Truevine

by Beth Macy

  But he has a sense of humor about it, too. When visitors ask for the secret to his longevity, he deadpans, “Because I never got married.”

  Every morning the Warden counts out the numbers as she lifts and rotates his arms and legs, five times each, to keep him limber. When he hears Louise enter the room, he says loud enough for her to hear, “You missed a number, Nancy.”

  When a new nurse arrives to care for him, she tends to speak too loudly at first.

  “I hear ya,” Willie says. “I’m blind, you know. I’m not deaf.”

  His ear is as sharp as his other faculties. When he hears a nurse coming up the stairs, he calls out, “Who is it?”

  “The nurse” comes her reply.

  “Does the nurse have a name?” Willie wants to know.

  The centenarian Willie Muse is another person entirely from the timid, fist-clenched younger Willie Muse. He’s gone from cautionary tale to wise elder. The photo-card caricature has a personality now, and that personality is finally being recorded in a voice all its own, in the memories of all who hear it and live to tell. It has advice to give, lessons to impart.

  Brutally honest, Willie tells his great-great-nephew Jason, who grows up in the Mercer house, that he needs to practice his tuba more if he expects to progress in the high school band.

  He hates the thumping of rap, which he calls “that mess.” Willie prefers listening to the blues, bluegrass, country music, and spirituals. His favorites are Louis Armstrong, Minnie Pearl, Mahalia Jackson, and the Reverend Billy Graham. He loves whistling along with the theme song to The Andy Griffith Show. (“Good Lord, could that man whistle!” recalls his nurse Diane Rhodes.)

  He’s lived through nineteen presidents, two world wars, and the advent not just of Hollywood and television but also of microwaves (“That’s an oven?”), CD players (“Amazing!”), and commercial airplanes, which he still prefers to riding in cars.

  He asks Nancy to record him singing his favorite songs on a cassette so he can play them back to himself at night. He reminds her often that he was a better musician than George.

  Me and my lady lover, walkin’ down the street…

  Beginning on his 103rd birthday, Baskin-Robbins gives him a free ice cream birthday cake, with a rainbow painted in icing—to remind him of his mother. A home-health nurse comes to the party and brings along several visitors. Her brother plays the banjo, a niece the violin, her husband the autoharp.

  “Get my recorder,” Willie says to Nancy, so he can enjoy hearing it again later. He especially loves the niece’s violin rendition of “Ashokan Farewell,” the lonesome fiddle waltz and theme of Ken Burns’s miniseries The Civil War.

  Every night before bed, Willie stops to straighten his mother’s picture, displayed in a pretty silver frame on the wall near the foot of his bed. He thinks about a black maid standing up to all those policemen (“’leven of ’em!”), the circus bigwigs in their fedoras and suits (“City Hall!”). Never in his life will he forget the moment Georgie spotted her, then elbowed him in the ribs, both of their lives upended once more (“‘There’s our dear old mother!’ he said to me”).

  In his mind, Willie sees her the way she appears in the picture: her face long-suffering and serene, wearing her homemade dress and black felt hat. There’s a vague pile of work she’s tending on her lap—a sewing project, maybe, or some laundry, perhaps.

  It’s hard to tell whether she’s squinting defensively or cracking a half-smile.

  Like her great-granddaughter Nancy, Harriett keeps her stories quiet. She holds her cards close.

  Uncle Willie has outlived his mother, his siblings, and every one of the showmen who exploited him—including the only one he ever hated. “Scum of the earth,” he still calls Candy Shelton. When he’s feeling feisty, he’ll add his favorite curse—“Cocksucker!”—a sly grin turning up the right corner of his mouth.

  While Willie lives to be a centenarian, adored by everyone he meets, Shelton spends his waning days in a sheet-metal trailer at the Giant’s Camp in Gibtown.

  A writer exploring the state of Florida for a book-length travelogue stumbles upon him there, living alongside other retired sideshow workers. The year is 1973.

  In nearby Sarasota, the last two remaining members of the Doll family won’t let the man inside their door, telling him they are finished with the press, period. “We quit the gaggle,” one of the sisters says, politely. “We done that all our lives.”

