by Beth Macy
When Harriett landed in Roanoke, by about 1917, she was following a well-worn migration pattern. She was looking for information on her sons, of course. But she was also looking for opportunity, just like the more than four thousand other African-American migrants who’d flocked to the so-called Magic City in its earliest years, making the nascent boomtown the fastest-growing city in the post–Civil War South.
In 1882, a group of ambitious tobacco merchants and entrepreneurs had persuaded the Philadelphia-based Norfolk and Western Railway to launch a terminus, machine shop, and corporate hub in a Virginia outpost named Big Lick. To sweeten the deal, they offered the Philly industrialists rights-of-way, cash bonuses, and tax exclusions. The N&W provided cheap access to iron and coal lodged in the mountains, which in turn spawned industrialization of the region as investors raced to set up mines, furnaces, and mills along the winding tracks.
As an additional incentive, the town fathers even offered to change the name of the town from Big Lick, with its hillbilly salt-lick implications, to Kimball, in honor of the railroad president. When Kimball demurred, they switched it instead to Roanoke, a Native American word that translated loosely—and fittingly—to money.
Nearly a third of the city’s early residents were black, former sharecroppers and sons of former slaves who made their way to Roanoke by wagon and by train to work as Pullman porters, janitors, and manual-labor assistants to the machinists and railroad brakemen.
Some of the men sold illegal liquor on the side, and their wives cleaned white people’s houses, and, all in all, it was still a hell of a hard time to be black because the white establishment told African Americans where to eat and where to live and where to sit in public spaces.
But it beat sharecropping.
“Had an old Virginian fallen asleep in ‘Big Lick’ last year to wake up to Roanoke today, he would have been as much bewildered as Rip Van Winkle was when he awoke in the Kaatskills,” gushed a writer in The Industrial South, a weekly newspaper. A New York Times reporter enthused that Roanoke’s fledgling businesses were now poised to exploit the state’s coal deposits with the goal of returning Virginia “to something like its old position in the Union.”
There were growing pains galore, including a relentless spate of typhoid that people called Big Lick fever. A bawdy, thriving saloon and brothel scene clashed with the boosters’ view of Roanoke as a shiny symbol of the so-called New South.
In a town dominated by single working-class men, there were more saloons than any other kind of business in Roanoke’s downtown, not counting all the illegal speakeasies, called nip joints. At night, “with the red-light beacons of the bar rooms all ablaze over the plank sidewalks, and the music of the violin and banjo coming through the open doors and windows, the town suggests a mining camp or a mushroom city of Colorado,” a Baltimore Sun reporter wrote.
Built atop a bog, Roanoke grew faster than its public sanitation system could handle, with a death rate in its early years that was higher than New York City’s. Early residents threw down stepping-stones in front of themselves to avoid losing their shoes in the mud.
There were no public gardens, parks, or libraries, no public squares or tree-lined avenues. By 1907, Roanoke had transformed from a village of five hundred people to a city of thirty-five thousand without much concern for aesthetics or the greater civic good.
As renowned urban planner John Nolen quipped, the place had simply gone “from Big Lick to Bigger Lick.”
The city was as divided as the railroad tracks that separated black from white. Most new arrivals were farmers from the countryside who let their cows and chickens roam free into their neighbors’ lots, and they were looked down on by the city’s burgeoning business class. When a couple from rural Franklin County rode downtown in their beat-up wagon, they startled at the sight of a passing bicyclist, then jumped again at the sound of a fire alarm being tested, one reporter noted. Bystanders burst into laughter at their “hayseed” ways until finally the couple fled, embarrassed and confused.
Blacks were even bigger targets for ridicule, turning out in such numbers at a fair “as to threaten a watermelon famine” and singled out for press coverage only when accused of crimes. Whites even blamed the periodic smallpox waves on “the Negroes” and once torched the homes of infected blacks.
If Franklin County had been a tough place to be black, at least the tensions there had been spread out over a half-million acres of hills and hollows. Here, blacks and whites competed for jobs. While they lived and worked in very different social strata, they also brushed against one another with regularity on streetcars, in stores, and, for those employed as domestic workers or chauffeurs, in the homes of the wealthy.
