The idea, when it first came to her, was so bold it was practically suicidal. She could have been arrested. She could have been killed.
Harriett Muse could not have read the advance press Dexter Fellows had spoon-fed and finagled Roanoke Times reporters into writing in October 1927. THE WORLD’S LARGEST CIRCUS IS HERE, the newspaper trumpeted in a preview story about the upcoming spectacle of four locomotives, one hundred railcars, sixteen hundred people, five rings, six stages, and the circus’s most famous star of the moment, a special-guest albino elephant from Burma.
It was the first time the combined RB&BB shows had ever played Roanoke, and Ringling’s advance team had been busy placing newspaper ads in the weeks leading up to the performance. The billing crew plastered handbills for the two shows all over the city ahead of time, and the adjusters secured the usual permits. The Big One had just recently grown from a four-ring to a five-ring affair.
At the Roanoke Fairgrounds, there was no WHITES ONLY sign posted. But this was the same venue where the KKK rallied, and blacks across the South already knew they could not just wander the show grounds at will. In Louisiana, for instance, officials had gone to the trouble of mandating racially separate ticket booths and entrances and exits, down to the declaration that black and white accommodations had to be twenty-five feet apart.
While carnivals performing weeklong stays typically set aside a midweek day as Colored Day or Black Achievement Day, circuses that played just one day afforded no such access. Blacks arriving at a one-day event such as the 1927 Roanoke show would have had to view the big-top performance from a restricted area in the back of the tent—the back-end blues, as show people called it.
By the fall of 1927, the Ringling caravan was finishing up its late-season swing through the southern states, having already looped through Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee. Taylor Gordon, John Ringling’s longtime chauffeur, had described what it was like for black circus workers from the North to journey through the land of Jim Crow: the shock of seeing signs out his Pullman car window that read NIGGERS AND DOGS NOT ALLOWED and of learning to introduce himself to white southerners as “Mr. Ringling’s niggah” to stave off criticism and attacks.
Gordon was wisely defensive. In 1920, a lynch mob had gathered outside a circus tent in Duluth, Minnesota, declaring that three black workers for the John Robinson Circus had raped a white girl. Though the young woman’s doctors found no physical evidence of the rape, the mob hanged the men anyway in one of the most notorious events in American circus history.
And yet consider: even those heinous events had not been held in locales where the city’s chief prosecutor was the founder of the largest Klan organization in the state.
Indeed, the biggest threat of danger on this day was not to any circus employee. And it had nothing to do with the usual unpredictability of Circus Day, that rare moment when country and city life converged; when preachers got to see the wonders of God’s animal creations but also rubbed elbows with some of the drunkest, meanest people in town; when middle-class farmers and townsfolk were put within eyeshot of “educational” but naughty “hoochie coochie” strip shows—aka the cooch show.
No, the gravest danger that day was to Harriett Muse, who’d made her way from her clapboard shack on Ten-and-a-Half Street through the downtown and to the fairgrounds in suburban south Roanoke late that afternoon, probably by streetcar.
For decades, Roanokers would speculate about how she learned her long-lost sons were playing that day in that circus. Maybe a neighbor had seen them performing earlier in the day and sent word. Maybe one of the families Harriett did laundry for casually mentioned noticing one of the posters plastered all over town. Maybe one of her other children, now grown, heard it through the Jordan’s Alley grapevine.
Her granddaughter Dorothy (Nancy’s mother, Dot) had been born to Annie Belle and Herbert Saunders on October 4, just ten days before. That little girl would grow up hearing a lot about Harriett’s brave actions that day. Discussed at every family reunion and every Sunday potluck, the story would become the Muses’ single most vivid piece of lore, passed down like tales of a grandfather’s war heroics, or a cousin’s brief brush with notoriety, or the meeting of the immigrant great-grandparents when the man saves the pretty lady from stepping on a snake.
After all those years of searching and worrying, Harriett woke up the morning of October 14 with an absolute certainty of where she should go.
Her husband would be of no help to her; that was nothing new. The last thing he thought they needed now was more mouths to feed.
Harriett was entirely alone.
But she was convinced. And she was unflinching.
