by Beth Macy
By the time I poked my head into her tiny soul-food restaurant, with the idea of writing a story about her famous great-uncles, it was very clear that all personal details were going to be closely held, trickling out in dribs and drabs—and very much on Nancy Saunders’s timeline. The first time I asked if I could interview Willie Muse, she pointed to a homemade sign on the Goody Shop wall. A customer had stenciled the words in black block letters on a white painted board and given it to her as a gift.
The sign said SIT DOWN AND SHUT UP.
Willie was not now—nor would he ever be—available for comment. So, hoping to generate some goodwill for a future story on her uncles, I wrote a feature about her restaurant, a place where the menu never changes and isn’t even written down. You’re just supposed to know.
Legions of black Roanokers could already recite the daily specials I would eventually commit to memory: Tuesday is spaghetti or lasagna, except every other Tuesday, which is pork chops. Wednesday is fish, and Thursday country-fried steak. Friday is ribs, but you’d better come early because the ribs always sell out quickly. The line out front starts forming at noon, though lunch doesn’t officially begin until 12:15 and not a minute before—and later if Nancy has to run home to check on Uncle Willie and finds him in the midst of a bad day. (His favorite special? Spaghetti Tuesday.)
For most of December, the place is closed so the Saunders women—Nancy and her mother, Dot; cousin Louise; and aunt Martha—can work on the hundreds of yeast rolls, cakes, and pies they make by advance special order for Christmas.
Among the other unwritten rules in the Goody Shop code: “Don’t criticize, especially the fruitcake,” I wrote. “When a novice Goody Shopper grimaced at the very mention of the jellied fruitstuff, Saunders snapped, ‘I beg your pardon! You’re getting ready to step on the wrong foot!’” She pointed, again, to her sign.
She also kept a painted rock on top of her cash register, a gift from her preschooler nephew, whom she helped raise. She was not above picking it up—presumably in semi-jest—should a customer offend her.
When I returned for lunch, two days after my story ran—Rib Fridays were my favorite—Nancy shook her finger at me, and it was clear I was not getting anything close to a pat on the back. Dot sat nearby peeling potatoes, watching The Young and the Restless and cringing at what she knew her daughter was about to say.
Nancy had been ready to send me packing the first time I walked in the restaurant and blithely inquired about her uncles, but softhearted Dot persuaded her to let me stay and do the restaurant feature. A Y&R fan in my youth, I’d bonded quickly with Dot over the characters and was helping peel potatoes in her kitchen before the episode was over, much to Nancy’s chagrin. (Victor Newman was a scoundrel, we agreed.)
“You know what your story did?” Nancy barked. “It brought out a bunch of crazy white people, that’s all!”
Paying customers, I might have added, but she was in no mood for backtalk. She walked past me without further comment. She was leaving now to feed Willie and turn him in his bed, as she often did throughout the day, leaving the Goody Shop as many as five or six times a shift.
If Nancy Saunders had her way, her great-uncles’ story would have stayed buried where she thought it belonged. The first time she heard it, she was just a child, and she found the whole tale embarrassing, and painfully raw. The year was 1961, and black and white people alike wanted to know: Were the light-skinned brothers black or white? Had they really been trapped in a cage and forced to eat raw meat?
These men deserved respect, Nancy knew. They did not deserve the gawkers who came by their house at all hours, banging on the front door.
By the time I came on the scene, no one talked about savages or circus freaks in front of Nancy, a sturdy woman with a no-frills Afro, graying at the temples, whose skin was nearly as white as the chef’s coat she wore to work. She baked bread every bit as good as her great-grandmother Harriett’s ash cakes—and she was every bit as fierce. Even Reg Shareef, who knew the family well, had never contemplated bringing the subject up with her.
“That is one exceptionally guarded family,” he told me, advising baby steps. “You have to think of them as a tribe. They fall out with each other sometimes. But if you fall out with one of them, they will come roaring back at you like an army.”
It was ten more years before Nancy warmed up enough to let me cowrite a newspaper series about her uncles, and only after Willie Muse’s death, in 2001. She didn’t reveal much, though. She invited my fellow reporter Jen McCaffery, photographer Josh Meltzer, and me inside the Muse brothers’ house exactly once.
She made reference to a family Bible that we were not permitted to view, and for years after the series ran, whenever I visited the restaurant she hinted that there was so much more to the story than we had found.
Our newspaper was the same one that had mocked her family’s version of the kidnapping story decades before. It had looked the other way when city officials decimated two historic black neighborhoods in the name of midcentury progress, via urban renewal, or, as the black community called it, Negro removal. The newspaper cheered when the city knocked down hundreds of community homes and buildings, including the Muse family’s Holiness church. It refused to print wedding announcements for black brides until the mid-1970s because, the wealthy white publisher reasoned, Roanoke had no black middle class.
I myself had used a pair of pregnant black teens to illustrate a story about Roanoke’s super-high teen-pregnancy rate in 1993, a story that went viral before that Internet term existed and made the girls the object of ridicule; even Rush Limbaugh joined in with a rant. When the girls dropped out of school shortly after my story ran, it was devastating, including to me.
