Truevine

by Beth Macy

  Just before midnight, Willie’s labored breathing turns into intermittent gasps.

  Birthday balloons still hover above his four-poster bed. The snow globes are next to the stuffed animals, the picture of Harriett on the wall. Nancy punches the button on his cassette player, and out comes the voice of Andy Griffith singing “Just As I Am.”

  A hospice worker urges her to give her uncle permission to leave. Tell him it’s OK to go.

  Shortly after midnight Nancy crawls into bed beside him, curls up by his side.

  “God has left you here on earth for a hundred and eight years,” she whispers. “So I know y’all must have a special connection.

  “Uncle Willie, will you please tell God, ‘We’re still struggling.’”

  At 1:40 in the morning, eight days after his 108th birthday, Willie Muse dies exactly the way he wants to.

  It’s Good Friday, 2001. God is good to me.

  The Monday after Easter is bright but blustery. At the funeral home, a family friend sings:

  He knows what’s best for me

  Although my weary eyes, they can’t see.

  So I’ll just say thank you, Lord.

  I won’t complain.

  Mourners process to the segregated cemetery, and clouds descend as they enter the gate. The morning had been bright, the temperature in the mid-40s, but suddenly a wind gusts in and the mercury abruptly drops.

  As a line of cars wends its way into C. C. Williams Memorial Park, snow flurries begin to descend. It’s so confusing at first that people mistake the flakes for blossoms blowing off the spring trees.

  The preacher reads as the casket is lowered, and all heads are bowed.

  When the last amen is uttered, the wind dies down and, abruptly, so does the snow, the flakes melting at everyone’s feet. The sun comes out again, bright.

  More than a decade later, mourners are still talking about the burial of Willie Muse, and not just because of the wind or the snow but mainly because of what happened next.

  “It had been so warm that morning and then so cold,” says Diane Rhodes, the nurse.

  “And then, just like that, a rainbow appeared, and everyone just stood there stunned. And we were all of one accord:

  “Heaven was opening the gates. To welcome Uncle Willie home.”

  But Nancy hasn’t spotted the rainbow, not yet. She’s busy pulling out large bags from the back of a cousin’s van. Then she’s untying the bags.

  Then one hundred and eight balloons float into the air, and all eyes are on them, squinting.

  It’s an Uncle Willie trifecta, a performance spectacle featuring his three favorite things: balloons, snow, and a rainbow—God’s promise after the storm.

  As the balloons ascend, they split into two distinct clusters. The groupings seem to hover for a moment, as if taking one last look. Then they rise higher and smaller and, finally, drift out of sight.

  Half the balloons are white, for purity. And half are blue, for the color of his eyes.

  Epilogue

  Markers

  The trains still pass by Jordan’s Alley, their cars still brimming with coal, though the fuel in many of them is now destined for markets overseas.

  The ones that head south roll past the site of the old fairgrounds, the spot where an illiterate washerwoman, the daughter of slaves, managed to find and claim her long-gone sons, even though she was the wrong color, in the wrong neighborhood, on the wrong side of the law.

  Harriett Muse’s bravery remains unmarked in Jordan’s Alley, and it goes unrecognized here, just south of downtown, where the trains now parallel a thirteen-mile greenway path meant to connect the various Roanoke Valley communities, provide outdoor recreation, and, in so doing, attract new industry to the region to replace the waning influence of the railroad and of coal.

  Riding my bike on the Roanoke River Greenway path, I parallel the passing trains, too. I pass dog walkers and runners, young and old, black and white. It’s one of the rare places in Roanoke where the racial makeup actually reflects the diversity of the city’s census count, down to the immigrant soccer league playing Sunday mornings across the street.

  My friend Zeor, a refugee from Liberia, comes to watch her sons play on those fields. “We were never called ‘black people’ before—until we moved here,” she tells me, tapping into Americans’ innate and unconscious belief in the reality of race as unequivocal divider. Our history of categorizing human beings as immutably black or white before we even know their names.

