by Beth Macy
A local named Old Man Wilson sold dandelion beer, homemade pies, and other goods to the workers, who knew they were being ripped off by the high prices at the company commissary. Fenwick was an isolating place for black families; the only other black woman there was married to the stable boss, the man who took care of the mules that carted the ore out of the mines. The mules were kept underground during the week but allowed to graze outside the stable on Sundays—to keep them from going blind.
They must have captured the attention of the young George and Willie, animal lovers with poor vision and extremely sensitive eyes. Harriett had listed them as being just nine and eleven in the 1910 census, though other official documents have their births listed several years earlier—which would put them at sixteen and nineteen during the Fenwick stint. Maybe she kept them officially young to keep them from working inside the mines?
And what of the mysterious Mr. Cook? Census records showed a Hattie and Moses Cook living together in Roanoke County in 1900—he worked as a farm laborer, she stayed at home. But when I looked for proof of their marriage and/or subsequent divorce or his death record, it was as if he had vanished from public record. (Only Tom, the third son, would officially, albeit briefly, use the Cook name in adulthood, in his 1930 census entry. On his 1924 marriage license, he was living in Cabell Muse’s rented house and went by the name Thomas Muse.)
Though I never established the Muse brothers’ paternity with certainty, months later I discovered the name of their paternal grandmother, America Cook, in an errant 1920 census document that had the entire family misfiled under the name Mules. That information led me down more inconclusive paths, ancestry tracks that were muddied by generations of systematic servitude, illiteracy, and careless record keeping on the part of census takers.
America Cook was most likely a former slave, born in Virginia in 1827. After the Civil War’s end, she worked as a housekeeper and remained living in the household of John Cook, a miller and white landowner who had probably been her slave master. In 1870, she was living with John Cook and her two mulatto children, twelve-year-old daughter Elizar and toddler Henry, who was one and a half.
Though the handwritten census documents are literally hard to read and even harder to project onto the Muse family tree, my best guess is that Henry Cook was George and Willie’s father, and that landowner John Cook was the brothers’ grandfather. That was a common, though rarely recorded, scenario in the Reconstruction-era rural South, especially in and around Truevine. And it’s another reason why African-American ancestry is so hard to track.
Hanging on his bedroom wall, an incomplete family document still occupies the mind of ninety-four-year-old J. Harry Woody, a Truevine native who lives in a four-square home in Roanoke’s West End. It’s his grandparents’ 1878 marriage license. Where the young couple’s parents’ names are listed, there’s a single line where the groom’s father’s name is intentionally blank, as if he were immaculately conceived.
“My great-grandfather was a white man,” Woody told me, recounting the story his father told him. “See, the landowner would have sex with his black maid, and then tell her that she should feel honored that a white man would want her!” he exclaimed from his living-room hospital bed.
“It was happening from slavery all the way down to when I was growing up” in the 1930s, he added. “They’d force all the maids, and they had kids of all different colors.”
As proof, he points to the thin skin of his forearm, the color of coffee with full-fat cream. “And didn’t none of them ever claim their children,” he added, his eyes blazing, more than a century later, with the indignity of his own father’s fatherlessness. “They were ashamed to claim their children, but they weren’t ashamed to force sex on the maids.”
I wondered aloud how the white children living nearby identified him. Like Janet Johnson and A. J. Reeves, he remembered walking miles to Truevine School—“sixty kids and one teacher in a single room”—while the white children took county-furnished buses and taunted the black walkers along the way.
“They called me nigger!” he said, and scoffed.
Then he changed the subject, staring at a prepublication postcard I’d given him that featured the cover of this book.
Mr. Woody positively lit up, reading the tobacco field on the cover like he was divining tea leaves, and this is what he saw: “Looks just like tobacco from the thirties,” he said, pointing to the yellow-tinged leaves. Immature plants, still months away from harvest. The yellowed leaves meant that the farmer who planted the crop was poor—and probably black. “Back when blacks wasn’t able to buy fertilizer because they didn’t have the money to pay for it. You can tell that ’cause the leaves are turning yellow before they got to be full-sized.”
