Truevine

by Beth Macy

  A few years later, The New Yorker finally spelled their stage names correctly but cruelly recollected their 1928 return to the circus as being motivated by… food. “The fried chicken had soon given out at Roanoke. Their relatives and friends had at first looked on them as heroes and wonder men, but gradually came to regard them as flitter-witted gormandizers.”

  During Ringling’s Madison Square Garden 1928 season opener, the brothers seemed captivated only by the menagerie, the Post reported: they watched the tigers pace, their heads turning “patiently, regularly, back and forth together as they leaned silently on the rail, as absorbed and fascinated as any bucolic from Jackson, Miss.… [though] without a doubt they’d seen this phenomenon before.”

  During a June stop in Buffalo, the Muses were once again such a draw that six patrons came close to trampling over a reporter during their mad rush to get to the platform where they were playing. Annoyed, the reporter ended up with mud plastered across his trousers and shoes as he pondered how the crowd had come to be under the spell of the “bearded twins from someplace or other in the South Seas Islands.”

  In a pitch card taken around that time—a photo the size of a postcard that was sold as a souvenir in penny arcades, candy stores, and amusement parks—the brothers have graduated from Martian ambassadors to Eko and Iko, Sheep-Headed Cannibals from Ecuador.

  George appears to be scouting out something in the distance—people to eat?—while Willie crouches on one knee, pointing stage right. They wear blousy shirts, comically oversized vests, and pantaloons tucked into tights.

  George has one hand on Willie’s shoulder, and both sport long dreadlocks and beards. It was the height of the exhibition craze that sideshow managers tried to dignify with the euphonious word Zulu, a time when Clyde Ingalls not only featured Clicko and Eko and Iko, but had also begun to hire “foreign rarities scouts” to regularly recruit acts from genuinely far-off places like Burma and the Congo. During the time of Jim Crow restrictions, displaying such bloodthirsty warriors and Stone Age savages underscored the omnipresence of racial segregation. Besides, with circuses now struggling to compete with the marvels of radio and motion pictures, Ingalls hoped the imports would help him up his game.

  As Ingalls told reporters, the Muse brothers “were taken from Ecuador to England when nine years of age by missionaries, and so have been brought up under English rules which forbid them eating each other—or the spectators!” But compared with the older pitch cards and circus publicity pictures, there’s now a marked change in the expressions of George and Willie that belies the ballyhoo about their cannibalistic Zulu shtick.

  “Black ‘wildmen’ were sometimes exhibited in cages as uncivilized brutes who subsisted on raw meat and bit the heads off chicken or snakes. But these two, in comparison, look like Boy Scouts,” said Bernth Lindfors, the University of Texas scholar, of the photo.

  Perhaps that’s because George and Willie are now in on the joke. They’re performers who are being paid—for a while, anyway.

  “They may have been laughing at us, but backstage, we were laughing at them because they were paying to see us,” Willie told his relatives.

  Their younger brother Tom was not so enthralled. He had not grown up in the circus backyard, as the brothers had, and didn’t understand the appeal. Besides, black rousties were paid two-thirds of what their lighter-skinned Euro-American immigrant coworkers earned, and unlike his brothers, they generally were segregated from whites in lodging and in the cookhouse.

  They wielded giant sledgehammers in unison as the lot lice stood nearby, watching the feat of syncopation, a free show-before-the-show. It was grueling work, maybe even harder than the dawn-to-dusk sharecropping schedule of “can to can’t.” They were up early, up late, with long hours, and very little sleep.

  Tom hated the work, but he did what he was told and dutifully sent most of his salary home to his mother. The brothers had seen enough of their stepfather’s behavior to be wary of what would come of it, though.

  And since their departure for the circus in the spring of 1928, things had only gotten worse.

  11

  Adultery’s Siamese Twin

  The money—first from the change cup on the porch, then from the Ringling settlement and the funds being sent home—changed everything at Ten-and-a-Half Street. The food went from pinto beans to steak. The nip-joint shot glasses turned into whiskey in a jar—bought by the case.

