by Beth Macy
Boswell didn’t own the Muses’ old shack at 19 Ten-and-a-Half Street, but most of the surrounding lots had Boswell’s company as a landlord for many decades. Which was just one reason Harriett wanted so badly to buy the Ballyhack property. It was only a half hour away but, mentally and culturally, it was another world. And that world inspired her to make sure George and Willie would have a home waiting for them when they retired, too—far from Jordan’s Alley.
Boswell did own the house across the alleyway on Tenth Street. In 1985, both shacks were still standing, barely, when a seventy-six-year-old domestic worker named Madeline Tate froze to death inside a one-story duplex at 21 Tenth Street during minus-11-degree weather.
Police found her body lying next to her woodstove, the only source of heat in a house that rented for $50 a month.
She’d bundled herself up in a dress, two blouses, a sweater, a bathrobe, and a pair of boots. Her arms were folded casually, as if she’d planned to get up soon and put more wood on the fire.
“We’re very sorry it happened,” Boswell’s daughter told a reporter. But the company was not responsible, she said, referring to the clause in the contract requiring renters to provide their own heat.
In the wake of Tate’s death, the city increased the number of inspectors from two part-timers to thirteen full-time positions. Boswell’s daughter, who had inherited the company, sold it to a real estate consortium, and Tate’s house was demolished soon after.
In 1989, the city paid a demolition contractor $1,000 to tear down the Muse shack, a sum that was greater than its assessed worth.
Tate’s house and several others surrounding it—including the Muses’ old shack—had been condemned as unfit for habitation shortly after her death, and the city said it might have been able to save her if someone had complained earlier about the bad conditions.
But neighborhood activist Florine Redick told a Roanoke Times reporter she had complained, only to be dismissed by city officials, who said that none of the houses were bad enough. “Anybody with eyes can see there’s something very wrong,” she said.
A newspaper photograph of Tate’s house showed a weatherworn shack with a slanted porch, rickety wooden steps, badly broken latticework fronting the house beneath the porch, and very little paint but for peeling white flecks. On a similarly slummy house next door was the sign FOR RENT. BOSWELL REALTY COMPANY.
“If people complained and housing inspectors came by, the slumlords would boot the tenants, then rent the dump out again to someone who would not complain, for a time at least,” remembered former Roanoke Times reporter Doug Pardue, who investigated Tate’s death and helped keep the story on the front page for weeks.
More than a decade later, a cluster of Easter egg–colored Habitat for Humanity homes was built to replace the Muse and Tate shacks, and several nearby properties. The development was named for a retired railroad executive and a General Electric engineer, both of whom had been active Habitat volunteers. One had traveled south to spend a week in Pikeville, Kentucky, repairing homes for low-income people.
At the homes’ dedication, no one spoke of the old front-porch concerts put on by Martian ambassadors, or even of the little girl who’d been born just around the corner, though an astute reader of best-selling nonfiction might recognize her name. Loretta Pleasant, born a half-block from Jordan’s Alley in 1920, would grow up to become the unknowing donor of cells that contributed to groundbreaking medical research, as chronicled in Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.
Like Madeline Tate, Henrietta Lacks (as she later became known) died penniless. Whereas Lacks was buried without a marker in a private family cemetery in rural Virginia, only a number—978—marked Madeline Tate’s grave in a pauper’s cemetery in the countryside of another county. At Tate’s graveside service, a chaplain read aloud: “It’s better to rely in the Lord than put any trust in flesh.”
A few months later, seven people gathered at her grave in a springtime ceremony, after which the Roanoke Times described Tate as now being “more privileged than her neighbors—something she probably never dreamed of during her life.” Tate’s number had been replaced by a proper tombstone: MADELINE ADAMS TATE, 76 YEARS OLD, JAN. 20, 1985, FROZE TO DEATH.