“It came to her as she was sleeping,” Dot told me in a 2001 interview.
“She saw it all in a dream: ‘Go to the circus.’”
The New York Yankees had just won the World Series, slaughtering Pittsburgh in four straight games. Babe Ruth had just come off his record-setting season of sixty homers, and Lou Gehrig had led the charge. Aviator Charles Lindbergh was touring the nation in the Spirit of St. Louis, the single-seat monoplane he’d flown from New York to Paris a few months before. The first nonstop transatlantic flight, his feat was another in a long string of firsts for Americans in the 1920s. From modernized plumbing and electricity to movie theaters, cosmetics, bobbed haircuts, and radio—so much about the Roaring Twenties was brand-new. “You Need Never Change Your Oil If You Own a Buick,” boasted an ad for the Watson Motor Company, a Roanoke dealership that offered coupes for $1,195.
The city had just celebrated the opening of its first bowling alley to welcome women bowlers—as long as they were white. The local police court was full of the usual drunk-in-public arrests and Prohibition still busts. In the past fourteen months alone, two policemen and two Prohibition agents had been shot and killed during liquor raids.
Ben-Hur, “the mightiest of all epic spectacular romances,” was playing at the Jefferson Theatre downtown for fifty cents. Street photographer and Roanoke studio owner George Davis had been busy documenting the installation of new underground water lines and taking other snapshots of life in the growing city, stopping only to shoot breaking news for the newspaper—such as when a downtown furniture store caught fire, or the local Klan gathered.
A thin man with penetrating eyes, Davis had long had his antennae dialed in to local happenings. When news broke, he sped off toward it after hoisting his massive, 111-pound Eastman camera, with eight-by-ten-inch glass-plate negatives, in the rumble seat of a friend’s borrowed car. He preferred photographing places to photographing people, though he wasn’t opposed to marrying the two when something visually interesting occurred.
Among the images that particularly fascinated him were portraits of African Americans he’d either collected or shot himself: a domestic worker sitting atop her back-porch stoop, eyes sorrowful and hands wrinkled and worn; four men hanging lifeless by their necks from a tree somewhere in southwest Virginia, a group of white men sneering at them below—in the middle of the day.
Though I found no photos of the 1926 Klan parade, Davis did use large-format film to document the 1931 statewide KKK convention in Roanoke in similarly exquisite detail. CHARTER NO. 6 WOMEN OF KKK, ROANOKE, VA. read banners held by rows of young white women, clad in cheerful white uniform-style dresses, with white stockings and black Mary Janes. The one deemed prettiest got to stand at the front of the picture.
SECURITY GUARDS ON HAND—BRING YOUR PASTOR AND THE ENTIRE FAMILY one poster for the event read, and another said ABSOLUTELY NO PROFANE LANGUAGE OR DRINKING BY ANYONE ON OR OFF STAGE.
The KKK queen, with her pious half-smile, sports a black satin sash with a single word splashed across the front of her white tea-length dress: JUSTICE. Confidence-exuding smiles are on every face. “More than likely those are daughters of some of the most prominent families in Roanoke,” Buster Carico had described it, remembering the Klan events.
Their body language conveys triumph and a wholesome righteousness that is hard to fathom some eighty years removed. But here it is, another glimpse of stop-time morality, preserved in crisp black-and-white.
When the circus came to town that bright fall day, George Davis had no idea that his 111-pound camera would soon turn its lens on Harriett Muse.
Roanokers had already been treated to the Dexter Fellows full-court press. The October 14 show would spotlight Ringling’s “biggest, newest, and most amazing features of all time gathered from every country in the world,” the newspaper boasted. Aside from Pawah, the Burmese elephant, the headliners were the soon-to-marry aerialist couple Lillian Leitzel and Alfredo Codona, dangling from wires, rings, and swinging trapezes. The sideshow wasn’t mentioned in the ads, as was custom, but an advance story in the Roanoke Times did herald the collection of “all strange oddities combined in one sideshow, continuous from morning till night.”