  The black-owned Baltimore Afro-American painted the metamorphosis of Cabell Muse in a disapproving glare. The paper said he had long been “feared by men of lower strata,” a well-known bully in the black community.

  But now, emboldened by the sudden infusion of settlement cash, he was becoming even more “overbearing and brutish in his associations.” He hogged the Muse brothers’ back pay for himself, spending it on a brand-new car and other luxuries. Harriett’s dream of buying property would have to wait.

  For a young A. L. Holland, the behavior of Cabell Muse became a morality lesson that underscored his own father’s sense of duty: instead of blowing money on a car, Gus Holland walked to his rail-yard job and squirreled away his earnings, giving him something that would buttress the family for generations rather than bleed it dry—home ownership.

  The Hollands wasted little money buying food because they kept chickens in the backyard for eggs, and they canned vegetables they grew in the yard. Instead of buying coal to heat their stoves, Gus Holland carted home leftover cross ties from work, using the scrap wood for free fuel. The children, who grew up chopping kindling for the stove every night before they went to bed, would adopt a metaphor for their father’s lessons: “We made cotton, but we took that cotton and made silk.”

  Cabell was definitely the only blue-collar worker in town with the fortune—and the audacity—to buy a car. To a person, blue-collar African Americans in Roanoke aspiring to join the middle class in the late 1920s “walked to work. Didn’t nobody have a car,” Holland recalled. “I mean, Dr. Pinkard and Dr. Claytor and maybe the lawyer had a car.”

  Holland didn’t recall what brand Cabell’s car was (nor did anyone in the family), just that “it was real nice.” Buick models introduced in 1928, at the peak of the stock market bubble, ranged from $1,195 to $1,850, around the average American’s annual salary.

  Back then, the speed limit outside city limits was forty-five miles per hour. A trip from Roanoke to Charlottesville that now takes two hours by way of the four-lane interstate then took eleven. Roads were twisty and riddled with potholes. The Roanoke Times was filled with morbid accounts of cars careening off mountainsides and ramming into each other. In one instance, a Rocky Mount man was repairing a blown-out tire on the roadside in the fall of 1927 when a speeding motorist slammed into him, breaking most of his bones, then drove away. The injured man died the next day.

  Henry Ford’s mass-production methods already had transformed the way Americans worked, played, and spent their money. The car became the status symbol for aspirational Americans. If you owned a car, it meant you had achieved the “world’s highest standard of living,” according to a popular highway billboard featuring a smiling family of four taking a joy ride through the mountains.

  For Cabell, the ride may have been joyful, but it was plagued with hairpin turns. Word was out all over Jordan’s Alley: he had graduated from the women in the back rooms of the nip joints to something far more serious—another man’s wife.

  That man, Hope Wooden, worked for the Norfolk and Western Railway. He was fifty-eight years old and “comma, colored,” in newspaper parlance. Holland could still visualize Wooden sweeping the stairs that led to the tracks of the downtown train station. Wooden had worked as a railroad mail carrier, porter, and janitor.

  Word had reached Wooden that Cabell was flirting with his much younger wife, Edna. The Woodens had a teenaged son, Charley. And Cabell was known to stop by the Woodens’ place before Charley got home from school or Hope from his train-station work. The neighbors all knew. It
was impossible to miss, especially when the presence of Cabell’s car announced it to everyone on the street. The car was not the accessory of choice for twenties-era adulterers—it was way too flashy—but Cabell was intoxicated by the power of that car.

  Wooden made it clear to Cabell that he should stay away.

  He threatened to kill him, the neighbors all said, if he didn’t.

  It was turning into another tumultuous year in Roanoke, with an average of one murder a month for nineteen months straight. A severe drought had everyone in the summer of 1928 on edge. The city council had adopted water restrictions, and gardens were drying up. Prosecutor Kent Spiller was still on a tear about his pet issues, liquor and gambling. His latest targets were cigar stores and confectioneries that sold bets on baseball games; he’d had twelve people arrested for such wagering on June 12.

