Truevine

1

Sit Down and Shut Up

The story seemed so crazy, many didn't believe it at first, black or white.

But for a century, it was whispered and handed down in the segregated black communities of Roanoke, the regional city hub about thirty miles from Truevine. Worried parents would tell their children to stick together when they left home to see a circus, festival, or fair.

A retired African-American school principal recalls, at age twelve, begging his mother to let him pick up odd jobs when a traveling circus visited town.

"They were hiring people to set up, but my mom said no. She was really serious about it," he said.

The myth of the Muse kidnapping was so embedded in the local folklore that, long before he became a social science professor, Roanoke-born Reginald Shareef remembers thinking it was bunk when his mother said to him: "Be careful, or someone will snatch you up," just as the Muse brothers had been.

But eventually an adult took him aside and told him that a circus promoter really had forced the brothers to become world-famous sideshow freaks, subjugating them for many years. And not only that, they had found their way back.

They were here. Now. Retired and hidden away in an attic of one of the houses on a segregated Roanoke city block, one of them living into the early aughts.

While adults relayed the story as a cautionary tale, kids teased each other about it. Nobody seemed to know for sure whether the Muses really lived in an attic—and the handed-down stories had key points of divergence—but the truth didn't stand in the way of a good story: the brothers were the equivalent of Boo Radley. "The story had a mystery to it and a witchery in some people's minds," another retired educator told me. And some kids weren't sure whether it was the circus they should be afraid of—or the Muses.

In the 1960s, Shareef grew up in the same segregated neighborhood as the Muses; his grandmother lived two blocks away. He ran around with the great-nephews of the Muse brothers. "They were a nice family, but the men were always getting into something," he recalled. "It's a wonder the women in that family didn't go crazy."

In 1996, Shareef published a pictorial history of Roanoke's black community and included a long-hidden photograph of the Muse brothers he'd found in the dusty archives of Roanoke's Harrison Museum of African American Culture. The caption he wrote contained errors—they weren't twins, and they weren't exactly toddlers when they were kidnapped—but the gist was correct: "Albino twins [George and Willie Muse] were stolen at age three and featured as 'freaks' for many years in the Ringling Brothers Circus."

A Muse relative saw the photo in the book and called Shareef on the phone, asking, "Where'd you get that picture?"

The family didn't like to talk about what had happened to their uncles; they'd all been taunted about it as kids.

"Your uncles eat raw meat!" classmates shouted at them on the playground. Or worse, curiosity seekers, blacks and whites, would show up on their front porch at all hours of the day and night, demanding to see George and Willie. Another albino relative, a niece, described that double curse of differentness rearing back on her. For years, she had a hard time leaving her house to go to the store.

Not long after Shareef's book came out, the Muse brothers' great-niece Nancy Saunders went to the owner of that image, Frank Ewald, who ran Roanoke's premier photo-finishing shop and gallery. A photo collector, Ewald had purchased the negatives of celebrated Roanoke street photographer George Davis, who'd taken the 1927 portrait of the brothers featured in Shareef's book. Ewald was in the process of launching a Davis photo exhibit when Nancy visited the gallery and politely said: take George and Willie out.

"She wasn't combative or threatening," Ewald recalled. "She just asked us not to exhibit them."

He didn't dare.

The first time painter and folk-art collector Brian Sieveking heard the story, he was an eight-year-old budding artist fascinated by circus sideshows. He'd seen the Muses' picture at the Circus World Museum, in Baraboo, Wisconsin, the original home of the Ringling Brothers Circus, and began drawing them in his sketchbooks next to other acts that struck his fancy, including Johnny Eck, the Amazing Half-Boy, and Chang and Eng, the original Siamese twins. "I got curious about the Muse brothers because you could easily understand the fat lady and the tall guy, but what exactly did these guys do?" recalled Sieveking, who is white and now a forty-nine-year-old art professor.

The summer he was twelve, his family moved from Cincinnati to a high-end subdivision outside Roanoke and enrolled him in a private school. He was lonely and bored, and took solace in a stack of decommissioned books for sale in a back room of the downtown library. There he stumbled upon a book called You and Heredity, a quasi-scientific tome on genetics published in 1939. Proponents of the eugenics movement often used sideshows as propaganda about the dangers of miscegenation and of allowing the lower classes, especially those with genetic "flaws"—and most especially African Americans with such characteristics—to breed.

In a chapter titled "Structural Defects," Sieveking was stunned to find a photograph of an unnamed George and Willie Muse with a caption describing Roanoke as their hometown. His new town!

