Truevine

by Beth Macy

  Our earlier talks had been fluid and friendly. A year before, Janet had asked me to help her and a sister track the family’s genealogy back to slavery, looking up forebears on my Ancestry.com account. When I hit a dead end, I introduced her to a researcher friend, who also couldn’t overcome the record-keeping gaps.

  But during this interview, our fourth, Janet was hesitant to open up. It wasn’t just the difference in our skin tones. It seemed to be my education and my presumed life of ease. It was every white kid who’d ever spit on her from a school-bus window while she trudged the four miles by foot to the one-room school. It was the still-vivid memory of a slave in Truevine, passed down through the generations at Truevine School: he was standing naked atop a tree stump with pork grease slathered on his muscles—so he’d show better, so he’d bring a better price—and his family never saw him again.

  “White peoples is hateful,” Janet said, finally. “And I like you, I do. But it’s hard for people to understand, my grandkids even… to know how hard it was when me and Mama was coming up. That white peoples treated us like dirt.”

  It was Mabel’s ninety-eighth birthday. She stared out the window, and she didn’t seem to be following our conversation, until suddenly she jumped in:

  “They would feed you outdoors,” she said, her voice reedy and resonant.

  She was speaking about the farmers she ’cropped for from the 1920s through the ’60s, and her parents before that. “They had a little table under the tree by the big house, and when it was lunchtime they’d raise up the kitchen window and hand you out the food—like you a dog or something. Then you’d eat at that table.”

  “They said they didn’t like ‘niggers in the house,’” Janet explained. “That was the rule.”

  That was the kind of world George and Willie Muse were born into in the 1890s, when the only hope the son or a grandson of slaves had—somehow, some way—was to buy a piece of land. Cabell and Harriett Muse had been reared during Reconstruction, a time when former slave owners had adopted sharecropping as a system for retaining control over almost four million ex-slaves, most of whom had no means of sustaining their families—or of leaving the land where they’d once been bound. With a cash-poor farm economy dominating the South, cotton and tobacco crops became the main sources of credit, and black families rented small plots of land in return for a portion of the crop.

  But whites determined how blacks should be paid, how much they should work, and how many members of their family would do the work. The ’croppers weren’t compensated until the tobacco was sold, at which point they generally got one-quarter to one-half of the money the farmer received. Half-shares, people called it.

  But that was if the farmer was honest about how much the crop brought. And if the ’cropper hadn’t taken out too many liens against his wages from the farmer or the store. Interest rates on loans and cash advances typically ranged from 21 to 53 percent, and often the ’cropper earned nothing at all on “settling-day” once he paid back his debt, ensuring he’d have no choice but to return to that farm another season—and sink even deeper into debt.

  Like the Muses, the Pullens lived in shoddy tenant cabins along the perimeter of the farmer’s land. “There were holes in the walls and the roof, too,” Janet said. “That farmer was such a mean man. He’d carry that tobacco and sell it in Danville, but we never did get to go,” she recalled of the warehouse where the crop was auctioned every fall. “He’d [show] you what it brought, but Daddy never could read any of it.”

  So it went across the South, where only a fool would question the landlord’s math. “If you raised the slightest question, you ran the risk of being forced off the land,” explained Berea College historian Andrew Baskin, who has researched slavery and its aftermath in Franklin County. “Everything was in the hands of the whites who owned the land.”

  Most rural blacks didn’t challenge the system. Alabama sharecropper Ned Cobb explained why in Theodore Rosengarten’s landmark 1974 exposé, All God’s Dangers. When Cobb’s neighbor Henry Kirkland questioned his landlord’s accounting, he “flew in a passion—he toted his pistol all the time—… over that book business and throwed that pistol on old Uncle Henry and deadened him right there.” He shot the man’s son, too.

  Nelson Whitten, the Freedmen’s Bureau Records official sent to Franklin County in 1867 to “provide for more efficient government of the Rebel States,” wrote to his boss in Washington, D.C.: “I find an inclination on the part of the whites, though not universal, to override and take advantage of the freedmen whether they are working for a share of the crops, or for wages.”