Among the lot lice, buzz had been building all week for the Friday shows. The paper advised readers to borrow alarm clocks so they could join the throngs at dawn, when the trains would steam into the rail yard. The night before, rousties had folded the tents up in Bristol, Tennessee. After Roanoke, the performers had just one more week of stops in Virginia and North Carolina; then the troupe would call it quits for the season, having traversed 13,618 miles of train track that year.
Thirteen years. That’s how long it had been since Harriett had last laid eyes on her sons. As far as she knew, they were still being billed as the “missing link” between man and monkey, with references to African jungles and simian features in their names and banner drawings. Things had changed a lot, though, since George and Willie left home in 1914 and especially since they joined Ringling in 1922.
Their hair, for one thing. Their show names, for another. Not to mention their hometowns, home states, home countries—and even their planets.
A page-one publicity stunt trumped up by Fellows in 1925 had made them the stars of a hairdressers’ convention. Seated in the front row of a Hotel Astor ballroom in New York, they were no longer from Ethiopia or Ecuador. This time, the story went, they were found floating off Madagascar by John Ringling himself!
They’d gone incognito to the hairdressers’ convention, their dreadlocks tucked into roomy, newsboy-style caps. “As the convention president rapped his gavel to start the day’s proceedings, Eko and Iko removed their hats and allowed their monstrous hair to be photographed against a background of groomed stylists,” Ringling stage manager Fred Bradna recalled.
One hairdresser complained about the circus interrupting his convention with a practical joke, but he was soon placated when Fellows later pointed out that some fifty newspapers not only printed pictures from the event, they also named the hairstylists’ association.
The brothers fit announcer Lew Graham’s qualifications for a successful freak act to a tee: They were unique. They were good musicians. And, dressed in finery with red sashes and tuxedos—the outfit topped off by that explosive, anachronistic hair—they were far more interesting than they were grotesque.
It’s hard to imagine people today being shocked by the sight of dreads, so common today on Bob Marley T-shirts, hipster bohemians, and even the occasional middle-aged white lady.
But during a time when it was rebellious for women, black or white, to bob their hair, few people had adopted, or even witnessed, a hairstyle born in ancient Egypt and popular among pre-Columbian Aztec priests, Islamic Sufis, and Masai warriors.
In later years, Whoopi Goldberg would have no problem finding a New York salon to care for her do, but Clyde Ingalls and Candy Shelton surely had to scramble to find a dreads-savvy hairdresser. (While I spotted pictures of “colored barbershop” tents in the Ringling archives at the Circus World Museum, I found no record of anyone styling the Muse brothers’ hair.) It’s possible they picked up some tips from Clicko, whose manager soaked his much-shorter dreadlocks in flat stout ale.
The strangeness of the brothers’ skin color was now surpassed by the strangeness of their hair. And Shelton took full advantage. During a stop in Cleveland around that period, a Plain Dealer writer described them wearing “an enormous cap filled with the long wooly hair which makes them different from the rest of us, hence objects of curiosity.”
A writer in Fairfield, Iowa, added: “The boys are as vain of it as a woman of her hair, and shampoo it every second day.”
And: “They let you pull it to see that it won’t come off.”
Patrons could have their picture made with the brothers, but it would set them back the equivalent of almost thirty dollars in today’s currency—payable to Shelton, of course.
Over the previous thirteen years, the press coverage of the brothers from Truevine featured a multitude of origin stories, but the planetary story was perhaps more fantastic than them all:
In 1923, they’d been spotted climbing out of a hole near the remains of their spaceship, wrecked in the Mojave Desert.
They were the first interplanetary freaks, now hailed as Eko and Iko, Ambassadors from Mars.
“Actually they were amiable lads, particularly Eko [usually George], who loved all animals, wanted to become an equestrian [like Bradna], and when he was not performing could be found behind a menagerie wagon gazing fondly at the lead stock,” Bradna wrote.
The New Yorker magazine agreed, noting in a “Talk of the Town” column that George seemed to be “a shade brighter” than Willie, who looked to his brother for “conversational guidance”: “If you said ‘Hello,’ the bright one would reply: ‘How do,’ and the other would immediately pipe up, ‘How do.’ If George said he was feeling fine, Willie would thereupon furnish the same report.”
The writer claimed that scientists had pronounced them both “subnormal.” But he also asserted that the brothers “shed their hair from time to time, as a chicken moults.”