He wanted to know when this book would be for sale. Publication was still more than six months away. He said younger people, black and white, needed to understand the harsh realities of their ancestors. “They think we’re lying! They say, ‘That was then, this is now.’ They think everything was roses, but ain’t nobody making any of it up.”
I’d been sitting at this bedside for going on two hours. It was a crisp April morning. He’d ended the interview twice already, saying he was tired, then kept telling stories when I stood up to go.
Fenwick itself was a short-lived enterprise, closing in 1924, two decades after it opened, when ore discovered in Minnesota, Ohio, and Pennsylvania was found to be easier and cheaper to extract. The town bank, the railway spur, and several of the resorts followed suit. The buildings that housed them are long gone. Some were moved when the mines closed; others were buried when the area was turned into a wetlands and recreation area.
Don Charlton recalled his mother writing letters for an illiterate elderly black man who had worked at the mines and remembered the way he pulled three cents to pay for the stamp from his coin purse. Uncle Ed, as Charlton called him, wore a pungent asphidity bag around his neck as a talisman. Popular at the time, especially among African Americans, the bag contained rotted herbs that were believed to ward off polio and the flu.
Judging from the New Castle Record, the biggest news of the day, not counting the heated debates over Prohibition (the paper was pro) and women’s suffrage (con), focused solely on the land-owning whites: Whose cousins were coming to visit to take the healing waters of Craig? And what on earth had happened to the prominent citizen convicted of murder who had broken out of jail, the last trace of him being a set of bloody footprints found on the top of Burks Mountain?
His trial had been such a spectacle that Anna Clark took the train from Covington to her old New Castle hometown to watch it unfold.
Charlton and I drove past the clear, rushing creeks that have drawn visitors to Craig County since Thomas Jefferson’s time. He pointed out the old rail bed that once held the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway spur, which probably carried Harriett and her children to Covington, where so many blacks migrated for work in the thriving paper-mill factories—and to escape the burgeoning presence of the KKK.
Charlton beamed at the gorgeous Fenwick Mines Recreation Area, a U.S. Forest Service park shelter. With a boardwalk for the wetlands and its handicapped-accessible creek-side trail, the mining site has become a big draw for birders, especially those chasing red-shouldered hawks and pine warblers—proof, as a cultural geographer researching the area once noted, that “humanity’s disruptive influences can be erased from the earth.”
In 1998, KKK chapters from Maryland and Tennessee held a picnic at the area. It was not a rally, a park-service employee assured the media, just a “pitch-horseshoes-and-eat-hot-dogs sort of thing.”
Nancy Saunders knew her great-grandmother Harriett had worked briefly at the Episcopal Diocese–run boys’ home in Covington sometime before her move to Roanoke in the mid-to late teens. She’d wondered what it must have felt like for Harriett to watch the homeless boys play on the spacious grounds, attend school in the charming brick cottages, and entertain visits from Santa and Boy Sc
out leaders—while her own sons weren’t just homeless, they had vanished entirely, and to where? Not even their original carnival managers seemed to know.
But the scenario of Harriett mothering children by someone other than Cabell Muse, whom she wouldn’t marry for seven more years, came as an unlikely detour on the family’s long-accepted timeline. (Neither Willie nor George ever mentioned the surname Cook, according to family members, and when Harriett and Cabell married, they both listed themselves as single on the marriage license.) The implication that Harriett may have initially contracted with a traveling carnival to put her boys to work was another, even bigger surprise.
If that version was true, it would replace the narrative of two child sharecroppers being plucked from the fields.
