Naomi “Omie” Wise: Her Life, Death, and Legend

On April 7, 1807, a search party from the North Carolina village of New Salem found the body of a pregnant young woman named Naomi Wise drowned in Deep River. Authorities quickly arrested John Lewis, the local man commonly assumed to be the father of her illegitimate child, for Wise's murder and took him to Randolph County's ramshackle jailhouse to await trial.Today, we know this story from “Little Omie Wise,” the folk ballad that it produced. Made famous by a 1964 Doc Watson recording, the song shoehorns Wise's fate into the standard narrative of so many murder ballads: a predatory older man impregnates an innocent young girl and then kills her to maintain his carefree single life. As this deeply researched book reveals, the truth was rather different. Drawing on both newly uncovered documents and their own long family history in Randolph County, Hal E. Pugh and Eleanor Minnock-Pugh have produced a detailed and conscientious account of the case.The real John Lewis, it emerges, was part of a feared local family whose menfolk had a well-earned reputation for violence. His job as the area's constable set him on the first rung of fulfilling his political ambitions, which he hoped to advance further by marrying into the rich and influential Elliot family. All these hopes would have vanished if he allowed Wise—an older and rather more worldly woman than the ballad suggests—to publicly name him as her baby's father. He had far more to lose than his old footloose ways if he allowed the scandal to come to light—so it was better to kill her first.With the help of friends and relatives, Lewis escaped from the Randolph County jail before his trial could be scheduled, fleeing to Indiana Territory where he remained at large for more than 5 years. By the time he faced trial for Wise's murder in October 1812, his family had helped to make most of the crucial evidence disappear, giving the judge no choice except to acquit him. Lewis stood trial again a year later, this time for the 1807 jailbreak, but received a sentence of just 30 days. He died in 1817, most likely from the bite of a poisonous snake.For the most part, Pugh and Minnock-Pugh tell this story well. They carefully supply supporting evidence for each stage of their account and provide photographs of the key documents and significant sites, such as “Naomi's cooling board”—the flat rock at riverside where her body lay for the coroner's hearing. There is much fascinating information on the “ordeal by touch,” which Lewis was subjected to at this hearing, and on the imminent “bastardy bond” proceedings that had threatened to expose his role in the pregnancy (pp. 40, 21).Two of the earliest sources on the case are a narrative poem recovered from the commonplace book of Mary Woody, a North Carolina woman whose life span overlapped with Wise's own, and the educator Braxton Craven's lengthy newspaper account of 1851. Though both are somewhat romanticized—a caveat the book rightly notes—they still have much to offer. The poem in particular provides our only surviving account of the evidence put forward at the coroner's hearing, as well as a rare female perspective on the case. Although they didn't discover Woody's verses personally, Pugh and Minnock-Pugh give them their first widespread exposure in the book. The copious appendices reproduce in full both the poem and Craven's journalistic account, along with transcripts of the relevant legal documents and a discography listing the ballad's many recordings.Serious scholars of the Naomi Wise case and anyone planning to teach it will find this book a very useful resource. That said, there are passages where a more stringent editing process would have helped. Instead of sticking to what screenwriter William Goldman called “the spine of the story”—in this case, Wise's and Lewis’ respective fates—the authors occasionally detour into largely irrelevant material, such as the minutiae of New Salem's Quaker community or the precise route likely to have been chosen by Lewis’ pursuers. This periodically robs their core story of its momentum and risks losing the general reader's attention.