  It’s one year after Ferguson, fifty years after the Watts riots, 150 years since the end of the Civil War. In the past year, thirty-two states have enforced new voter identification requirements that disproportionately disenfranchise poor and minority voters, and twenty-six unarmed black men have been fatally shot by police across the United States of America. Even Atticus Finch, it turns out, wasn’t the progressive lawyer we thought he was.

  On the greenway, near the old fairgrounds and the new medical school, I ride over a freshly scrawled graffiti bomb on the asphalt. SLAVERY IS OVER! someone has spray-painted.

  I think of Nancy’s young cousin, the auburn-blond Erika Turner, when I see it. She has cried, imagining the travails of her great-great-great-uncle Willie and his brother George. When she cries, Erika tells me, her hazel eyes turn green. A rising senior at a Roanoke County high school, she’s one of a handful of African Americans, occasionally the only one, in her advanced classes. When riots broke out in Baltimore her junior year, her classmates criticized the protesters and looters, asking, “What’s the sense in them burning businesses? What does that prove?”

  The course was advanced placement psychology, and Erika, one of three blacks in that class, pointed out that the riots were not happening in a vacuum. They were precipitated not only by police killings, but also by a government-sanctioned history of violence, discrimination, and injustice as old as the country itself.

  But this is a conversation that most white people, if suburban classrooms and greenway graffiti are to be believed, do not wish to have. More than half of white Americans think the country spends too much time talking about race, while just 18 percent of black Americans do.

  In July 2015, I’m driving Nancy to the cemetery where Willie Muse is buried. She tells me she’s inspired by my account of her great-grandmother’s efforts to make the circus pay for her sons’ work. “I lost track of how many times she had to take those circus men to court. And if she was like that back then with no education, just think what she might be like today. She was… bad.”

  There’s just one real problem with the facts as I’ve assembled them, she says, and it’s big:

  “I do not and I will not believe that Harriett let her children go off with no circus,” she says. “As a mother, that was all she had to cling to—her children and her Christ.”

  I remind her about the Billboard notice Harriett took out with the help of Anna Clark. I remind her of the initial 1927 newspaper coverage of the case, in which Harriett was said to have “contracted” to let her sons leave with the mysterious Mr. Stokes.

  She reminds me of the institutional racism exhibited by countless publications during the Jim Crow era; of the Roanoke Times’ mocking attempt to capture the family’s voice—“for anxious and beseeching words from the lips of their ‘old mammy who yo all aint seen for all dese years’”—without ever actually quoting anyone named Muse.

  She reminds me of the story that Willie himself told—about a man luring him and his brother into the back of his wagon with a piece of candy. I asked if Willie had used the word kidnapped. “No,” she snaps. “His word was stolen.”

  “I’m not questioning what you found,” Nancy says. “I’m telling you how I feel about it, based on the love and connection that Uncle Willie had with his mama.”

  What exactly transpired between Harriett Muse and an itinerant showman in the summer of 1914 will probably never be known. After drilling down more rabbit holes than I can count, I’ve had to settle for
an imperfect and incomplete story line, uncertain but for its ripple-free reflections on memory, power, and race.

  It’s late afternoon and 90 degrees, the sky so cerulean the Blue Ridge Mountains are visible for miles in every direction. We enter the gates of the cemetery, which holds more than twenty thousand graves—many of them Roanoke’s earliest black rail workers and domestics, still housed in unofficial segregation, like most of the people in the surrounding neighborhood.

  In one of the cemetery’s oldest sections, the physician I. D. Burrell—the man who died on the train to Washington after Roanoke’s white hospitals refused to admit him in 1914—is buried beneath a tall granite obelisk. Three of the city’s five Tuskegee Airmen are buried nearby with dignified headstones, including a pair of brothers who joined the elite group of African-American military pilots. (One died in a 1943 training exercise, and the other, who signed up to complete his brother’s mission, died in a 1949 crash during the Berlin Airlift.)