  No one in Roanoke or anywhere else in the nation paid much attention to the legal betting going on by the finance gangsters—soon to be called banksters—on Wall Street, where a record seven million shares of stock had just changed hands on a single day. Millions of Americans were about to lose their jobs; one in four were on the brink of losing their life savings. Those enjoying the excesses of the Roaring Twenties were about to find out that the stock market would not, in fact, rise indefinitely.

  To facilitate his work, Spiller made great use of the federal “padlock law,” which gave local police the authority to lock up any building being used for the sale of illegal liquor. But at 1:44 a.m. on June 13, bootleggers and liquor runners struck back. They went to the home of Samuel Atkins, the policeman known for being the most vigorous Prohibition enforcer in town. They snuck into the back alley behind his house, and they hit him where they knew it would hurt.

  They firebombed his car.

  The explosion shattered the windows of every house on the block.

  A few weeks later, on a sweltering July day, Hope Wooden decided to surprise his wife by coming home for lunch. Finding not only nothing to eat but also no wife in sight, he went to see if Edna was at her mother’s house, a few blocks away.

  His lunch wasn’t there either.

  But Cabell Muse was.

  He was upstairs, in bed, with Wooden’s wife.

  “Look, the man had been warned,” Holland remembered. “A man’s wife was his beauty, and he took pride in taking care of his wife. Hope had warned him to stay away.

  “But old Cabell didn’t have the sense to do it.”

  Wooden made his presence known to Cabell, who was short but stocky with broad shoulders.

  Cabell leapt from the bed swinging, and he charged at Wooden, hitting and kicking him, according to police accounts.

  Shielding himself from Cabell’s blows with one hand, Wooden used his other hand to draw a rusty pocketknife from his trousers, then wrangled the knife open with his teeth.

  Wooden came back at Cabell—with the end of his rusty knife. He stabbed Cabell in the torso and the neck. He stabbed him in the back and legs.

  Wooden stabbed him so many times that when police arrived no one could figure out how Cabell had managed to claw his way to the front yard, a line of blood trailing him down the stairs and through the back porch.

  Cabell Muse’s last act had been to crawl toward his only safe haven.

  He collapsed in the front yard, a few feet from the car paid for by Willie and George. The brothers were far away, working a midseason show in Madison, Wisconsin, when Cabell drew his final breath.

  His blood soaked into the parched grass, where it continued to draw spectators for several days.

  Wooden did the only thing he knew to do: he went back to work at the train station, confessed to his superiors, and prepared for police to take him in.

  At police headquarters, he admitted freely to committing the murder, leaning casually against the rail in the switchboard room.

  When he noticed the antiquated knife in the hands of the desk sergeant, he even bragged to a reporter from the afternoon World-News that he’d used it to kill Cabell. The article was headlined FATHER OF EKO AND IKO, THE MARTIAN AMBASSADORS, KILLED.

  The murder of Cabell Muse paled in comparison to other events making headlines in the southern black press in the late 1920s. (Outside Roanoke, the white press didn’t mention it at all.) A record low of eleven lynchings had been reported across the South that year. The following year in St. Louis, five men had escaped slavery on a Mississippi plantation, one saying he’d been forced to work without pay since the age of nine. Another victim testified that plantation owners had “sold” his wife to another planter for $250. In 1926, the New York World published an exposé on southern slavery, reporting that a thousand prisoners had been sold into coal mines and forced-labor camps the previous year, generating the modern equivalent of $2.8 million for local officials and $6.6 million for the state government, according to Douglas Blackmon’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. Most of the inmates were impoverished sharecroppers, many of whom had been arrested for offenses as slight as trying to hop a train. They faced beatings with steel wire, hickory sticks, and shovels, and were locked up in what the World called “dog houses,” rough-hewn boxes the size of coffins, for forty-eight hours at a stretch. The Alabama slave mines were finally closed in the summer of 1928, as Blackmon described it, with two columns of African-American men “blinking at the sudden brightness of the summer sun” and singing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” as they walked out of the mine shafts a final time.