Could they carry on an intelligent conversation? One elderly Roanoker who met them as a child remembered that Willie had the habit of parroting whatever his older brother said.
When I asked Nancy that same question, she bristled. “Don’t make my uncle Willie out like he was some kinda damn fool!”
As young men around the age of thirty in 1927, the brothers could have been hampered in terms of sentence construction—because they’d been denied education and cloistered in the sideshow, a distant relative explained. More likely, they were just playing a role.
It’s clear the capacity for learning was there, as the brothers were later described as more vocal and more articulate. In late life, doctors said they conversed easily and possessed a quick wit.
Attorneys who interviewed an elderly Willie Muse told me he was “in no way incapacitated mentally or in any way incompetent in his thinking.” One of the lawyers, John Molumphy, had happened to interview Willie in mid-December, “and I remember thinking, ‘He’s got a better handle on his Christmas shopping list than I do at this point.’”
As their humanity began to be recognized, in the circus back lot as well as in the press, their personalities began, slowly, to emerge.
For now, though, as far as their media representation, they were cartoon characters, and always the butt of the joke.
Fellows was so adept at corralling the media, feeding the New York Times such headlines as EKO AND IKO PLAY VIOLA AND GUITAR AND THE ANIMALS JUST CURL UP, that another New Yorker writer predicted it would be impossible, looking back, to know the truth of what really went on under the sideshow tent and in the circus backyard, the behind-the-scenes zone that was a walled-off city unto itself: “Mr. Fellows’s stories are taken for granted and treated by the rewrite men with almost unfailing good humor, but what are historians a hundred years hence going to think of us when, along about the end of March in each year’s carefully preserved files, these startling sidelights on metropolitan life in the early thirties begin to show up? We hope that Mr. Fellows is still alive at that time to explain proudly.”
Amid all the trumped-up press accounts, all the racist faux dialect, and all the “comma, coloreds” that made up the media coverage of the Muse family saga, that observation is one of the very few thoughtful, and accurate, statements I’ve encountered.
Though Harriett had no idea where her boys were, most people in New York paying any attention to the comings and goings of the circus would have. Eko and Iko were often among the top tier of sideshow headline grabbers, especially during Ringling’s annual four-to-six-week indoor opening-season engagement at Madison Square Garden, in which John Ringling was a major shareholder. As eighty-four-year-old Zip lay near death at Bellevue Hospital in the spring of 1926, reporters poured on the love, hyping the various ways in which his fellow freaks were grieving: Clicko allegedly stopped doing somersaults, for instance, and the Texas giant was mooning in a corner. “Even the Ambassadors from Mars, who don’t say much as a rule but look at the monkeys and at Big Bill the rhinoceros, are standing in front of his seat in the basement of the new Madison Square Garden, scratching their yellow matted heads and mumbling in low tones.”
One thing the elbow nudging between Fellows and the press undoubtedly demonstrated was just how famous the brothers from Truevine had become. Their strange, singsongy names had entered the mainstream vernacular everywhere Ringling played—especially New York. As early as 1922, the REO Speed Wagon that ferried Ringling sideshow performers between their dressing rooms and performance tents was a jalopy that resembled an old milk truck, with six letters painted on the side: EKO & IKO.
Perhaps the best indicator of their fame came in an unrelated New York Times book review of a new work by Gertrude Stein. The reviewer hated the book in particular, hated Stein’s repetitive modernist style in general, and, in a harsh bit of trash talking, likened Stein fans to “people who have paid good money, gold or boloney, to be amused by the gift of tongues, whether exemplified by Miss Stein talking nonsense, Eko and Iko muttering gibberish, or Habu, the man with the iron tongue, lifting three-hundred-pound weights from the sideshow floor.”
They were objects of ridicule, yes. But they were also bona fide characters, as exaggerated and outsized as the banners fastened to their sideshow tent. With their silk sashes and faux-official medals, the Ambassadors from Mars had been gawked at by millions of people from Hawaii to the Hudson Valley of New York.
But not by their mother.
Not yet.
