Alec Whitley” was written after “Lines Written on the Assassination of D. B. Tucker,” concluding that “the first verse of ‘Alec Whitley’ provides a synopsis of ‘Lines’” and “the composer of ‘Alec Whitley’ was familiar with ‘Lines,’ and, probably used the idea in the last verse (8) of ‘Lines’” to begin his new
8. His wife in North Carolina she could not take her rest.
She felt that there was trouble with her husband in the West.
Oftimes she had looked for him, and oftimes seen him come,
But now he is gone from her to never more return.
Thomas claimed he “first heard [the ballad] ‘Alec Whitley’ in eight years after his first “Alec” story. He included the song in his revamped 1958 story, published in the Stanly News and In 1960, Thomas submitted a recording of “Alec Whitley,” performed by Mr. Russell McIntire, to the Southern Folklife Collection. In that same year, the North Carolina Folklore Society accepted this new version of his story with the
His revised story begins with a recitation of the ballad “Alec Whitley.”
He murdered Bert Tucker in the West
He murdered Bert Tucker in the West
He murdered Bert Tucker in the West
And he knocked a widder out of rest.
So they carried Alec Whitley to Albemarle
So they carried Alec Whitley to Albemarle
So they carried Alec Whitley to Albemarle
And they made a prisoner of him there.
He stayed there three days and two nights
He stayed there three days and two nights
He stayed there three days and two nights
And they hung him to a red oak limb.
They hung Alec Whitley to a red oak limb
They hung Alec Whitley to a red oak limb
They hung Alec Whitley to a red oak limb
Just to show the world what they’d do for him.
It was about the tenth of June
It was about the tenth of June
It was about the tenth of June
When they hung that cunning old
According to some ballad analysts, the pejorative description of a black man as a “cunning old coon” may have been used to describe the white Alex Whitley as a simple matter of necessity, to rhyme with June in the previous line of the However, many researchers are baffled by this usage. My theory is that Thomas composed the ballad himself, rather than discovering it as he claimed, and named his character “Alec” based on the description of the savage black man in his earlier article, thus providing further justification for the lynching.
The Embellished
Like his predecessor Harrington, Thomas amplified the vilification of his character “Alec Whitley” by concocting this preposterous scene:
Whitley cut off Tucker’s feet and compelled the dying man to walk on the bloody stubs of his amputated
This provocative description of savagery is similar to the portrayal of the character “Alec” in the bull story: Thomas’s recitation of sensationalist gossip attributes unbridled savagery to both Alecs. This fabrication was included in a footnote on “Alec” in a chapter on lynching ballads as information received from two Many local folks believed this horrific scene was the truth, because Thomas wove it into his story presented as fact.
Thomas further embellished a sense of wickedness in his “Alec” by depicting him as a man feared by the community:
But settlers of western Stanly learned that if they suspected Alec Whitley, they should whisper his name. To accuse him was to invite your barn to burn old folks
This assertion is pure fabrication. The real Alex Whitley was never charged with or convicted of burning a barn. Yet in Thomas’s story, “Alec” is pursued by a posse of 22 men organized by Deputy Sheriff John Dry, searching through the night across dangerous, dark terrain, making their way through the woods lit only by the Milky Way and surrounded by animals lurking in the The scene is intended to create suspense for entertainment.
In contrast, a newspaper report from 1892 offers a more mundane picture of the posse.
Last Sunday a woman named Dry saw him (Whitley) pass near her door … She told her husband (John Dry), and he collected a posse of men, and they followed his
On Monday, June 6, 1892, the posse organized by Mr. (not deputy) John Dry seized Alex, who was locked in a room in the residence of Ephraim Whitley, a justice of the peace.
Thomas’s description of the posse’s nighttime hunt culminates with the discovery of tracks made by boots with a heart carved in the heel. This fancy pair of boots was worn by his “Alec” to walk readers through his tale. Early in his story, “Alec” is marked as a thief, identified through these distinctive boot tracks at the scene of a crime.
Once in southern Cabarrus, a farmer returned home to find a large sum of money had been stolen. Officers found the tracks of two men leading from the farmer’s house. One of them had worn boots with the imprint of a heart on the high
Alec Whitley had been seen nearby, and when he was arrested he wore boots with the tell-tale
Thomas further vilified his “Alec” as a man who escaped punishment for his crimes, writing, “Whitley had beaten the to give the appearance that he was above the law.