Words linger and words matter, I learned, and it’s not possible to predict the fallout they can have on a subject’s life.
It would take me twenty-five years, finally, to earn something nearing Nancy’s trust; to convince her I wasn’t one more candy peddler intent on exploiting her relatives for the color of their skin—or purely for my own financial benefit. As the literary critic Leslie Fiedler has put it, “Nobody can write about Freaks without somehow exploiting them for his own ends.”
George and Willie Muse had come into her care in the 1960s, a situation Nancy considered her privilege as well as her duty, and her loyalty to them extended to everything from coordinating their retirement activities and doctor visits—restoring the love, respect, and dignity that had been stolen from them as children—to holding their story close.
By 2008, she had begun, in her inimitably gruff (and usually funny and occasionally even sweet) way, to warm toward me. When I set out to write a ten-part series on caregiving for the elderly, Nancy was the first person I called for input.
“You gotta keep it real,” she said, sharing names and numbers of people who would eventually become primary sources for that project. She periodically counseled me about other career and family stresses, advising me, “You can handle this. Listen, girl, if you can get back into Dot’s kitchen, you can do anything.”
When I hit a snag updating the story of the pregnant teens more than twenty years after my explosive first story, it seemed fate that Shannon Huff, now a thirty-seven-year-old mother of four, lived just around the corner from Nancy’s northwest Roanoke ranch house. After some angry relatives tried to bully me into not running the story—physically threatening me and demanding a meeting with my newspaper bosses—Nancy reassured me, “You don’t need their permission to do the story, just like you don’t really need mine to write your book. Not really, you don’t.”
And yet, months earlier, Nancy’s permission is exactly what I sought. On the eve of publishing my first book, about a third-generation factory owner who had battled Chinese imports to save his company, I had given her an advance reading copy of Factory Man, dog-earing a chapter on race relations I’d found particularly hard to write. It detailed decades of mistreatment of black furniture-factory workers, miscegenati
on, and the sexual harassment of black domestic workers, who often resorted to wearing two girdles at the same time as a defense against their bosses’ groping hands and outright rape.
“It’s been that way down through history,” Nancy said. “A friend of my mom’s, she’d be vacuuming down the steps [on a housekeeping job], and the husband would be feeling her up from behind. My mom had to fill in for her one day. And so she told the man first thing, ‘Don’t make me open up your chest!’”
By which Dot Brown meant: with the tip of my knife.
Nancy and I had come a long way from the days of sit-down-and-shut-up.
Still, it was by no means a gimme when I called her in November 2013, asking for her blessing to pursue her uncles’ story as a book. She was in her midsixties and recently retired, after closing the Goody Shop. I wanted her help delving into the family story as well as connecting with distant Muse relatives, including one albino Muse still living in Truevine.
“I’ll think about it,” Nancy said, and the message was clear: I was not to call back. She would call me.
More than six weeks later—oh, she enjoyed making me wait—she finally called. “I waited so I could give it to you as a present,” she said.
It was Christmas morning, and Nancy had decided to let me write her uncles’ story with her help and blessing. But on one condition: “No matter what you find out or what your research turns up, you have to remember: in the end, they came out on top.”
I knew the story’s ending, I assured her. I’d already interviewed several people—nurses and doctors, neighbors and lawyers—all of whom described the late-life care she’d given her uncles as impeccable and extraordinary.
I was less certain about who had forced them into servitude in the first place, about their struggle to have their humanity acknowledged and their work compensated. How exactly, during the harsh years of Jim Crow, had they managed to escape?
2
White Peoples Is Hateful
Driving into Truevine today, you still see hints of the hopelessness that hung over the tiny enclave a century before. Chestnut Mountain stands sentinel to the west, and farm plots give way to sagging trailers and tidy brick ranch houses. Joe-pye and pokeweeds wave along the roadside, and sagging tobacco-curing barns—most of the logs hand-chinked by Franklin County slaves and their descendants—are not Cracker Barrel postcard throwbacks: they’re a decaying nod to the cash crop that has long driven the economy of the region, most of it farmed on the backs of minority labor.
But year after year, the past grows fainter. Another barn crumbles. A CLOSED sign hangs askew on the door of an antiques shop that was once a thriving country store. There, sharecroppers who plowed for their supper and pulled tobacco for their shelter used to buy hundred-pound sacks of pinto beans to last their families the winter long. The largest structure for miles in Truevine was a brick school built for black children in the 1940s. Closed shortly after integration, it was reopened by a small textile factory that operated for a few decades before it, too, shut down, in the wake of the North American Free Trade Agreement.
From slavery to segregation, from integration to globalization—the economic history of the American South intersects in this isolated, unincorporated crossroads. Truevine is a speck of land where slaves and their descendants became sharecroppers, then sewing-machine operators, then unemployed workers before, finally—those who could afford to, anyway—they fled.
Truevine and neighboring Sontag, Penhook, and Snow Creek: these close-knit Franklin County enclaves are memories now more than working communities, places where farmers once grew millions of pounds of the highest-grade cigarette tobacco in Virginia’s so-called Old Belt. A few large tobacco operations are still in business, though tractors and giant metal curing barns have replaced the log structures and mules.