  The entwinement of former slaves with land and white landowners continued after the Civil War. And, in the remotest parts of the rural South, so it persisted for another century and beyond.

  Up the road from the Pullens’ and past a small field of bright-leaf tobacco, Thelma Muse Lee remembered feeling entrapped. “We ’cropped for eighteen years, till after our kids left home,” she said. “It was the onliest way we had to make money. But you could never make enough to buy any land. Because you had to give half to the farmer, then he’d take out what we owed him for fertilizer. Then in the spring we had to borrow money from him again for seed,” she said.

  It was an Indian-summer day, with temps in the upper 80s. The year was 2014, but looking at the landscape behind Thelma’s house, it could have been a century before. Thelma was boiling thirty-seven and a half pounds of green beans she’d canned over the weekend, she told me proudly. She had grown the beans herself—at the age of ninety-three, managing every aspect of the garden, except the tilling, which fell to her son—and now she was sealing the jars atop an outdoor wood fire the son had started at five that morning, before he left for work.

  When I asked if she was trying to keep her kitchen cool by boiling the jars outside, she and Janet shot each other a bemused look. White people.

  “No, honey,” Thelma said, shaking her head. “I’m saving on electric.”

  Thelma remembered hearing about the Muse kidnapping as a child. It was the same cautionary tale the blacks in Roanoke had been taught, but with a different setting. “They got stoled from a fair they used to have up here in Rocky Mount,” she said.

  Thelma thought they were related to her—her maiden name was Muse, and she had albinos in her family, including a daughter who lived a few houses up Sontag Road—but she wasn’t sure exactly where George and Willie fell on her extended-family tree.

  A few miles away, under the shadow of Chestnut Mountain, the Muse lineage was similarly vague. A. J. Reeves didn’t get much further in school than Janet Pullen or Thelma Lee. But he chopped the wood for the potbellied Truevine School stove, same as they did, and he, too, had Muse family blood. He figures that his grandmother Queen Victoria Muse probably descended from the same Truevine-area family as Cabell Muse.

  One hundred years old at the time of our interview, Reeves was sporting a pair of new replacement knees that carried him to his backyard workshop every morning. The centenarian spends most days building and repairing clocks—mantel clocks, grandfather clocks, clocks of the sort you set on your desk. A farmer-turned-sawmiller-turned-contractor-turned-plumber, Reeves performed his last plumbing job in 2007 on a Habitat for Humanity house at the age of ninety-three. He still lends out his tools and advice to the many neighbors who stop by regularly to chat. A hand-lettered sign in his workshop that hangs from the ceiling says IN GOD WE TRUST. ALL OTHERS PAY CASH.

  Asked to describe living conditions in Truevine during the era when the Muse brothers disappeared, Reeves cracked a sly half-smile, leaning back to unleash a cacophony of squeaks from his rusted office chair.

  “You want the truth?” the clock maker asked, tilting his head. “Are you sure you want the truth?”

  He was as serious as a copperhead in a wood stack.

  His grandparents were Franklin County slaves, freed at the end of the Civil War, he told me. His grandfather Armistead Reeves even participated in it, one of 5
34 Franklin County slaves requisitioned by the Virginia governor to join the Confederate war effort. Armistead was sent to Richmond to cook for the troops and tend their horses in 1862.

  Details of Armistead’s war experience were not recorded, but I found parallels in the records of a contemporary, Samuel Walker, born into slavery in nearby Snow Creek and married to yet another Muse. Walker described his first memory at the age of five in 1847: watching the sale of his mother to a Georgia plantation owner. He ran after the wagon that took her away, calling her name, but she never looked back.

  Walker married Naomi Muse, who belonged to prominent Truevine landowner Elizabeth Muse, along with thirty other slaves—including, probably, Cabell Muse’s parents. Elizabeth Muse had threatened to sell Naomi during the war, prompting her to fret over who would care for her “chaps,” as Naomi later recalled. But the family stayed together until 1862, when Samuel was conscripted to serve as a teamster and fortification builder; he was eventually sent to the front lines shortly before Lee surrendered to Grant. The first time their names appear together in an official record is in 1870. But because they were illiterate, the census taker misspelled Naomi’s name as Onelly.

