Brief description of the novel
In bitterly divided western North Carolina, Confederate troops execute 13 men and boys suspected of Unionism. The Shelton Laurel Massacre, as it came to be known, is a microcosm of the horrors of civil war—neighbor against neighbor and violence at one’s front door. Told by those who lived it—the colonel’s wife, a helpless witness; the jealous second-in-command who gives the fatal order; the canny mountain woman who cares only for her people and her land; the conscript, haunted and seeking redemption; and the mute girl, whose folk magic yields an unexpected result—these voices offer an intimate glimpse into the lives of five people tangled in history’s web, caught up together in love and hate.
About the writing of the novel
Based on an actual event and historical characters, And the Crows Took Their Eyes is a richly imagined portrait of a dark and bitter time—illuminated by sudden gleams of warm humanity and undying strength.
During the Civil War, in the western North Carolina county where I live, 13 men and boys, suspected of supporting the Union, were captured by the Confederates and shot by a firing squad. Some called it a military action. Around here, it’s remembered as a massacre. And the bitter strife between divided local inhabitants gave the county a nickname that still endures—Bloody Madison.
I’d seen the historical marker commemorating the Massacre many times as we drove out to Shelton Laurel to visit friends. I’d walked through the house in Marshall, where Lawrence Allen, the Confederates’s commanding officer responsible for the Massacre, had lived. And though Civil War history had never been of particular interest to me, I began to realize that there was a novel waiting to be written, right here under my nose—historical fiction, not a mystery like my previous books. And as our country became more and more polarized into different political camps, the reality of a war between neighbors seemed sadly relevant.
As I began to dig deeper, I found a compelling story. In 1861, voters in Marshall, county-seat, and home to the more affluent, slave-holding citizens, backed secession from the Union. The non-slaveholder farmers of Shelton Laurel opposed secession and, according to some accounts, were prevented from voting. Some entered the Union Army, many stayed at home, resisting, often violently, conscription by the Confederates. When salt was declared a vital resource and put under the Confederate government’s control, the Laurelites were not allowed to purchase any. And salt was necessary to preserve meat, to keep it through the winter. So in early January of 1863, a force of 50-some men, most of them Laurelites on leave from the Union army, rode into Marshall to obtain the salt their families needed. They raided the town’s salt repository and went on to ransack stores and houses, including Colonel Allen’s, even pounding up the stairs to rip the very blankets from the beds where the colonel’s children lay desperately ill with scarlet fever.
A few days later, a troop of Confederate soldiers from Allen’s command made its way to the Laurel Valley, searching for the perpetrators of the raid. Women were tortured in a vain effort to make them tell where their men were hiding, At last, 13 random men and boys were rounded up —some deserters from the Confederate Army, most probably not a part of the raid on Marshall. They were told they would be taken to Tennessee for trial and were housed overnight in a cabin belonging to Judy Shelton. The following day they would be marched a few miles away and shot —the Shelton Laurel Massacre.
The more research I did, the more I encountered the name Judy Shelton— still remembered in Shelton Laurel as Aunt Judy or Granny Judy. When I had begun to plan my novel, Judy wasn’t even on my radar; but once I stood where her cabin had been and laid my hand on the chimney that remains, once I began to puzzle out how Judy fit into this story, she came to life and, in many ways, became the linchpin of my story.
As far as I could tell from my research, Judy never married. Born in 1833, between 1850 and 1864 she had seven children by Sol Chandley (who married another woman in 1858.) Also, in 1858, Judy’s father died, and she inherited the homeplace where she would live the rest of her life. Later (1867-1873), Judy had three children by A.G Tweed (said to be her childhood sweetheart but married to another.)
Well. There was enough romance in those bare facts to visualize Judy entire — a strong-minded mountain woman, determined not to marry and thus lose control of her inheritance. Add to this, Judy, who, with the help of others, rescued the bodies of the massacre victims and buried them.
Yes, Judy sprang to life almost at once. The others were slower to emerge.
Though my sympathies were with the Unionists of Shelton Laurel, I was committed to telling both sides of the story and settled on three representatives from the Confederate side. The first two were Col. Lawrence Allen, the commander of the 64th, and his wife Mary (known as Polly.) I could find almost no information on Polly, so I used my imagination to conjure up the feelings and struggles of a loving wife and devoted mother amid a civil war, with its privations and dangers growing ever closer to home.
Lawrence’s career is relatively well-documented, down to a last sad newspaper article, and I tried to adhere to what is known while making my guesses about his state of mind during the war and after.
I interviewed a descendant of the Allen’s, who showed me a pamphlet recounting Lawrence Allen’s heroic deeds. The descendant was passionate in his defense, saying that the so-called massacre was a justified military action taken against dangerous men (yes, and boys) carrying on guerilla warfare against the Confederate troops. “Nothing but a bunch of savages!” he insisted. And with that, I had a line that would be used and reused in my telling.
Col. Keith, the officer, generally held responsible for the massacre, was a bit of a puzzle to me. As I tried to humanize him, to suggest motivations for his behavior, he persisted in acting like a villain. I talked about my work in progress on my blog and was surprised to receive, almost like a voice from the grave, an email from a Keith descendant. She asked that I treat her ancestor fairly and noted that he had ended his days as a highly respected member of his community.
The new information shaped my final chapters and lent an ironical twist to the two colonels’s fates.
And what of my two other main characters: Marthy and Sim? Marthy is based on a real person- a so-called ‘idiot girl’ who was tortured. I could find little other information about her, and she appeared to have died young. So I felt free to treat her almost as fictional, making her mute, but not an idiot, and giving her a sweetheart and an integral role.
Sim, a young man from Tennessee and an unwilling conscript to the Confederate Army, is wholly fictional. But there were many like him, caught up in a war they wanted nothing to do with. His fictional character made it possible for me to pull together the disparate voices and turn history into a novel.
I had no idea when I began what a balancing act would prove to be —weighing the known facts against the demands of story-telling, constructing an arc for the plot and each character, and sticking to what is known while embellishing with what might have been. And all the while, these characters were looking over my shoulder, breathing down my neck, whispering in my ear . . . No. that wasn’t it . . . Be sure to tell about . . . Yes, I think that’s close . . .
I listened to those voices. And now I hope they’re all satisfied—Polly and Lawrence Allen, James Keith, Marthy and Sim. And especially Judy.
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