A vigorous opponent of providing public housing to African Americans back in the 1960s, city councilman John Boswell Jr. had driven the bumpy red-dirt alleyways in his cushy Buick, bullying tenants who were late paying, and refusing to insulate or make repairs in the worst properties. “You didn’t want to rent from Boswell, but you had to because he was the cheapest,” said JoAnne Poindexter, the Roanoke Times’ first black reporter. She grew up attending Jerusalem Baptist and, now sixty-five and retired, still does.
Some of her friends and relatives were among the five thousand or more people displaced by urban renewal in Roanoke. Between 1951 and 1955, JoAnne’s family lived in a new housing project called Lincoln Terrace. When school integration triggered white migration to the Roanoke County suburbs, her father bought a house in a nearby neighborhood called Rugby. Just a few years before white flight hit, all Rugby homes had been deemed salable only to whites.
Boswell had been the lone dissenting voice against the construction of federally subsidized housing, trying to protect his own bottom line. If his Jordan’s Alley renters could find better, cleaner, and cheaper housing in the projects, he knew he would lose tenants. “Unmitigated socialism,” Boswell harrumphed when the 105-unit Hurt Park housing project complex opened in 1965. “In my opinion, three persons in Roanoke who have been pushed around too much are the real estate owner, the taxpayer, and the man who is trying to operate a business.”
That same week, Johnny Cash performed at the Roanoke Fairgrounds, where the Muse brothers had once played. His hit that year was, fittingly, a train song—“Orange Blossom Special.”
And the U.S. Office of Education told the Roanoke school superintendent that his plan to desegregate the city’s schools—eleven years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision—had finally been approved.
If Boswell had been the neighborhood heavy, then Wilbur Austin was his antidote, especially once he’d joined forces with Houp in the late 1930s. “Lawyer Austin was very well known among blacks,” Sarah said. “You know how you always have one lawyer who’s pretty cheap? That was him.”
Once Austin latched on to Houp, he had an entrée into the entire African-American community. That’s likely how Harriett Muse came to hire him, how the unlikely duo came to travel the continent seeking justice for her sons. “They were always planning and anticipating what would happen when they were going places,” Sarah said.
Houp and Austin were a formidable one-two punch when it came to collecting on Kortes’s bounced checks.
Especially Houp. While Austin was paunchy and fidgety, Houp was trim, confident, imposing; a dark and handsome ladies’ man with a broad nose and shoulders. He wore suits with bright white shirts and impeccably shined shoes.
Sarah doesn’t recall meeting Harriett Muse, but she remembers George and Willie visiting the store several times during their trips home. Their family had a credit account with Miss Irene, and the brothers, wanting to avoid the stares of people in the neighborhood, usually waited in the car while their relatives shopped.
Harriett was heading to Roanoke to grocery shop, in fact, on a sweltering day in July 1942. She was riding the winding road from Ballyhack, on her way to collect her wartime sugar rations. A baker extraordinaire, she had moved beyond ash cakes as her budget allowed and was now known for her yeast rolls and cakes—though she still made ash cakes, on request, every time George and Willie came home, served with apple butter she’d canned herself.
It was two in the afternoon. The heat was getting to her, she told the friend who was driving the car, and just as he pulled off the road to check on her, Harriett slumped over.
“Mother Muse,” her friend cried out. But her death was instant.
She was sixty-eight years old.
Willie was especially distraught. “He always had that attachment to his mama,” Nancy said.
After Harriett’s death, her funeral expenses and outstanding debts were logged by Austin and approved by the court, like everything else. She owed one neighbor $13.41 for butter and milk, and another $2.05 for meat. Austin directed another $9.52 to pay off the credit account she’d kept back in Jordan’s Alley—at Miss Irene’s store.
At the funeral, congregants sang Harriett’s favorite hymn:
One more thing here
Don’t wait till the early dawn
Shall now it should be done
Speak things with a loudness as though they were
And know the Bible has already won
Go on and shout, it’s already done.