  “Perhaps one of the greatest tragedies of institutional slavery in North America was that it robbed millions of African Americans—and countless Virginians—of their heritage,” wrote journalist Bill Archer, who chronicled Walker’s painstaking efforts to receive a small Civil War pension. It wasn’t approved until six decades after the war ended, in 1925. For the remaining eight years of his life, Walker’s quarterly war pension amounted to $6.25.

  Walker saved the money to buy his first piece of property not by farming but by sending two of his sons off for jobs with the Roanoke-based Norfolk and Western Railway, which was expanding into the West Virginia coalfields in the 1880s to link Appalachian-mined coal to the port of Norfolk and, eventually, the Great Lakes. Using the funds they sent home, he built his first house in Franklin County, his granddaughter, Grace Roten, proudly remembered, complete with weatherboarding and “store-bought windows.”

  That same quest for upward mobility prompted Cabell Muse to leave Franklin County not long after the births of George and Willie. The first time his name appears in an official record is 1900, a time when thousands of African-American men, tired of trying to earn a living off the land, wandered the countryside seeking jobs in work camps and mines scattered throughout the South. They were building levees in Arkansas, gathering turpentine in Georgia, and mining coal in West Virginia and Tennessee—making far less than their white counterparts and sometimes, if their company-store debts were large, earning nothing at all.

  Cabell and scores of other young men from Truevine ventured to Rock, West Virginia, looking to earn the first cash money of their lives. They were, in the words of a prominent union organizer, “seeking a man’s chance in the world… looking for true American citizenship.” Most were tasked with hard labor, digging out coal, hammering metal into spikes, and building track to carry the coal using pickaxes, shovels, tie tongs, and mallets.

  In a posed photo from the Norfolk and Western archives, fourteen black men (and one white laborer) clutch shovels while four white bosses loom large in the foreground, one with his hand on hip and another leaning authoritatively on his leg, his foot perched atop a handcar. Rocks litter the sifted dirt, which gives way to scrubby grass, crooked electricity poles, and mountains rising from both sides of the tracks in a wide V.

  It was rough work performed largely by rough people, black and white. In 1904 in nearby Williamson, West Virginia, two drunken vagabonds who were caught wandering the work camp at night shot and killed a policeman and a railway telegraph operator. The officer was shot for refusing to drink the tramps’ whiskey, and the night operator was shot when he tried to intervene.

  Blacks lived in segregated communal housing, and as with the Mexican immigrants who would one day replace their kin in the tobacco fields, their families relied on them to send money home. Only the luckiest black workers like A. J. Reeves’s father managed to learn blacksmithing, a physically easier skilled trade that brought better pay.

  Masterless men, they were called, as the presence of tens of thousands of black men in work camps across the South instilled fear in whites, who saw them as job competition and free agents, no longer attached to the land or beholden to landlords.

  As sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois framed the situation, emancipation had transmogrified into a “race feud” in the southern states. “Not a single Southern legislature stood ready to admit a Negro under any conditions, to the polls; not a single Southern legislature believed free Negro labor was possible without a system of restrictions that took all its freedoms away; there was scarcely a white man in the South who did not honestly regard Emancipation as a crime, and its practical nullification as a duty.”

  Back in Franklin County, more than a dozen tobacco factories fashioned cigarettes and plug tobacco, but blacks typically weren’t permitted to apply for factory jobs. Imprinted in the minds of most white southerners was the notion that black people lacked the necessary intelligence to operate machinery. They dismissed their dialects, mannerisms, and supposedly narrow skills, viewing them as inferior in every way.