“We’ve always grown the kind of tobacco that is the worst for you,” says Penhook farmer Johnny Angell, who cultivates eighty-five acres of flue-cured tobacco with the help of a dozen or so Mexican guest workers who spend ten months every year doing the work the black sharecroppers used to do. Angell credits his tobacco’s richer taste to rolling topography and weather, especially cool Franklin County mornings drenched in big, foggy dews. With wide, leathery golden leaves, the region’s “bright leaf” tobacco is distinguished by its thick tar content, such that a worker pulling leaves off stalks will find his hands black and sticky by the end of the day.
This isolated cluster of tobacco communities has always stood apart from its larger counterparts a few counties to the south—not just for its tar-laden tobacco, but also for the character of the people who grow it. For their moonshine and music, for their nineteenth-century dialect quirks that still linger on the tongue.
Truevine is a place where children are still called chaps, and the word only is pronounced “onliest,” as in Till the factories came, ’cropping was the onliest way we had to make money for our chaps.
When one neighbor offers another a good deed—a driveway plowed, a bag of homegrown tomatoes dropped off on a porch—thanks is still offered in the language of Isaiah and Moses: God bless you a double portion.
To understand the world the Muse brothers came from, I talked to African Americans who have stayed in and around Truevine, some out of commitment to the home they love and others because they have no viable alternative. All had the Muse name tucked somewhere in their family tree, though those trees are marked by holes and missing limbs. In a culture where census takers didn’t bother recording the names of slaves, the first black Muses to enter the public record are noted only as property, documented by gender, age, and dollar value.
Most of the people you talk to in Truevine have no idea where their slave ancestors actually toiled, though it was likely nearby. Slavery in the American South, as Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson has written, decimated the black family unit of the 1800s, and it still plays a lingering role in black poverty and the relatively large numbers of families headed by single mothers today.
As retired Franklin County library genealogist Diane Hayes, who is African American, explained it, “Slavery was so painful that black families, like Holocaust victims, didn’t talk about what happened for a long time. Lots of times the families would be split up so badly, sold off when their owners died or given away as gifts when someone in the [white] family got married, that people don’t know” the names of their ancestors.
Before the publication of Alex Haley’s Roots, in 1976, slavery remained such a taboo subject among blacks that when midcentury museum workers at Colonial Williamsburg tried to introduce a recording about slavery into an early interpretive program, the tape was repeatedly sabotaged—by the black maintenance staff.
Even then it was still too raw, still too soon.
The stories flow more easily now, about brutal work conditions that didn’t vary much from the time of emancipation to the American civil rights movement. Without fail, from the wealthiest black entrepreneur to the retiree getting by on food stamps, the opportunity afforded Franklin County blacks throughout the first half of the twentieth century echoed Booker T. Washington’s sentiment from 1865: “To get into a schoolhouse and study this way would be about the same as getting into paradise.”
Most children of sharecroppers didn’t go to school during harvest, a period extending from August to December; they were too busy wiring tobacco leaves onto sticks, hanging them from rafters to dry. When their stomachs began to rumble, they were told to chew a leaf or two—as an appetite suppressant.
“In the fall, you only went to school when it rained or snowed,” said Janet Johnson, seventy-one, who’d been among the last generation in her family to work tobacco. She recalled dropping out of Truevine School in the sixth grade when she got tired of watching the white farmer’s children go to school while she and her siblings stayed home and worked the crop. Her mother, ninety-eight-year-old Mabel Pullen, hadn’t gone to school at all. Mabel didn’t learn to read until she was in her seventies, when s
he took a few night classes run by the county’s adult education program. Her husband, Charles, never did.
The Pullens live in Sontag, not far from Truevine, in a tar-papered bungalow, heated by wood and supplemented by a pungent kerosene space heater. Mabel was ninety-seven when we first met in 2013, hard of hearing but still sharp. I had met her daughter quite by chance while working on a newspaper article about proposed cuts to the federal food-stamp program. Janet, who retired when the furniture factory where she worked into her early sixties closed, was picking up a box of food from a nearby food pantry to share with her parents.
Charles and Mabel qualified for food stamps but refused to apply because, as Janet put it, “You talk about pride!”
To supplement their Social Security benefits, the extended family raised chickens, canned apples and tomatoes, and shared a plot of mustard greens—their salad patch, they call it—in the yard between their cluster of modest trailers and homes.
By the time I returned to ask about sharecropping in Franklin County, it was almost a year later. Janet agreed to introduce me to people from Truevine, including some Muses who still lived in the area. She was descended from people, I later pieced together, who crossed paths with Harriett Muse’s husband, Cabell Muse.
As a child, she’d heard that the circus had kidnapped the brothers right from under their mother’s nose, but details were scant. She’d thought about them often over the years, with pity for their trauma but with a touch of longing, too.
Only in a place like Truevine, she thought, could the notion of being kidnapped seem almost like an opportunity.
“It’s hard talking to you about this,” Janet said, abruptly, during a follow-up interview.