by Beth Macy
“My grandfather did that?” Brown said, astonished and, seemingly for the first time in his life, impressed by Wilbur Austin.
When the last missing court file from 1938 still hadn’t turned up after multiple searches by myself and a hired researcher, I asked the clerk of the Roanoke City Circuit Court to intervene. Brenda Hamilton accompanied me on a walk down the paneled, third-floor corridor that borders the courtrooms. Along the walls hang large oil paintings of Roanoke judges dating back to 1880s-era Roanoke.
I was also hunting for a portrait of the man behind that file, Wilbur Austin, who, following his work with the Muses, had become a traffic-court judge and, later, a juvenile and domestic-relations judge.
It was beginning to dawn on me that stalking the Big One was probably the most exciting work of Austin’s life.
I described the case to Brenda as we walked. When she reminded me she’d been the first African American ever elected to the Roanoke position of clerk of courts, I pointed out that we were standing directly in front of Judge Lindsay Almond’s portrait. As Virginia governor in the late 1950s, a Byrd ally, and a chief defender of massive resistance, Almond was the judge who handled the Muse brothers’ case.
Brenda was all too familiar with Almond’s defiance of the U.S. Supreme Court orders, his insistence on closing, rather than integrating, many Virginia schools. In 1959, she was seven years old and living in the Prince Edward County seat of Farmville, where the school board had closed the county schools for five long years. Wealthy whites in the region built private, whites-only academies.
As Almond put it in a 1959 radio address, his baritone drawl reverberating:
To those who [support] the livid stench of sadism, sex, immorality, and juvenile pregnancy infesting the mixed schools of the District of Columbia and elsewhere… Let me make it abundantly clear for the record: As governor of this state, I will not yield to that which I know shall be wrong and will destroy every rational semblance of public education for thousands of the children of Virginia. Be not dismayed by recent judicial deliverances.
Brenda missed the entire first grade.
During what should have been her second year of schooling, her parents arranged to drop her off at a family friend’s home in the next county, where she was then put on a bus headed to a one-room school. It was a shack with a tar-paper roof that leaked when it rained and had no space for quiet learning. There was only one teacher to accommodate scores of black students ranging from grades one through twelve.
“I used to cry every day,” she said.
When her father died the following year, the family moved to Roanoke. As massive resistance began to collapse, Brenda was one of a handful of blacks in a newly integrated Roanoke County school, where attendance was now booming due to white flight.
I told her what Almond and Austin had done for the Muses. That their legal maneuver had ultimately helped the Muse family but that the ploy was also racist, patronizing, and illegal. It was one more of the thousands of stories, told and untold, that illuminated the brutal legacy of 250 years of slavery and a half-century of Jim Crow.
Having located no pictures of the mousy and bespectacled Wilbur Austin that day in the Roanoke courthouse, I was still eager to find that missing file, hoping it contained more clues about the case.
“I’ll call you tomorrow,” Brenda said. “I will find that file.”
In her forty-two years of working for the city, Brenda had often walked past the portrait of the man responsible for her patchwork education. When I offered her my copy of a book on massive resistance in Prince Edward County, by journalist Kristen Green, she was eager to read it.
The following week, she e-mailed to say she’d already had to walk away from the book, twice.
“It’s like pouring gas in an open wound,” she wrote.
It was the spring of 2015, the sesquicentennial of the end of the Civil War. And yet racial wounds seemed to be growing deeper by the day: police shootings of unarmed black men occurred in so many cities, it was hard to feel one had been mourned before another happened.
A crazed gunman hoping to incite a race war killed nine worshippers inside a historic Charleston, South Carolina, church.
Then outside the statehouse in Columbia, South Carolina, the Confederate flag would lower for the last time. Closer to home, Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe ordered the flag’s removal from a specialty state license plate.
And Brenda was still contending with the regal portrait of the man who’d stained her childhood—not twenty paces from her door. Outside her office window in downtown Roanoke, a pickup with giant white poles erected on the rear corners of its truck bed sported twin flags, the Rebel Stars and Bars snapping in the summer breeze.