I was more than a little nervous about broaching the new revelations with Nancy. “She still doesn’t trust you all the way, but she’s working on it,” her best friend, Marsha, told me a few weeks before. (Halfway through the reporting of this book, Marsha attended a talk I gave at the Library of Virginia in Richmond, introducing herself only afterward—then reporting back to Nancy what I’d said publicly, during the Q&A, about this book. “She has me checking on you,” Marsha said, winking.)
For months, I’d been e-mailing Nancy every new photo I found featuring her uncles—and never once gotten a reply. I’d mailed her reprints I’d had made of a portrait of the brothers for her cousin Louise. Nancy returned most of my phone calls, but only after several days, sometimes weeks, had passed.
But I knew the Hattie Cook surprise could be unwelcome news. To ease (and speed) the conversation along, I delivered a small Christmas gift in early December, one that represented our two common interests—plants and food. I left a ten-dollar pot of rosemary on her front porch, though the metaphor didn’t hit me until later: rosemary is a symbol of remembrance, as in Would it kill you to return my calls?
The tug on her southern manners worked. When Nancy called a few hours later to thank me, we exchanged pleasantries. Then I told her about the Billboard article.
She was stunned, recalling the marriage license located a month earlier between Harriett Dickerson and Cabell Muse—from 1917, much later than the family had imagined. “After that, I was wondering if they were even Cabell’s children,” she said. “But I swear I never knew their mama was a Cook!”
This time she was curious, open, and not at all defensive. She seemed relieved by the possibility that she was not kin to Cabell Muse. Long ago she’d adopted her uncle Willie’s position that Cabell was a philanderer and a drunk, and—as I would soon learn—a very tragic figure.
She had long wondered why many of her nonalbino relatives were extremely light-skinned and now wondered if George and Willie’s father was perhaps white. Her grandmother Annie Belle, who helped raise her, was so pale that many mistook her for white. Nancy herself is very light-skinned. And though she is not technically albino, Erika Turner, Nancy’s teenaged cousin—who has albinism on both sides of her family tree—often gets bombarded with rude questions from classmates about her auburn-blond hair and hazel eyes.
“To be albino in the African-American community, you don’t fit in anywhere. You’re not black, and you’re not white; it’s hard now, but back then, it would have been extremely hard,” said Bonnie LeRoy, a University of Minnesota professor and genetics counselor.
George and Willie’s father, whoever he was, was probably teased mercilessly because of his sons’ condition. Even in modern times, some fathers at the clinic where LeRoy counsels families with albinism, skeptical of the child’s paternity, have abandoned their families altogether, she said.
“Maybe Mr. Cook’s the one who sold them,” Nancy said, referring to Willie and George.
It was the first time she was willing to entertain the idea that maybe they hadn’t been kidnapped from the start, despite what Willie himself had always maintained. But she firmly and resolutely believes that Harriett was not involved. “I don’t dispute what you found, but I can’t imagine all these years and all these people who knew the family, and nobody brought it up before,” she said.
Besides, as she’d told me many times before, Uncle Willie himself insisted they’d been kidnapped. “And my uncle Willie was not a liar.”
Nancy’s mother, Dot, had made the same argument. So had her grandmother Annie Belle, who was just a toddler when the boys left home. Neither had ever mentioned the name Cook—even though Cook must have been Annie Bell’s childhood name.
But what if Willie himself didn’t actually recall? Maybe he was too young when it happened to remember, or too traumatized? Maybe he’d heard the story so many times that what he remembered wasn’t the reality of having been kidnapped—that piece of candy coming toward him, proffered by a stranger in a sweltering tobacco field—but the memory of hearing that story told?
Or maybe Willie Muse remembered his early days in the circus the way a child, any child, recalls the first time a parent inflicts pain, even unintentionally. My own mother loved me to the moon and back, and yet my first recollection of her is a story I’ve never recounted before out loud or in print—because it makes her look bad. She accidentally burned me with a cigarette during a raucous game of euchre while I was seated on her lap at our kitchen table.