  And indeed, they had. I picture Grace Doll next to Clyde Ingalls on the bally, as in that early silent film, nervously tugging her sundress and answering all questions that are thrown her way.

  Shelton, though, clad in trousers and an undershirt, seems lonely and invites the writer in.

  After failing to regain control of the Muse brothers, Shelton had spent his final days in the circus as a Ringling ticket seller and lecturer—a bally boy. He had once been an insider, chummy with management and performers alike. Now he’d come full circle. At a Halloween party for the cast and crew in 1946, he prepared an old-fashioned chicken dinner for the entire bunch.

  Soon after, he retired and returned to his farming roots, this time in rural Virginia, just south of Richmond. He ran a poultry shop and chicken farm, doing the same kind of rote chore that had gotten his fingers lopped off as a young teen.

  “Cocksucker!” I imagine Willie Muse saying, had he ever known.

  “Serves the cocksucker right!”

  Shelton is nostalgic for the sideshow. A vagabond most of his life, he’s now a widower with no children. His only relatives are two nephews he no longer keeps in touch with. “I don’t remember a lot of laughter or joking,” says one of the nephews, who lived with him briefly as a teen.

  After his stint running the Virginia poultry farm, “we lost touch with him,” another nephew says.

  With the smell of simmering lima beans wafting through the trailer, the writer helps Shelton haul a trunk out of his closet. It’s stuffed with yellowed clippings, circus route books, and pictures. Together they peruse the 1937 Ringling route book. It contains a schedule of the last full season Shelton managed George and Willie Muse.

  That year he had pitched the brothers as Eko and Iko, Ministers from Dahomey, after the long-gone West African kingdom. That year they and 1,606 other circus workers traveled more than fifteen thousand miles and gave 404 performances.

  “You people your age never seen a real circus,” Shelton tells the writer. “It was a wonderful institution.”

  By the 1970s, the sideshow has mostly come and gone, caught in the crosshairs of changing sensibilities and disability rights. The freak show is not only offensive, now reserved mainly for “circus buffs and a few nonconformists in the humanities,” as the sociologist Robert Bogdan writes, it’s now long in the tooth, and so is Shelton.

  It’s to disabled people what the striptease is to women, what stereotypically offensive shows like Amos ’n’ Andy are to blacks.

  “It’s a darn shame they don’t exist anymore,” Candy Shelton says in what was probably the last interview he gave before his death, in 1974, at age seventy-six.

  She makes bread and she has guts, just like her great-grandmother.

  Nancy is the new Harriett, the tough matriarch of her tight-knit clan. At the Goody Shop, she bakes yeast rolls by the hundreds while Dot makes the cookies and pies. Customers flock there every early November to get in their holiday orders.

  And just like Harriett, Nancy is not one to be pushed around. There is a gooey center at the heart of her, but it can take a long time—twenty-five years, in my case—to discover it.

  Growing up, Nancy didn’t want people to ask about her famous uncles, so she erected a wall of toughness that projected as aloof, her classmates recall. “The family didn’t talk about Eko and Iko because it reflected the powerlessness of black people at the time; that somebody could come along and take your children, and you had no power over it,” recalls Reginald Shareef, the social science prof and family friend who freq
uented the Goody Shop. (His mother, Maxine “Mac” Thomas, was the revered librarian at the elementary school Nancy attended.)

  Nancy graduated in 1967 from Lucy Addison High School, which was named for the Reconstruction-era teacher who rose from slave to champion of black education in Roanoke. She went to work at Singer Furniture Company, a Roanoke factory, where she began dating a coworker named Howard (nickname: Ike), a quiet sort who by chance had the same last name. They married, and the city of Roanoke eventually hired Ike Saunders to maintain its traffic lights. It was Ike’s salary that financed the purchase of the Goody Shop, whereupon Nancy promptly hired her mother, aunt Martha, and cousin Louise.

  “I could write a case study for the Harvard Business Review on small entrepreneurship, and the family then might really understand what they accomplished in successfully launching and operating the Goody Shop,” Shareef says. “But in many ways, it’s like that book Ralph Ellison wrote in the fifties about the invisible man.” With little recognition from the broader community, blacks who succeed without moving out of their neighborhoods too often remain invisible to the white community, while the minority criminals and misfits among them get most of the ink.