After the service, the brothers sat with the rest of their family on their sister’s front porch in Jordan’s Alley, a place they would soon leave behind, thanks to Harriett, Austin, and Houp.
They were a block away from Miss Irene’s store, close enough to the rail yard to feel the falling cinders. Neighbor kids gathered, trying to get a peep at their peculiar hair, their milky skin, their fluttering blue eyes.
“Mama’s gone,” George said, shaking his head.
“Mama’s gone,” Willie repeated, shaking his head.
16
God Is Good to Me
The house on Mercer Avenue is a two-story American Foursquare. It’s made of wood-frame construction and painted white, with four bedrooms upstairs. The year is 1961. And as with all houses in the Rugby section of Roanoke, the deed stipulation on the home has just shifted from whites-only to come-one-come-all. Good-bye, white people.
Compared with Harriett’s house in Ballyhack, the Mercer home is a major improvement, with indoor plumbing and electricity, with water that doesn’t have to be fetched from the well. The porch is not rickety, its latticework fully intact.
Compared with the shacks in Jordan’s Alley, it’s draft-free and downright palatial. There’s no gaping hole in the wall, no woodstove to feed.
Chances are slim that an elderly woman might freeze to death here in her bathrobe, blouses, and boots.
White flight has descended on Rugby, which is fine with Annie Belle Saunders; her daughter, Dot; and Dot’s only child, eleven-year-old Nancy.
Dot and Nancy are the latest recipients of the largesse of Uncle Georgie and Uncle Willie, as they call their soon-to-retire uncles and great-uncles.
The women in the family have just purchased the house on Mercer, in their uncles’ names. The sale has been court-approved, for a lump sum of $8,000, the paperwork all taken care of by the knee-jiggling, hair-kneading Wilbur Austin.
There’s just one caveat:
Annie Belle, Dot, and Nancy may live in the Mercer home indefinitely, as long as they agree to take care of George and Willie for the “rest of their natural lives.”
The money has come from the nest egg Austin has been channeling their wages into since 1938. The fund has now grown to $23,000, a small fortune for a working-class family (the equivalent of around $183,000 today). The family has pulled off a feat in minority home ownership; the brothers are now among the 38.1 percent of home-owning black households in the nation, compared with 64.3 percent among whites.
The savings have accrued from Austin’s myriad trips to track the Muse brothers down when the circus checks bounced, from the threats and muscle employed by John Houp to force the skinflint showmen, finally, to honor their word.
Mostly, it comes from George’s and Willie’s fifty years of sideshow work. It’s hard to say how big that nest egg would be had the brothers been getting paid all along.
Willie is almost totally blind. Georgie’s heart is weak.
They don’t mind if a family friend or a Rugby neighbor asks them to play a few bars from a song. But they don’t like it when strangers bang on the door at two or three in the morning, demanding to see them, demanding to see the wild savages who eat raw meat.
The family hires a barber who makes house calls to cut their hair—so they can avoid the stares. At the segregated elementary school Nancy attends, kids tease her. They want to know: Which one is Eko and which is Iko?
“Neither,” she tells them, clutching her fists, so ready for a fight.
“Their names are Mister George and Mister Willie Muse.”
They share a bedroom at the top of the stairs, across the hall from Nancy’s room. Years from now, long after they’re gone, friends looking back will pause to remark on the color of that room.
They are always so certain of the shade.
“When you walked into the bedroom, everything was white,” recalls the doctor who made house calls regularly to treat Willie Muse. “The ceiling, the walls, the curtains, the beds, and even Willie. He was also basically white.”
The first time the doctor sees Willie in the room, he is singing along with the radio. In the doctor’s memory, the bedroom is so blanketed in white that he finds himself thinking: I’ve just walked into a Stephen King novel.
But everyone’s memory of that bedroom is skewed, wrapped in a dreamy, protective web. Having visited the room myself—the one time Nancy let me inside the Mercer house, in 2001—I, too, could have sworn the walls were painted white.