  But A. J. Reeves’s father returned from his West Virginia blacksmithing stint with an entrepreneurial work-around of that mind-set: “My daddy came back and bought a hundred and fifty acres of this land before I was born, for five hundred dollars,” Reeves recalled, gesturing to the property that abuts his church and the original wood-frame Truevine School (now the site of a church picnic shelter). “He was a farmer, but he also had his own blacksmithing shop right down the road. He never worked for anybody but himself, and he taught me that. Because you saw the way the ’croppers were treated. Even if they treat ya good—and most didn’t—they’re still taking part of your labor because you’re working one day for yourself and one day for them. I want to work every day for myself.”

  It was simple math, as commonsense as the minute hands and moon dials marking time along the perimeter of his workshop walls.

  Cabell Muse wanted to work for himself, too. He traded blisters from the tobacco hoe for blisters from shoveling rocks and dirt. But, unlike Robert Reeves, he did not come home to Truevine with a pocketful of cash.

  By the time he came back to Virginia, George and Willie had not returned home, and their mother was panic-stricken. The police hadn’t lifted a finger to help her find them, and a children’s-rights agency in Virginia had mounted only a brief, halfhearted search.

  She probably imagined the worst. Just an hour east of Roanoke, in Lynchburg, Virginia, news was reverberating of Ota Benga, whose story would become the low point of scholars’ search to find the “missing link” bridging human and ape. Hailed as a “pygmy” who’d been “liberated” from the Congo by an American missionary, Benga was first displayed at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis alongside Eskimos, Filipinos, and Native Americans. In an exhibit that was two parts Barnum and one part pseudo-science, they’d been forced to wear loincloths in the cold winter wind.

  In 1906, Benga—his real name was Toa Benga—came to live in a guest cottage at the Bronx Zoo, where he was caged with an orangutan. The zoo director had the idea to display the pair together, with a sign on their cage that read: THE AFRICAN PIGMY, OTA BENGA. AGE, 23 YEARS. HEIGHT, 4 FEET 11 INCHES. WEIGHT, 103 POUNDS.… EXHIBITED EACH AFTERNOON DURING SEPTEMBER.

  The exhibit drew forty thousand visitors on a single Sunday. But a scandal flared up almost immediately, led by indignant black clergymen who prevailed on zookeepers to release Benga to an orphanage. “Our race, we think, is depressed enough, without exhibiting one of us with the apes,” the Reverend James H. Gordon said. “We think we are worthy of being considered human beings, with souls.”

  But a New York Times writer opined otherwise, in an editorial that perfectly captured the white-supremacy zeitgeist of the day: “As for Benga himself, he is probably enjoying himself as
well as he could anywhere in his country, and it is absurd to make moan over the imagined humiliation and degradation he is suffering.”

  Eventually he did land at a black-run Baptist seminary in Lynchburg. Though he was happier there than anywhere else he’d been in America—he’d come under the tutelage of Harlem Renaissance poet and Lynchburg resident Anne Spencer, and through Spencer he met both Du Bois and Booker T. Washington—Ota Benga was taunted every time he went out in public. As he walked through Cottontown, a white working-class section of Lynchburg, boys cursed him and threw rocks.

  “Why they do that?” he wanted to know.

  In 1916, he shot himself in the heart next to a campfire he’d built for himself in the woods. “I guess he decided these are Christians and, with Christianity, you have a soul. And he thought he’d shoot himself, and his soul would go back to Africa,” said Spencer’s son, Chauncey, in a 1993 interview.

  A distraught Harriett tried to make up for the loss of George and Willie by birthing three more children in three short years—Tom and Annie Belle, and Harrison, who had the same white-blond hair, milky skin, and watery eyes as the older brothers.

  Relatives recalled that she took her brood to church every time the doors opened. She asked neighbors and fellow parishioners to alert her when they heard of a traveling carnival or circus playing in the Rocky Mount or, more likely, in the closest cities of Roanoke or Martinsville.

  But Roanoke was almost forty miles to the north, and Martinsville was almost that far to the south. As Booker T. Washington had put it, Franklin County was extremely isolated, “about as near to nowhere as any locality gets to be.”

  Harriett kept her other children close, especially Harrison. The boy was a blessing and a constant reminder to his mother, who swore that she would find George and Willie one day—or risk her life trying.

  3

  And Still the Cry Against Us Continues