  Nancy may have seemed unmoved by my 1993 feature on the Goody Shop—“It brought out a bunch of crazy white people, that’s all!”—but I later learn that one of those crazy white people is a prominent banker named John Clarke. Known far and wide as Big John, Clarke used to phone me with juicy story tips, which he uttered in a booming Virginia drawl. When I needed his help researching a story, he used to say, “Let me go dip my toes in the creek and get back to you on that,” and he would.

  He and Nancy get along so well that they tell people they are first cousins. For Christmas one year, he buys her a beautiful silk scarf. “When you ran that article about me, Big John showed up the first day, and from that day till the day he died, he was my customer,” Nancy tells me in 2015. “They always came for the Thanksgiving and Christmas rolls, him and his cronies. They’d stop on their way home from the country club, and they’d be about half-tipped.”

  He was one of a very select group of customers who could request “an extra kick of brandy” with his sweet potato pie order and, astonishingly, the Warden would comply.

  Nancy leaves the restaurant “three, four, sometimes five times a day to check on Uncle Willie,” recalls Elaine Stovall, a retired schoolteacher and Mercer Avenue neighbor. “You just can’t imagine how good she was to him.”

  She does everything she can think of to restore the family time he lost as a child. So he no longer has to sign with an X, she teaches him to print his name, which he does proudly—even though he can’t see his work.

  At Christmas, she puts a live Norfolk pine in his bedroom so he can inhale the scent.

  It’s just before Christmas 1995 when Uncle Willie begins complaining of severe stomach pain. Fearing a bowel obstruction, the doctor admits him to the hospital.

  Nancy leaves Roanoke Memorial Hospital after she gets him settled in. Soon after, a nurse applies a piping-hot electric heating pad to his stomach. A shift change occurs, and no one stops by to check on him or the device.

  By the morning, Willie has huge, blistering third-degree burns. He’s in so much pain, he can’t speak. He’s 102.

  When Nancy arrives the next morning and sees him writhing, “she really [lets] them have it,” says Jason, her nephew. (He’s responsible for the Warden nickname.)

  But she doesn’t blow her top, not yet. The one thing the Warden has taught her nephew: you never let someone see that they made you upset.

  “She took that anger, and she took her time, and then she took them to task. I would not have wanted to be them, not at all,” Jason says, shaking his head.

  The presence of the railroad has diminished significantly since the sharecroppers from Truevine migrated to booming Roanoke. When you marry, marry a railroad man / Every Sunday, dollar in your hand.

  In 1982, Norfolk and Western merges with the Southern Railway and switches names to Norfolk Southern, then shifts its headquarters to Norfolk. Roanoke’s corporate Big Daddy ups and leaves, just like that, sparking anxiety and hand-wringing among laid-off employees and economic developers alike. (Roanokers have to chuckle, though, when the marquee for new corporate offices in Norfolk is unveiled to contain a stunner of a spelling error: NORFORK SOUTHERN RAILWAY.)

  After a few years, a nonprofit hospital corporation with an invented, focus-grouped name comes barreling along in the railroad’s wake, and by 1995 Carilion is well on its way to becoming the largest employer in Roanoke, with plans of launching a medical school with nearby Virginia Tech and satellite hospitals across the western half of the state.

  It would be an intimidating move for anyone to sue Carilion, let alone a black woman operating a tiny soul-food restaurant out of a strip mall in one of the poorest sections of town.

  But the Warden is not intimidated. She’s about to give the biggest game in town a dose of sit-down-and-shut-up.

  Nancy summons her ancestors. She is Harriett under the sideshow tent. She is Dot Brown threatening her groping employer with a knife.

  She is Mabel Pullen back in Truevine, now taking the lunch that has just been tossed out the window at her and throwing it in the landlord’s face.

  She’s the pretty girl in Jordan’s Alley, telling the rent collector “No you don’t.”