Brenda called the day after our courthouse stroll with information that not only filled gaps in the Muse timeline but also must have sparked interest under the sideshow tent in the late fall of 1938. She had found the missing case file. Signed by Lindsay Almond himself, a petition inside it described a courtroom gathering on November 2. The Muse brothers and their mother were there with Wilbur Austin.
And so was a very unhappy Candy Shelton.
As Austin argued in his petition to the court, Shelton “has been availing himself of the services of the wards of this court without making just compensation to this Committee, and without any express or implied authority from this Committee, by reason of which he is indebted to this Committee for the services of said wards.”
The court records don’t say where exactly Shelton had taken the brothers after Ringling ended its season following the Scranton standoff in June. But judging from his 1938 employment card and other circus records, Shelton had been among the scores of Ringling staffers who switched midseason to the Ringling-owned Al G. Barnes affiliate, and he took the Muse brothers with him. (I also found a bally photograph of Willie on guitar and George on the ukulele during a 1938 Barnes stop in Green Bay, Wisconsin.)
The checks from Ringling abruptly had stopped going to Roanoke, again.
In a September 1938 letter, Ringling auditor J. F. Wadsworth indicated that the Muse “twins,” as he called them, were working with the Barnes circus in Texas. Austin was stirring up trouble, Wadsworth explained to the Barnes circus assistant treasurer: “From the letter of Austin, you will notice that he expects us to continue the payment of their wages each month and that he suggests it is up to us to get them back on the job.”
Wadsworth conceded that it was the company’s responsibility to return them to Austin after the contract expired. “At any rate, this should be taken up with Mr. [John Ringling] North and whatever action, if any, is necessary to protect us should be taken at once.” The contract for the “imbeciles” and “rope-haired wonders,” as Wadsworth called them, was once again in flux.
Wadsworth looped in Ringling’s legal adjuster, John Reddy, and made a point of telling the treasurer that he should return the “file of legal papers connected with this case” to Ringling offices, pronto.
I found no such file attached to the Ringling papers archives on file at Circus World—only a brief exchange between Austin and Wadsworth—but Brenda’s court records were now reassembled and could tell their story.
If the kids of the time expected more from a circus than it was humanly possible to give, how convenient that the Ecuadorian cannibals were ready to morph back into their Ambassadors from Mars attire.
Just three days before Austin’s November 2 petition to the Roanoke court, Orson Welles had terrified the country with his radio drama, War of the Worlds, a simulated newscast that suggested an alien invasion from Mars was in progress—landing in New York and New Jersey.
RADIO LISTENERS IN PANIC, TAKING WAR DRAMA AS FACT blared an above-the-fold headline on the front page of the New York Times, which described household disruptions, interrupted religious services, and communication-systems logjams. This scene unfolded in a single block of Newark:
More than twenty families rushed out of their houses with w
et handkerchiefs and towels over their faces to flee from what they believed was to be a gas raid. Some began moving household furniture.… Thousands of persons called the police, newspapers and radio stations here and in other cities of the United States and Canada seeking advice on protective measures against the raids.
A Syracuse reporter who happened to have the radio beat bundled his family into the car and headed north for Watertown, New York, “about the time the Martians were wading the Hudson and starting upstate,” Variety magazine reported. He’d stopped en route to rescue his mother-in-law when he learned that it was not a real attack.
Calls from more than 350 readers flooded the switchboards of the Roanoke Times: “So frantic were some of the callers that the entire matter soon ceased to be funny, even for the newsmen, who were kept busy, jumping from one telephone to another, and back again.”
Austin was no Messick, but he was savvy enough to make extraterrestrial hay out of the biggest entertainment snafu in radio history. I can just envision him in the courtroom: a champion fidget, running his hands through his hair, nervously adjusting his necktie, removing his Coke-bottle glasses in the middle of an argument only to put them back on again a few seconds later.
I can see Shelton there, dressed in his bally best, his mangled hand tucked into the pocket of his suit pants.