  On the same day a judge pronounced Wooden guilty of voluntary manslaughter, another black man was sentenced to three years in prison for a failed pickpocket theft at the Roanoke Fair. Just attempting to lift another’s property, even “within a hair’s breadth,” constituted stealing, argued Prosecutor Spiller in his closing remarks.

  The founder of Roanoke’s Robert E. Lee branch of the KKK, Spiller was also the chief prosecutor against Wooden in the Cabell Muse murder case.

  Spiller was proud of his tough-on-crime reputation. The same month Cabell was murdered, the press lauded him for asking police to call him “at any hour of the day or night when a slaying occurs within the city limits. It is [the prosecutors’] intention to be at the scene before the victim’s body is removed, so that they may not be deprived of what may prove to be important evidence.”

  But with Cabell’s death, justice had already been served, Spiller felt. He did not bother showing up to gather evidence, dispatching the coroner instead to Wooden’s mother-in-law’s lawn.

  The coroner counted seven wounds in Cabell’s back, three in his chest, and one each across his leg, head, and throat.

  Wooden was sentenced to a single year in prison for the crime—one-third the time the clumsy pickpocket received.

  When I first asked A. L. Holland about the crime, he was reluctant to weigh in—“It’s nothing that’s gonna make anybody feel real glamorous,” he said.

  And: “You didn’t talk too much about old people’s business back in the day; you kinda walked around it. But there was a big to-do about it when it happened.” He remembered kids at school discussing it as well as customers on his broom-selling route.

  When I mentioned that his cousin Nancy had told me about the murder—“You missed one, Scoop,” she had teased me a few months earlier, pointing out that our newspaper research had failed to unearth that story—Holland finally opened up. Like so many other African-American men of that era, including George and Willie Muse, Holland thought Cabell got what he deserved. And Wooden, too, with his relatively light sentence.

  Reginald Shareef, the social science professor and Muse family friend who has written about Roanoke’s black community, explained the adultery-revenge mind-set, and the common stresses and indignities that fueled it. Black men working in a white Jim Crow world were under tremendous pressure everywhere they went—especially from white bosses and white policemen. That stress had driven Shareef’s father, a rail
road mail clerk, to become a functioning alcoholic, like his father before him, who preferred working the graveyard janitorial shift to avoid his supervisors entirely.

  Shareef said he will never forget the horror of being suspended from school, only to learn that his principal was about to call his father out of work to fetch him instead of his mild-mannered mother, a librarian in an all-black elementary school.

  As he waited for his father to make the short drive from the railway office building to the school, “I was like a condemned man.” His father was now at risk of being belittled or disrespected by his white supervisor, who could have used the occasion to condescend to him about his parenting. His father was very proud and very large—six feet four and 250 pounds—and relatives feared that his suppressed anger would boil over at the slightest provocation, Shareef said.

  He remembers waiting for his father inside the double doors of the school, “so when he grabs me and slams me up against the car, only the kids on one side of the building will see me.”

  Many of the men in his childhood neighborhood were functioning alcoholics, which is why Shareef, who became a practicing Muslim at twenty-five, swore off intoxicants early in adulthood.

  Alcohol had been a constant source of stress between his parents. He remembers his father calling him into the living room one night.

  “Reggie, your mother says I have an alcohol problem. Go ahead and flip that switch and see if the lights come on.”

  Shareef dutifully flipped the switch.

  Light dutifully bathed the room.

  His father snapped: “I might drink, but I pay Appalachian [Power Company] every month.”

  During forty-two years of working for the railroad, he took only seventeen sick days.

  “To survive, you see, you had to have these coping strategies, and alcohol was the most popular one,” Shareef recalled.