When his “Alec” is a hunted murderer, he is snared by those distinctive boot tracks seen in the moonlight.
It was getting on toward daybreak now, and the old moon was riding higher. Speight knelt down on the path and examined the mild June dust. Here he found the prints of high-heeled boots. A light was struck. There was the imprint of the heart in the center of the heels. Alec Whitley had always worn this type of
Those boots embroidered the notoriety and mystical power of the character “Alec” as another example of how Thomas wove slivers of truth into these fabricated scenes to make them appear factual. But they are not.
In 1884 it was unusual for anyone to go to court to recover a fancy pair of boots, but the truth is that Alex Whitley did just that. On June 5, 1884, he filed a civil lawsuit in Stanly County against Mr. S. Frank Morgan for receiving stolen goods, i.e., his boots. Mary Whitley, Alex’s wife, testified that David Cagle, a boy of about 14 or 15, took the boots from their house and sold them to Frank Morgan, who then gave them to his son, James
There is no documentation of a heart carved in the heel. Regardless, the boots became part of Alex Whitley’s legacy and they, not he, would be remembered for having a heart.
Although in Thomas’s story Deputy Dan Speight says, “he would not shoot down his Stanly neighbors to save Alec those words never appeared in any news article from 1892 describing the lynching. Thomas used these words as justification for Sheriff Snuggs’s surrender of his prisoner to a lynch mob composed of his friends and neighbors. Thomas wraps Sheriff Snuggs in a soft blanket of kindness and caring, like a father figure who dispatches his deputy to protect not Alex, his prisoner, but young boys from observing the
Thomas described the burial of his “Alec” based on an 1892 news article.
And so they left him until the next day when men of the town brought a crude coffin and dug a grave beneath the
His description emphasized a disdain for “Alec”: a dead body hanging from the limb of a tree until the following day. The power of a mob to not only exert control over the execution but also to determine how, when, and where the remains would be buried—providing only a crude coffin and digging a grave beneath the hanging tree—heightens the savagery of their murder.
After weaving the threads of suspense and malevolence throughout his story, Thomas concluded his tale with a moralistic perspective on the ritual murder, reiterating his misogynistic theme by laying the responsibility for “Alec’s” death by a lynch mob on the back of his dead mother.
It is not well, of course, for any man to sit in judgment upon another. But perhaps a long time ago when Alec Whitley was born, some unceasing savage wind, that first stirred in Nod, east of Eden, came to the fatherless Stanly house and placed an evil kiss upon his brow. For winds do stir, and they make a mournful sound where the red oak stood in the Town Creek
Thomas’s proclivity for hyperbole is evident. He closes his story with a biblical quote condemning Susannah and branding “Alec” as a godless black man by comparing “Alec” with Cain:
And Cain went out from the presence of the LORD, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of
Equating Nod with Alex’s fatherless home may have soothed the conscience of those who committed or condoned the lynching, some of whom continued to walk through Stanly County in 1949. Thomas absolved them of their crime of murder, through his comparison of them to righteous executioners of Cain, who murdered his brother Abel.
Thomas’s removal of “Alec” from beneath the red oak tree to a church cemetery by an “unidentified kinsman” may have been plucked from the 1931 article, published before his first “Alec” story, that described this event.
He slept there, peacefully, it is hoped, for he had paid for his crimes, until 1927 when an unidentified kinsman dug up his bones and removed them to a country graveyard where he waits for
The “kinsman,” Alex Whitley’s daughter, is clearly identified in the original newspaper account: “Mrs. Titus Barbee, a daughter of Mr. Whitley, had the work Thomas’s use of information from this news article indicates he knew that Nelia and her family lived in the area when he published his story. This knowledge, however, did not deter him from publishing, nor diminish his posture as an expert on the life and murder of Alex Whitley.
Heath Thomas was not the first newspaperman to tell the story of the lynching of Alex Whitley. His predecessors wrote equally sensational articles that laid the groundwork for his creation. Political and religious ingredients blended with exaggerations, distortions, and outright falsehoods about the life and death of Alex Whitley and D. B. Tucker to provide tasty morsels that locals consumed for a century. As a news article reporting the Alex Whitley lynching in 1892 astutely observed, “Nothing in fiction can equal this
The citizens of Stanly County did not lynch a fictional character named “Aleck” or “Alec.” They murdered a real man, Alexander Whitley, presumed innocent under the law; a man who was born and raised in their midst; a son, brother, and father, known both to those who loved him and those who loathed him as Alex.