Austin pointed out that Shelton hadn’t paid the brothers in more than two months, the last time wiring the $115 payment via Western Union. He pleaded to the judge:
Your Committee would further show that George Muse and Willie Muse are known to the public of North America and the Continent of Europe as “Eko and Iko, the gentlemen from Mars,” and are Albinos of such similar appearance, and such freakish nature as to make them particularly desirable for public exhibition at this time, due in part to a widespread public interest in all Martian affairs, a hoax concerning the Planet Mars having recently been perpetrated upon the American public.
Orson Welles could not have had better timing.
The following week, Almond ruled that no one—including Shelton—would be permitted to remove Willie and George from the jurisdiction of his court until a proper contract had been written, signed, and approved.
Six weeks later, Pete Kortes sent his company treasurer—his wife, Marie—from their home in California to Roanoke to offer Austin a deal. The Kortes show would match the Ringling salary, and to prove they operated in good faith, they proposed something unheard of in the circus world of the 1930s: they would pay six weeks in advance. The Korteses would also cover all food, clothing, and travel expenses for the brothers.
More meaningfully to Harriett Muse, from now on she would know where her sons were performing.
Marie promised to mail regular letters to Austin, who would read them to Harriett when she came to the office to retrieve her monthly checks.
After more than two decades of being in the dark, Harriett would now receive monthly updates advising her “where George & Willie Muse are, and how they are.”
Shelton would never come in contact with them again.
The gentlemen from Mars were now under the “exclusive custody and control” of Pete and Marie Kortes.
Marie signed for her husband in his absence. Below her loopy cursive, Wilbur J. Austin Jr. signed the contract for Willie and George, who were present but could not write their names.
On February 20, 1939, the contract was initialed by Lindsay Almond Jr., then stamped with his official seal. And so was finalized the ruling of the racist, benevolent judge.
PART FIVE
14
Very Good Old Colored Woman
This time Harriett had a better plan for the money being sent home for her benefit. On a balmy late-winter day in 2015, I set out to explore exactly what she bought with the remittances from her sons, seventy-six years after the fact, and to track the rippling impact of first-time property ownership on a woman whose parents and children had been themselves considered property. My guide was Betsy Biesenbach, a Roanoke court researcher, title examiner, and map collector.
We drove southeast from Roanoke toward an unpopulated knoll near the Blue Ridge Parkway to find Harriett Muse’s first and only piece of land. Cars cruising the parkway hummed in the distance. A warm breeze skirted thickets of denuded trees. Wrinkled horse-nettle fruit clustered in tiny orange bunches, and dried milkweed pods spiked from fields of overgrown, butter-colored grass.
Even though our chances of discovering Harriett’s motivations were slim, here Betsy and I were, standing outside my car, each of us pivoting in a circle, as if on cue. Bookended by Fort Lewis Mountain to the west and Peaks of Otter to the east, the panorama demands that kind of attention.
It’s as if God reached his hand down four hundred million years ago and crimped a hundred miles of piecrust into sedimentary rock.
The only evidence of human habitation here, on what was once Harriett’s 16.8 acres, was the occasional pocket of daffodils marking long-gone property lines and a few stretches of rusted wire-mesh fencing. And lots of trash, in the form of more recently discarded tires, a toilet, and bottles of Yoohoo and Mad Dog 20/20.
People once lived here, first the Sioux and Powhatan and Iroquois, then the English and their African slaves, and the German and Scots-Irish settlers after them. In the late 1930s, whites owned most of the land, but several black subsistence farmers lived amid them, too, descendants of the slaves, most of them in an enclave called Ballyhack.
From 1939 to 1942, they were Harriett Muse’s neighbors.
For the first time in her life, the widowed maid owned something of her own—with a view so vast and so spectacular that, decades later, developers eyeing it for the first time would dream of one day building vineyards and exclusive golf resorts.
We were there to explore Ballyhack, a community that took its name from a bloody election-day brouhaha in the mid-1800s between rival political factions. If oral history is true, the fight took place at a voting precinct, where brawlers struck one another with boots, clubs, and knives (hence Ballyhack).