  We pass the cinderblock cemetery office, and near a cluster of stately hickory trees, Nancy points to the section with Willie’s grave. She comes here several times a year—before Christmas, on his birthday, and on Mother’s Day, when she also visits the graves of her mother, Dot, who died in 2004, and her grandmother Annie Belle, who died in 1983.

  Crabgrass creeps over the right side of the granite marker, which is flush with the ground, and dried grass clippings lie heaped on one side.

  WILLIE MUSE, the bronze marker says in raised capital letters, and beneath an outline of praying hands, it reads GOD IS GOOD TO ME.

  A week later we return, this time during office hours. We need help paying our respects to the unmarked graves created before the family could afford memorial niceties: George’s in 1972, and Harriett’s in 1942. Cemetery employees only know exactly where George is buried, since records before 1952 were not retained when the cemetery changed hands decades ago. (Nancy didn’t realize Harriett was buried here, too, until I found her death certificate earlier in the summer.)

  Groundskeeper Brian Nichols takes us to the far edge of an area referred to as the space graves, the humble unnamed section behind the office where people were buried in order as their bodies arrived, one next to the other, in largely unmarked graves and typically nowhere near their relatives. We walk out to the section he figures was dug in July 1942, when Harriett died.

  If you look closely down the row, he shows us, you can make out the indentations where the ground is sunken in just so, the outline of the graves as straight and rectangular as a set of xylophone keys.

  “Is it true he used to play tunes on a plastic string guitar, and you could tell what songs he was playing?” the groundskeeper asks Nancy. Yes, and Willie could also play songs using a range of notes he created solely by snapping his fingers.

  In the car we put in Willie’s homemade recording, now converted from cassette to CD. And, like an aural apparition, there he is, his a cappella baritone steady and clear.

  I replay the CD after I drop Nancy off. As I cross the Tenth Street bridge over the railroad tracks, I make my way back to Jordan’s Alley—that name only rarely crossing the lips of the area’s oldest residents. The new Habitat houses here are vinyl-sided and modest; a few have posted NO TRESPASSING signs.

  Their backyards are so deep they’ve erased all traces of the red-clay road that once passed for Ten-and-a-Half Street. Lodged between two backyard chain-link fences is the only visible remnant of No. 19—a scrubby, half-dead mulberry tree, a tangle of ivy and periwinkle rooted at its base. I snap a few pictures, pick up a single lichen-covered mulberry twig, and return to my car.

  The rail yard still clatters in the distance. But it’s barely audible over the music of Willie Muse: It’s a long way to Tipperary / It’s a loo-ong way to go.

  It’s the Irish war ballad, of all things, that sticks with him the longest—a song with the power to summon, with pride and astonishment, the memory of his “dear old mother” under a sideshow tent.

  Tobacco was Virginia’s dominant cash crop for more than two centuries. Farmed initially by slaves, it was planted, tended, and dried by sharecroppers in Virginia’s Southern Piedmont for decades after slavery’s end. (Cook Collection, The Valentine)

  In 1893, rioting broke out in the fledgling boomtown of Roanoke, Virginia, after a furnace worker named Thomas Smith was accused—probably falsely—of assaulting a white female produce vendor. Smith was hanged from a hickory tree, then shot, then dragged through the streets, and, finally, burned. A Roanoke photo studio sold this picture of Smith hanging from a rope as a souvenir; it was the eighth known lynching in southwest Virginia that year. (Anonymous archive)

  Census figures from 1900 indicate that Cabell Muse, along with scores of other Franklin County sharecroppers, migrated to Rock, West Virginia, to lay track for the booming Norfolk & Western Railway. The identities of the workers in this picture were not recorded, but it was taken around the same time just outside Rock, West Virginia. (Courtesy of Norfolk Southern Archives, Norfolk Southern Corporation)