  She gets behind the wheel of her Honda Civic hatchback, bought new in 1990 as a point of pride, and drives herself to the law firm of Richard Lawrence, one of the scrappiest and most formidable lawyers in town. (She still drives that car, by the way, also as a point of pride. When she can no longer take care of herself, she says, she plans to drive it to a nursing-home parking lot, beep the horn, and say, “Come and get me!”)

  By the time she and Mr. Lawrence are done with them, the corporate suits will pay for what the inattentive nurses have done to Willie Muse, to the tune of a settlement worth $250,000, which Nancy, acting as his legal guardian, administers. To stretch the money as far as possible, Big John Clarke offers her free banking and investment advice.

  And not only that, Carilion nurses who specialize in burns will personally come to the house on Mercer, to clean the wound and change the bandages. Twice a day, for going on two years.

  Early on in the process, hospital staffers had offered to train Nancy to tend the burn instead, but she declined. “I’m not the one that caused it,” she tells them.

  And: “If I had caused it, I would probably be in jail.”

  They are not there to calm Willie in the middle of the night, when the nightmares arrive, no matter how much he has prayed for them to go away.

  “I’m hot. Help me. It’s burning,” Willie calls from his room.

  It’s his relatives, not the nurses, who jostle him awake and chase the night terrors away.

  By his 106th birthday, Willie’s smooth Harry Belafonte voice has turned raspy. He can no longer walk, not even with the aid of the telephone cord. He spends most of the day in his room seated in his favorite chair, a La-Z-Boy recliner, looking forward to visits from Nancy and his nurses.

  “This man, even though he was blind, he just knew things,” nurse Diane Rhodes recalls. “He could tell in your voice after one sentence how you were feeling that day. He’d say, ‘So you’ve had a rough day at work today, Diane?’”

  If Diane has been impatient with a meddling coworker, Willie senses it. He counsels her not to speak her mind “until you’ve figured out the right way of saying it.”

  If she’s snapped back at a scolding colleague with a harsh tone, Willie knows. He tells her, “Feed ’em honey instead of vinegar. It’s good to keep the peace.”

  He has reason to be bitter, Diane knows from the stories he sometimes tells. During the earliest days of commercial aviation, people stared at him and Georgie on the airplanes. “Like we’re some kinda monsters.”

  He chooses not to dwell on past slights, even though his memory has recorded them all
. But, like the songs on his cassette player, he can play back the lessons from them anytime he wants.

  “Feed ’em honey, Diane,” he tells her.

  “Be better than the person who is mistreating you.”

  In March 2001, a month before his 108th birthday, Willie Muse wants to know, “Nancy, how old am I?”

  “A hundred and seven,” she tells him.

  “That’s old,” he says.

  They chuckle.

  His life has overlapped three centuries, from Grover Cleveland to George W. Bush. He was born the same year two musical sisters composed the most popular song in the world, “Happy Birthday to You.”

  “After my birthday I’m going to go live with God and with Georgie,” he tells his great-niece.

  The hospital settlement has allowed Nancy the cushion, with Big John’s advice, to hire near-constant caregivers.

  “My mother came for me and Georgie when we were young,” Willie tells a nurse named Margaret.

  “Did you ever marry, Willie?” she wants to know.

  “No, but I had a girlfriend.”

  “I bet you were cute.”

  “Yeah, I was a right handsome man.”

  Margaret, June, Marsha, and Diane—Willie has fed them all, his nurses, with honey. And they are his loudest cheerleaders now.

  “I don’t know how to explain it,” Margaret says. “It was just never monotonous with Willie. You looked forward to seeing him. Every day.”

  A month later, on April 5, the 108th birthday arrives. Nancy has gotten the rainbow-decorated cake, this time with a pot-of-gold flourish.

  The nightmares have faded. Willie’s sleep is deeper. He slumbers most of the time.

  When he wakes, he asks Nancy if she can see Georgie in the room.

  “No, Uncle Willie. I can’t see Uncle Georgie in the room.”

  “Well, he’s here,” Willie tells her, then drifts back to sleep.

  A week later, daffodils give way to tulips. Ferns shoot up and unfurl from the ground.