A milder-sounding name was later suggested, which is why most people now refer to the area as Mount Pleasant, for the views and high-elevation breezes. The black history of Ballyhack seems to have evaporated among all but the very old and the George Davis archives: his photograph The Dentist Visits Ballyhack features the outdoor pulling of a tooth by a neighborhood healer, with the entire family looking on, and its details offer a stop-time moment of rural daily living, from pigs at the feeding trough, to a collapsed porch roof cobbled from sticks, to bedsheets hanging from tree-limb fence rails.
The Ballyhack name did recently reenter the local lexicon, though, attached to an ultra-exclusive golf club a few miles down the road. Virginia Tech football icon Frank Beamer and NFL great Archie Manning are members, and many in the club travel to the region by private jet and chauffeur.
There were neither golfers nor brawlers in sight the day Betsy and I set out to locate the plot of land Wilbur Austin bought in George’s and Willie’s names for $790 in early 1939. He paid $400 cash down, accrued from the money he’d been setting aside for the brothers’ savings and retirement, followed by $10 monthly payments by Harriett. The house on the plot had been built sometime around 1905, Betsy surmised from the deeds, by a farmer named General Grant Maxey. It was a bit unusual, having the same name as the Union commander General Ulysses Grant in the midst of Rebel territory. But Maxey was born in 1862 in nearby Bedford County, and though he had many black families as neighbors, he was actually white, census records show.
Technically, we were trespassing as we walked atop the knoll where Harriett’s house had been located, long before her plot was sold and resold. We were trespassing on what had become, long after Harriett’s tenure there, the final resting spot for more than two million tons of the region’s garbage between 1977 and 1994. Two years later, Roanoke Regional Landfill officials had it capped off and covered with dirt and grass, moving operations to a newer and more environment
ally sound facility elsewhere in the county.
On auspicious days, it’s possible to stand at a nearby parkway overlook and catch sight of a bald eagle or a red-tailed hawk swooping in and out of the undulating blue haze.
Within fifteen minutes of our arrival on this day, a worker monitoring leachate seepage spotted us walking on the old landfill and told us to move along, and we did.
In 1939, Harriett Muse was one of fifty-six black homesteaders living in Roanoke County. Her dwelling was a five-room frame house, including a ceiling, as the real estate assessor noted. She also owned a barn built of oak with a roof that badly needed repair. Among the amenities of Ballyhack—a smattering of black homes spread out along a single meandering road, not unlike the tiny crossroads of Truevine—were a segregated “colored school,” two black churches, a black cemetery, and a black-owned store. As the crow flies, Ballyhack was just four miles southeast of the Roanoke city line, but the road there from Roanoke was winding and ill maintained, making the journey rugged and long.
Ballyhack was a tight-knit community, recalled ninety-three-year-old Veron Holland, who grew up spending weekends at her grandparents’ farm next door to Harriett’s. Veron pulled weeds in the garden, helped care for the chickens and cows, and went to church at the Ballyhack African Methodist Episcopal church. When she was lucky she got to shop in a little store run by Ardelia Jones, “a very, very pretty woman who would sell us a penny’s worth of candy,” the retired teacher told me.
Veron described the forty homes clustered around Ballyhack as “shanty and shackly,” small country houses built of wood-frame construction, some of them lopsided, but for the stick-straight house built by hand by her grandfather Jordan Holland, the son of former slaves.
“I tell you the truth, black folks had a hard time trying to live back then. Money was a very scarce thing,” Veron said. Her father, Garrett Holland, worked as a Norfolk and Western railroad laborer, the family grew its own food, and her parents squirreled away money to send Veron and her sister by train to Bluefield State, in West Virginia. “Hollins College was right here in Roanoke County, but blacks couldn’t go,” she said. (Another retired black educator told me the same story, remembering that students had to sit in the back of the train car until the moment it crossed the state line into West Virginia, at which point they all rose and moved forward.)