“Roanoke was incredibly hostile to African Americans,” said Rand Dotson, an author and historian who chronicled Roanoke’s earliest years in a 2007 book. “There was a level of hostility that most people today can barely comprehend,” from segregated public accommodations and segregated housing ordinances to outright violence on many occasions.
“Whites were scared of blacks and despised them. They thought they weren’t really people. And yet they hired them to work in their homes, cook their food, and do their laundry, which was just bizarre.”
The relationship was as oddly intimate as it was degrading.
For the rest of their working lives, that is exactly how the Muses paid their rent and fed their children: Harriett working as an in-home maid and picking up laundry jobs on the side, and Cabell driving white men and women around—first in a wagon, later in a car. (In what must have been a disappointing entrée into Roanoke work life, before becoming a chauffeur, Cabell spent part of 1917 doing the same kind of manual labor he’d done on the railroad—digging trenches, fixing leaks, and laying water pipelines for the Roanoke Water Company.)
Harriett and Cabell weren’t allowed to vote because they couldn’t read, nor could they afford to pay poll taxes, requirements written into the 1902 Virginia Constitution, which replaced the old Reconstruction-era Underwood Constitution forced on it in the aftermath of the Civil War.
“Discrimination! Why, that is exactly what we propose,” boasted constitution delegate and future senator Carter Glass when asked whether the new voting restrictions were discriminatory.
The goal, Glass explained, had been the “the elimination of every Negro who can be gotten rid of, legally, without materially impairing the strength of the white electorate.”
To celebrate the new constitution and the complementary Jim Crow laws that banned the mixing of races in public places, restrooms, trains, and water fountains, municipalities across Virginia planted oak saplings in courthouse squares.
It didn’t matter who you were, if you were black; just strolling into the wrong Roanoke block could land you in jail—or worse, depending on what was going on at the time. In 1904, a white shop worker named George Shields went home for lunch and found his wife and three-year-old daughter lying in pools of blood, victims of a robbery and assault. His wife, Alice, survived the attack—barely—to describe her perpetrator as a black man.
A manhunt sprang up, and no black male in the city was spared suspicion. The entire race was blamed as hundreds of whites took to the streets and demanded vigilante justice. Newspaper writers used the crime to justify holding down African Americans, blaming the crime on “the black menace” and “the beast in the Negro.”
Four days after the attack, rumors circulated that a black civic leader and minister, the Reverend R. R. Jones, had given a Sunday sermon suggesting that George Shields himself had committed the assault. A mob of a thousand whites went looking for Jones, storming through black neighborhoods and shooting up Jones’s home, tearing down fence pickets, and blasting pistol shots into the sky. Jones denied making the remarks, but whites still papered the city with placards, vowing he’d be lynched if he failed to leave town by nightfall.
Born into slavery, Jones, a Roanoke preacher for thirty years, walked seven miles through the woods to se
cretly catch a train heading north—never to return. The black-owned Richmond Planet advised him that he should only dare to do so once he’d made his own funeral arrangements, bought a shotgun, and killed a few of the “white hoodlums” who were sure to show up at his house.
When a “Negro roustabout” in nearby Salem was accused of making a “dastardly statement” about the case, a mob hauled him away and stripped him, tying him to a telephone pole and whipping him with electric wires. When he screamed, they stuffed handkerchiefs in his mouth.
Several other black men were run out of town, and some were fired from much-coveted railroad jobs. A black woman was spared only when she went into “spasms” after a mob threatened to flog her, too.
Two weeks later, a black drifter named Henry Williams was captured in the West Virginia coalfields by the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency, the railroad’s crime-busting arm, and confessed. Following a short trial that historians would later deem a sham, a judge ordered him hung until he was “dead, dead, dead.”
No apologies were issued to the scores of black citizens who’d been wrongfully accused of harboring the offender or challenging the narrative of the blood-hungry mob. The Shields case cemented racist sentiments in the region, paving the way for segregation ordinances, more violence, and lingering tensions in a city demographers still consider among the most segregated in the South.