But Nancy says no. And later, looking at photographs, I see that she’s right. The walls are the hue of ferns unfurling, of Easter-basket grass, of springtime in Virginia.
It must have been something about Willie that projected an air of calm, white, and stillness, long after he departed this world. I can’t think of anything else.
More than anyone, it is Nancy who makes good on the Mercer Avenue promise. She and her mother, Dot, take care of Georgie until his death of heart failure, in 1972.
They fret watching Willie grieve for his lifelong protector and best friend; they worry that he’ll soon die, too. He has never been without his brother. “Georgie was almost more like a father to him,” Nancy says, though they were only three years apart.
But God is good to Willie Muse.
He tells that to everyone he meets, as if by greeting.
He says it as he prays before every meal, before every snack.
He says it when Nancy brings the balloons and gifts that will mark the birthday his family celebrates as his eightieth, then ninetieth, and all the holidays in between.
“He talks to God the way he would talk to you and me,” one of his at-home nurses remembers, still referring to him in the present tense.
He outlives everyone he has crossed paths with in the circus—the showmen who exploited him, his colleagues in the sideshow, the lawyers who opposed and defended him.
When he’s ninety-nine, doctors install a pacemaker with a battery designed to last seven years.
“God is good to me,” he says, again, when the battery keeps ticking beyond seven years, then eight.
And so does Willie Muse.
If the circus was his first real home, the property on Mercer is his first real house. At birthdays and Christmas, he wants it stocked with stuffed animals, music boxes, and snow globes—his novelties, he calls them, in circus parlance popular fifty years earlier. “She’s touching my novelties,” he tattles on his great-niece Louise when she borrows a favorite stuffed alligator from his bed.
While George embraced playing with children in the family—Come sit on my big fat knee—Willie kept them at a distance. If they tried to roughhouse with him, he complained, “You’re messing up my clothes.”
He’s living the childhood he never had. He gives Nancy the motherhood she never had, too.
He shakes his snow globes. Though he can’t see the flakes floating inside, they transport Willie to Truevine. He thinks of the pale-white snow cream his mother once made from va
nilla, sugar, eggs, and new-fallen snow—a poor man’s ice cream.
Before suffering a stroke in 1990, Willie plays his Marquis guitar every day. After the stroke, his left arm is compromised, but he gets the guitar out anyway just to hold it in his lap. The neck looks like dominoes, the fretboard finish worn down in rows of ovals by his finger pads. He runs his hands along the frets, not so long removed from the clatter of train cars and cookhouses.
He asks Nancy to buy him a harmonica. Then he asks her to send it back for another, “one with more sharps.”
He plays “Tipperary” first, then “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” which they used to play before, during, and after the world wars: Hurrah for the flag of the free…
There’s the tune he sings in memory of a lover from a town he no longer recalls: Put your arms around me, honey / Squeeze me tight / Pull up and cuddle up / With all your might.
There’s the song he sings every day to Nancy: You are my sunshine, my only sunshine / You make me happy when skies are gray…
When she’s had a bad day, he counsels her, “When you walk around angry, Nancy, you lose a lot of blessings the Lord has in store for you.”
Willie craves the French fries she makes for him—extra long so he can pick them up easily. When Nancy’s on vacation or out of town, Willie cons Louise into making him cheeseburgers, a meal that taskmaster Nancy (the Warden, they call her) forbids. Cheeseburgers are too rich, she says, too hard for someone his age to digest.
Louise and Nancy have placed old telephone cords at hip height around the room, to help Willie feel his way when he walks. Nancy’s husband, Ike, has placed the bed diagonally into the corner, so when Willie stands he can hold the rail Ike has affixed to the wall.
Willie is proud of his age, calling it a blessing from the Lord. He explains to all who visit that God has entrusted him to live as long as he has.