The hobby turned into obsession. A few summers later, he was working as a grocery-store checkout clerk when the subject of the brothers came up in the break room. His coworkers were among the very few black people the teenaged Sieveking knew in Roanoke, which was, then and now, among the most housing-segregated cities in the South. They told him the Muse family lived "over in Rugby," a black neighborhood, where Willie Muse was approaching one hundred and still very much alive.

Sieveking sent word that he'd like to interview Willie, as he had done, once, with Johnny Eck. He wanted to know more about the brothers' careers, and he'd become particularly interested in the 1944 Hartford circus fire, one of the most devastating in American history (it killed 168 people). He would go on to paint a beautiful, haunting portrait of the fire—with the Muse brothers front and center. But he didn't get that interview.

"I wanted to ask Willie Muse about the fire," Sieveking recalled. "But I was told in no uncertain terms not to mess with Nancy," his primary caregiver.

As a young journalist who'd arrived in Roanoke in 1989 to write feature stories for the Roanoke Times, I took two years to muster the nerve to mess with Nancy. A newspaper photographer had told me the bones of the kidnapping story, based on rumors he'd heard growing up in Roanoke. "It's the best story in town, but no one has been able to get it," he said.

By the time I poked my head into her tiny soul-food restaurant, with the idea of writing a story about her famous great-uncles, it was very clear that all personal details were going to be closely held, trickling out in dribs and drabs—and very much on Nancy Saunders's timeline. The first time I asked if I could interview Willie Muse, she pointed to a homemade sign on the Goody Shop wall. A customer had stenciled the words in black block letters on a white painted board and given it to her as a gift.

The sign said SIT DOWN AND SHUT UP.

Willie was not now—nor would he ever be—available for comment. So, hoping to generate some goodwill for a future story on her uncles, I wrote a feature about her restaurant, a place where the menu never changes and isn't even written down. You're just supposed to know.

Legions of black Roanokers could already recite the daily specials I would eventually commit to memory: Tuesday is spaghetti or lasagna, except every other Tuesday, which is pork chops. Wednesday is fish, and Thursday country-fried steak. Friday is ribs, but you'd better come early because the ribs always sell out quickly. The line out front starts forming at noon, though lunch doesn't officially begin until 12:15 and not a minute before—and later if Nancy has to run home to check on Uncle Willie and finds him in the midst of a bad day. (His favorite special? Spaghetti Tuesday.)

For most of December, the place is closed so the Saunders women—Nancy and her mother, Dot; cousin Louise; and aunt Martha—can work on the hundreds of yeast rolls, cakes, and pies they make by advance special order for Christmas.

Among the other unwritten rules in the Goody Shop code: "Don't criticize, especially the fruitcake," I wrote. "When a novice Goody Shopper grimaced at the very mention of the jellied fruitstuff, Saunders snapped, 'I beg your pardon! You're getting ready to step on the wrong foot!'" She pointed, again, to her sign.

She also kept a painted rock on top of her cash register, a gift from her preschooler nephew, whom she helped raise. She was not above picking it up—presumably in semi-jest—should a customer offend her.

When I returned for lunch, two days after my story ran—Rib Fridays were my favorite—Nancy shook her finger at me, and it was clear I was not getting anything close to a pat on the back. Dot sat nearby peeling potatoes, watching The Young and the Restless and cringing at what she knew her daughter was about to say.

Nancy had been ready to send me packing the first time I walked in the restaurant and blithely inquired about her uncles, but softhearted Dot persuaded her to let me stay and do the restaurant feature. A Y&R fan in my youth, I'd bonded quickly with Dot over the characters and was helping peel potatoes in her kitchen before the episode was over, much to Nancy's chagrin. (Victor Newman was a scoundrel, we agreed.)

"You know what your story did?" Nancy barked. "It brought out a bunch of crazy white people, that's all!"

Paying customers, I might have added, but she was in no mood for backtalk. She walked past me without further comment. She was leaving now to feed Willie and turn him in his bed, as she often did throughout the day, leaving the Goody Shop as many as five or six times a shift.

If Nancy Saunders had her way, her great-uncles' story would have stayed buried where she thought it belonged. The first time she heard it, she was just a child, and she found the whole tale embarrassing, and painfully raw. The year was 1961, and black and white people alike wanted to know: Were the light-skinned brothers black or white? Had they really been trapped in a cage and forced to eat raw meat?

These men deserved respect, Nancy knew. They did not deserve the gawkers who came by their house at all hours, banging on the front door.