The courthouse oaks grew taller and leafier. And across Virginia, blacks lived under a canopy of subjugation. In 1915, Roanoke officials passed a city ordinance forbidding blacks and whites from living on the same block and carved out five segregation districts, saying the presence of a black person living on the same block as whites “offends the general sense of community,” increases tensions, and decreases property values.
Most blacks in Roanoke were too afraid to speak up, but the editor of the Richmond Planet cataloged the indignities: “We have been denied the right to vote, the right to hold office, the right to live on the same block with the white man, the right to ride in the same railway car, the right to occupy a seat in a street car beside a white man, the right to worship in the same church, the right to drink at the same bar, the right to be buried in the same cemetery—and still the cry against us continues.”
In response, the Roanoke Times—the newspaper that had once opined, “Lynching has its place”—devoted most of a page to an open letter titled “The Negro Question.” It claimed black crime was endangering “the future of our beautiful southern land.” The solution, the editorial writer proposed, would be the formation of a white man’s league that would exert a repressive influence on the “lawless negroes.”
By the mid-1920s, Ku Klux Klan membership had surged to five million members, with chapters from California to Maine, including a thriving Klan in Roanoke, named after Robert E. Lee. With the government’s permission, a national parade of Klansmen marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in the nation’s capital in 1925 and past the White House, then occupied by Calvin Coolidge, to express superiority over not just blacks but also Jews, immigrants, Catholics, and radicals.
The entire country was obsessed with the notion of separating people into greater and lesser breeds.
But city life, as racially charged as it was, still held the potential of progress as Cabell and Harriett Muse moved to Roanoke, drawn by the same desires that motivated most other blacks from the countryside: with the prayer that Cabell would land a coveted job on the N&W. As a popular blues lyric went, When you marry, marry a railroad man / Every Sunday, dollar in your hand.
“Everybody was leaving the country, coming to town, like they thought they were gonna be picking up money off the streets,” recalled A. L. Holland, ninety-eight, a onetime railroad janitor and civil rights leader who broke barriers in the 1960s when he finally got to use his college degree in an office job. In 1898, his father, Gus Holland, had migrated from a tobacco farm in Chatham, near Truevine, to work as a railroad blacksmith, a relatively plum job he landed only because of his experience shoeing horses on the farm.
“He never bought an automobile, but we never did live in a rented house,” his son proudly recalled. “He knew owning property was more important, so he walked to work every day.”
By the time Cabell and Harriett Muse first show up together in Roanoke records, in the 1910s, Cabell was finished “doggin’ the rails,” as the backbreaking work of building railroad track was called. In West Virginia, he had resented the way the company required African Americans to purchase platefuls of corn bread and beans while white workers and supervisors received balanced meals. In West Virginia, black workers on assignment had to bring their own spoons, a typical Jim Crow humiliation, and racial tension in the camps was high. A black track worker on assignment in the coalfields recalled whites posting a sign: BLACKS READ AND RUN. IF YOU CANNOT READ, RUN ANY DAMNED WAY.
So no one blamed Cabell when he landed easier, slightly more dignified work as a chauffeur, a job with more independence and a higher status, while Harriett labored as a domestic worker and laundress. They lived in a black enclave near the N&W rail yard, a cluster of shacks and shotgun shanties near the city’s West End that old-timers still refer to as Jordan’s (or Jerden’s) Alley.
They were just a few blocks away from the Victorian mansions owned by the likes of the Roanoke Times publisher and those Philadelphia-bred railway executives, close enough so Harriett and her neighbors could walk to their back doors, pick up the laundry, and carry it back home to scrub by hand.
The Muse home at 19 Ten-and-a-Half Street was set on an alleyway, more or less, a red-dirt road with an alley on one end and a sooty rail yard on the other. Engines were maintained at the yard’s roundhouse, so a near-constant cacophony of steaming locomotives, blowing whistles, and train-car clatter hovered over the neighborhood. Cinders belched from the engines, enough to make a resident’s eyes water at times. With six houses crammed together on the Muses’ side, and four across the street, the entire road was just a half-block long.