  Truevine native A. J. Reeves was the grandson of Franklin County slaves. While other men left the region to escape tobacco sharecropping and seek equally tough but better-paying railroad work, Reeves’s father, Robert, returned from his West Virginia railroad blacksmithing stint with enough savings to buy 150 acres of land, enough to farm and to build this once-glorious Victorian-era family home on. Reeves, ninety-nine when this photo was taken, still lives on family land and has always followed his grandfather’s advice to never work for anyone but himself to avoid mistreatment. (Photograph by Beth Macy)

  “White peoples is hateful,” former Truevine-area sharecropper Janet Johnson (left) recalled of her family’s treatment on a Franklin County tobacco farm. Shown here in 2013 with her mother, Mabel Pullen, and father, Charles (now deceased), Janet had painful memories of not being allowed to attend school when the tobacco harvest came in, and of a farmer-boss serving the family’s lunches through the window. “They said they ‘didn’t like niggers in the house,’” she explained. (Photograph by Stephanie Klein-Davis; copyright Roanoke Times, reprinted by permission)

  This photo, probably taken in the mid-1910s, is the earliest known photograph of George (left) and Willie Muse as child sideshow exhibits. Their woolen suits are too small, indicating they’ve already been wearing them a long while. “They were dressed with some care for the ruse but not really that much attention to detail,” one historic costume expert said, as if a showman had kept them and had no intention of truly caring for them himself—or of returning them to their mom. (Courtesy of the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Tibbals Collection)

  William Henry “Zip” Johnson, who was arguably the world’s most famous freak, was “discovered” by P. T. Barnum, who claimed he found him naked and walking on all fours along the river Gambia. Barnum was said to have paid him a dollar a day to pretend to be “something between a man and monkey”—and not talk. (Photograph by Sverre O. Braathen, courtesy of the Milner Library Special Collections, Illinois State University)

  Sideshow manager Clyde Ingalls (left) was a colorful fixture with Ringling Brothers & Barnum-Bailey Circus. Trying to woo potential patrons into his tent, he often spotlighted top performers such as Johnson aka “Zip” (right) on the bally platform, in an attempt to “turn the tip,” or gather enough quarters for another sideshow performance to begin. (Courtesy of Circus World Museum)

  Sideshow impresario Lew Graham would search the world “freak-hunting,” then write regular letters back to John Ringling estimating the cost of the following season’s exhibits—including, in this list, William Henry “Zip” Johnson, whose manager, O. K. White, was to be paid $40 for his services in 1909. (Note: Johnson’s name is referenced as Zip White.) (Courtesy of the Milner Library Special Collections, Illinois State University)

  This is the second-oldest known photo pitch card of Willie (left) and George Muse, shown here circa mid- to late 1910s, playing the banjo and saxophone. Thoug
h they were falsely regarded as being cognitively impaired (probably owing to their oscillating eye condition and lack of socialization and schooling), their managers and co-workers conceded that they were brilliant musicians. (Collection of Warren Raymond)

  Taken sometime between 1918 and 1922, this is the only known photograph of the Muse brothers with one of their captors, showman Al G. Barnes, who bragged in his memoir about “buying the boys” and “making them a paying proposition.” (Collection of Josh Meltzer)

  The Al G. Barnes Circus was massive, as evidenced by how much lakeside real estate it took up in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1922. Across America at the turn of the last century, “Circus Day” was second only to Christmas Day in popularity. (Courtesy of Circus World Museum)

  Kelty’s annual “class photographs” of the sideshow exotics heralded the new Ringling Brothers & Barnum-Bailey Circus season and were taken at Madison Square Garden, this one in 1924. George Muse is third from the left, upper row, standing next to William Henry “Zip” Johnson. Willie Muse is third from the right, standing between the Doll family and Franz “Clicko” Taibosh. (Courtesy of the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Tibbals Collection)

  The all-black Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus sideshow band was led by P. G. Lowery. The Muse brothers are visible both in the Kelty “class photograph” that hangs from the sideshow entrance and in a cartoon-like banner, just to the right of the tent’s entrance, which casts them as tuxedo-clad people with white features, including thin noses and blond hair. (Courtesy of the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Tibbals Collection)