By the time I came on the scene, no one talked about savages or circus freaks in front of Nancy, a sturdy woman with a no-frills Afro, graying at the temples, whose skin was nearly as white as the chef's coat she wore to work. She baked bread every bit as good as her great-grandmother Harriett's ash cakes—and she was every bit as fierce. Even Reg Shareef, who knew the family well, had never contemplated bringing the subject up with her.

"That is one exceptionally guarded family," he told me, advising baby steps. "You have to think of them as a tribe. They fall out with each other sometimes. But if you fall out with one of them, they will come roaring back at you like an army."

It was ten more years before Nancy warmed up enough to let me cowrite a newspaper series about her uncles, and only after Willie Muse's death, in 2001. She didn't reveal much, though. She invited my fellow reporter Jen McCaffery, photographer Josh Meltzer, and me inside the Muse brothers' house exactly once.

She made reference to a family Bible that we were not permitted to view, and for years after the series ran, whenever I visited the restaurant she hinted that there was so much more to the story than we had found.

Our newspaper was the same one that had mocked her family's version of the kidnapping story decades before. It had looked the other way when city officials decimated two historic black neighborhoods in the name of midcentury progress, via urban renewal, or, as the black community called it, Negro removal. The newspaper cheered when the city knocked down hundreds of community homes and buildings, including the Muse family's Holiness church. It refused to print wedding announcements for black brides until the mid-1970s because, the wealthy white publisher reasoned, Roanoke had no black middle class.

I myself had used a pair of pregnant black teens to illustrate a story about Roanoke's super-high teen-pregnancy rate in 1993, a story that went viral before that Internet term existed and made the girls the object of ridicule; even Rush Limbaugh joined in with a rant. When the girls dropped out of school shortly after my story ran, it was devastating, including to me.

Words linger and words matter, I learned, and it's not possible to predict the fallout they can have on a subject's life.

It would take me twenty-five years, finally, to earn something nearing Nancy's trust; to convince her I wasn't one more candy peddler intent on exploiting her relatives for the color of their skin—or purely for my own financial benefit. As the literary critic Leslie Fiedler has put it, "Nobody can write about Freaks without somehow exploiting them for his own ends."

George and Willie Muse had come into her care in the 1960s, a situation Nancy considered her privilege as well as her duty, and her loyalty to them extended to everything from coordinating their retirement activities and doctor visits—restoring the love, respect, and dignity that had been stolen from them as children—to holding their story close.

By 2008, she had begun, in her inimitably gruff (and usually funny and occasionally even sweet) way, to warm toward me. When I set out to write a ten-part series on caregiving for the elderly, Nancy was the first person I called for input.

"You gotta keep it real," she said, sharing names and numbers of people who would eventually become primary sources for that project. She periodically counseled me about other career and family stresses, advising me, "You can handle this. Listen, girl, if you can get back into Dot's kitchen, you can do anything."

When I hit a snag updating the story of the pregnant teens more than twenty years after my explosive first story, it seemed fate that Shannon Huff, now a thirty-seven-year-old mother of four, lived just around the corner from Nancy's northwest Roanoke ranch house. After some angry relatives tried to bully me into not running the story—physically threatening me and demanding a meeting with my newspaper bosses—Nancy reassured me, "You don't need their permission to do the story, just like you don't really need mine to write your book. Not really, you don't."

And yet, months earlier, Nancy's permission is exactly what I sought. On the eve of publishing my first book, about a third-generation factory owner who had battled Chinese imports to save his company, I had given her an advance reading copy of Factory Man, dog-earing a chapter on race relations I'd found particularly hard to write. It detailed decades of mistreatment of black furniture-factory workers, miscegenation, and the sexual harassment of black domestic workers, who often resorted to wearing two girdles at the same time as a defense against their bosses' groping hands and outright rape.

"It's been that way down through history," Nancy said. "A friend of my mom's, she'd be vacuuming down the steps [on a housekeeping job], and the husband would be feeling her up from behind. My mom had to fill in for her one day. And so she told the man first thing, 'Don't make me open up your chest!'"

By which Dot Brown meant: with the tip of my knife.

Nancy and I had come a long way from the days of sit-down-and-shut-up.

Still, it was by no means a gimme when I called her in November 2013, asking for her blessing to pursue her uncles' story as a book. She was in her midsixties and recently retired, after closing the Goody Shop. I wanted her help delving into the family story as well as connecting with distant Muse relatives, including one albino Muse still living in Truevine.

"I'll think about it," Nancy said, and the message was clear: I was not to call back. She would call me.

More than six weeks later—oh, she enjoyed making me wait—she finally called. "I waited so I could give it to you as a present," she said.