Most born in the neighborhood lived quiet lives, more modest than the blacks who lived closer to downtown in Gainsboro, home to a thriving Henry Street business district. An aspirational middle class was forming there around a growing number of doctors’ and lawyers’ offices, several black-owned businesses, and a hotel/nightclub scene that brought in such rising stars as Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, and Cab Calloway. The musicians played epic, late-night sessions in the black-owned Dumas Hotel after performing for crowds at the whites-only Hotel Roanoke owned by the railroad.
But having status in Gainsboro didn’t much matter when Dr. I. D. Burrell, a black physician and druggist, became deathly ill in 1914. He’d been working toward starting a black hospital. But when white Roanoke hospitals refused to treat him, he was left to attempt a trip to a Washington, D.C., facility instead.
Dr. Burrell died en route. When Roanoke’s first hospital for blacks finally opened on Henry Street in 1915, it was named for him.
Gainsboro was also home to a young Oliver Hill, whose work on the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case overturned the “separate but equal” laws of the day.
I interviewed Hill in 2006 about segregation in Roanoke. He was one hundred at the time, but he remembered clearly the injustice of Jim Crow dawning on him in 1918, when he had to awaken at 5:00 a.m. for basketball practice in the combination auditorium-gymnasium at Harrison School. “You had to clean up and put the chairs away before you could play. And you knew they had a gymnasium and showers and everything in the white schools,” Hill recalled.
In his autobiography, Hill described trying to sell discarded whiskey bottles he’d collected as a child to a Roanoke distillery to earn some extra change. “When I got up on the second floor, someone yelled out, ‘Grab the little nigger and cut his balls out,’” which sent Hill scrambling for his life.
If Gainsboro was a place that occasionally produced Supreme Court litigators and foreign ambassadors—the Talented Tenth, as Du Bois called th
e black leaders of his day—then Jordan’s Alley was home to the lower 90 percent. Its businesses were comparably much smaller, many of them run by recent Syrian immigrants who lived over their shops. Willie Mae Ingram, known to the community today as Mother Ingram—an honorific given to the wives of pastors—was raised by her grandparents around the corner from Ten-and-a-Half Street, near the same stretch of railroad tracks. Her grandfather kept hogs in a communal pen up the street, and a creek ran through the area where she picked creasy greens. Few houses had furnaces, and it got so cold in winter that her grandmother used to take an old flatiron, heat it on the back of the coal-fired stove, and tuck it into the foot of her bed, wrapped in blankets, to keep her warm.
Willie Mae was eighty-four years old when I spoke to her in 2014, and she is one of a handful of people still living in the community with firsthand knowledge of the Muse brothers. She remembers Harriett Muse because she was strikingly tall and old-fashioned-looking, “with a black dress and an apron, like someone you’d see on a wagon train.”
Everyone knew everyone else in a community where life was lived in the public eye, on the sidewalks, front porches, and alleyways. “You walked everywhere,” said Regina “Sweet Sue” Peeks, eighty-four, including to Harrison School, a mile away in Gainsboro and across the bridge. She was raised near the rail yard by an aunt and uncle, Cora and John Holmes, whom she still refers to as Mama and Daddy. Her biological mother, Genova, lived with them off and on, and worked domestic jobs on Maiden Lane, a white neighborhood across a bridge and a couple of miles away, for a family who refused to pay her extra for Sunday work and made her use the “servants’ bathroom” in their dank, unfinished basement. “They had a pony, and once they even let the ‘poor little colored girl’ come ride it,” she said.
I winced when Sweet Sue told me the family’s name, which I recognized immediately from the deed on my house. I’ve lived on Maiden Lane for fifteen years, and I winter my geraniums in the sink of that very same dank basement (after a heavy rain, it still leaks). When I asked how Genova got to the house, she told me she took the streetcar to Grandin Village, a quaint commercial area filled with restaurants, shops, and a movie theater, then and now.