This is nothing like contracting with a carnival showman to put your two young teenagers on a train, granted, even if you thought he’d bring them back. But who is anyone to judge the pressures facing an illiterate washerwoman raising five children alone in rural Virginia during the harshest years of Jim Crow?
Nancy seemed excited that I’d found a new story thread, albeit one that raised more questions than it put to rest.
“Old people, you know they could keep some serious secrets,” she said, finally.
She would see if she could nudge anything new out of her ninety-two-year-old aunt, Martha Turner—the only living member of her mother’s generation.
But the Cook name was also a mystery to Martha, she reported back a few weeks later.
Serious secrets weren’t unheard of between showmen and the parents of sideshow acts. Circus-goers had long clamored for exotic acts from the so-called Dark Continent, and several African Americans had been recruited to portray African natives. Black sideshow musicians, many hailing from New Orleans, took jobs playing such African “savages” on the side.
“There was a circus term for it, even,” said Bernth Lindfors, a University of Texas literature and African-American studies professor who has written about black sideshow performers. “You’d pretend to be someone running around with a spear and a grass skirt, and that was your ‘Zulu ticket,’” he explained.
That was certainly the case with William Henry “Zip” Johnson, whom Barnum claimed to have found in West Africa in a “PERFECTLY NUDE STATE, roving among the trees and branches, in the manner common to the Monkey and Orang Outang.”
But Barnum hadn’t been the first to display Johnson, the son of former slaves William and Mahalia Johnson. In 1860, he bought the rights to exhibit him from the much smaller Van Emburgh’s Circus, located in Somerville, New Jersey, not far from Johnson’s hometown. Many years later, a woman claiming to be his sister recounted that he’d been sold at the age of four “by his parents in need of funds.” The details of that initial contract have been lost to history, but the Johnsons had six children to feed, and the money offered by that first circus must have felt like a fortune to the newly freed slaves—even if their teenaged son was forced to screech and rattle the bars of his cage, pretending to eat raw meat.
One obituary writer noted that for the first ten years of his career, Johnson “had almost to be forced to mount the platform,” suggesting that he was coerced, at least initially, to perform.
Was the remuneration worth the early family loss? Or was Johnson better off playing the role of Zip?
How do you measure a life?
In dollars, by Barnum’s accounting. And so, regardless of how much Barnum supposedly grew to love his fa
vorite performer, he also fiercely controlled his every movement onstage and off, from profit margins to publicity stunts. Johnson’s true backstory was suppressed in trumped-up press accounts and steeped in a racist, exploitative climate that underscored the ideological mainstream of the day: black people were subhuman.
Like Johnson’s backstory, the genesis of George and Willie Muse’s career is largely undocumented. If their mother did initially contract with the Great American Shows, it is clear from her beseeching notice in Billboard that she was “anxious to learn the whereabouts of her two sons” and to get them back. Being black, illiterate, and husbandless at the time, she certainly wouldn’t have had the upper hand in contract negotiations. “She couldn’t read her own name if you put it in front of her,” Nancy said—and if she did sign a contract, it was only with an X.
Like her sharecropping relatives on settling-day, she was dependent on the honor of the white man to explain, and live up to, the written word.
Billboard updates written by the show’s business manager, Ben H. Klein, made the touring company sound like the most cheerful and beneficent family-oriented affair. The wife of his partner, Morris Miller, ran the candy concession and held down the fort with Klein while Miller went on buying forays to Chicago, for instance, to shop for new train cars. (Miller’s goal, he told Billboard in 1914, was to double the carnival’s size, amassing a twenty-car train, by the next season.)
The carousel operator took a vacation to his home in New Kensington, Pennsylvania, to visit his wife. And Klein himself vacationed on a two-week “pleasant sojourn” before returning to find that carnival-goers in Ligonier, Indiana, “were wearing a smile that won’t come off.”
In Fort Wayne, a newspaper referred to George and Willie only as “strange creatures,” highlights of a small sideshow affair that also featured the “smallest woman in the world.”