Seeing how they were held up as amiable lads in one account and ridiculed as slow-witted mutterers in the next, I wondered how much control Candy Shelton still exerted over their public image and in their daily life in 1927. Divorced by 1926, he’d spent that Christmas with the brothers, according to an eerie photograph recently found by the curator of the Tibbals collection at the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota. (The picture was attached to belongings associated with Candy’s first wife, Cora, also known as Frankie. She’s the one who mockingly dressed up as a Muse brother for the 1924 Halloween costume party.)
Wearing long one-piece bathing suits and standing thigh deep in a Florida lake, the Muse brothers lean on each other for support. They appear to be in a water amusement park—one that’s strangely barren but for them and the two men flanking them, as if they’d all jumped the fence and snuck into the empty park for Christmas. One of the men sits on the high end of a teeter-totter while the other—the pudgy Candy—holds the seesaw firmly in place with his foot underwater.
“Eko and Iko on Xmas day, taking their annual bath,” someone, presumably Frankie, scribbled on the back of the picture.
It was the thirteenth Christmas in which Harriett had not seen, or heard from, her sons.
The following spring, in its coverage of Ringling’s 1927 opening day, the New York Times made note of a new performer in the sideshow, a bearded lady hired after her predecessor’s beard had deliberately been singed by the fire-eater. Or so the story went.
The sabotage was sheer luck for Madame Adrienne, the new bearded lady, and a sign, the reporter wrote (apropos of nothing at all), that “Eko and Iko knew their home planet was in the ascendency.”
The past year, in fact, had brought with it a lot of change to the circus, including three deaths that would portend the end of an era for the Ringling sideshow: Zip, the dean of freaks; Krao Farini, a Laotian-born bearded lady who was also much beloved (she’d asked to be cremated so no spectators could view her body after her death); and the December 1926 demise of Charles Ringling, the best-loved brother and known as Mr. Charlie by all, including the rousties. It was Charles who’d managed daily circus affairs while John began chasing riches in Oklahoma oil fields and Florida real estate.
But George and Willie were about to see how, when your home planet’s in ascendency, as the astrological theory goes, you have greater power and influence over others.
The line was a throwaway gag for the reporter—and no doubt dictated by the Minister Plenipotentiary himself. But the joke would backfire on the Greatest Show on Earth.
George and Willie can’t read the WELCOME TO ROANOKE sign as their train car rolls through the mountains east from Bristol, past the crimson fall foliage and into the booming city, where civic leaders had fretted that Roanoke wasn’t big enough yet to host a spectacle of Ringling’s size. They probably recognize the topography of their childhood, though, as the sun rises and the train chugs through the red-clay hills where the Alleghenies meet the Blue Ridge. Past Poor Mountain, past Twelve O’Clock Knob, then past Fort Lewis until, finally, the train cars come to a creaky halt in Roanoke, where Mill Mountain stands sentinel over the town.
The four-engine, five-ring behemoth arrives in Roanoke at 9:00 a.m. The tents and banners are hoisted, the animals disembark. Walking into the fairgrounds late that morning, George and Willie are as surprised as anybody to run into a familiar face.
It’s Leslie Craft Crawford, their neighbor from New Castle. They haven’t seen her since childhood, not since they played together in Craigs Creek. But they recognize her immediately, exclaiming “Miss Leslie!” together and waving their arms.
Surely it occurs to them how close they are to home: if Miss Leslie’s here, then maybe their mother is also nearby—if she’s alive.
The brothers take their place on the sideshow stage, and when it’s time to introduce themselves and play the mandolin and guitar, they squint hard, their eyes scanning the standing, milling crowd. (As is typical with Ringling and other large circuses, there are no chairs inside the sideshow tent, making it the rare place in the circus where segregation codes often break down.)
Their vision has dimmed considerably in recent years, but if they squint just right, they can make out the faces near the front.
They sing their favorite song as they strum:
It’s a long way to Tipperary,
It’s a long way to go.
Outside the tent, Harriett probably spies her sons’ banner picture first, though it’s doubtful she recognizes them from it. Their cartoon likeness is displayed near Clyde Ingalls’s platform. The banner takes up prominent real estate, just to the right of the sideshow entrance—with a giant sign announcing continuous performances and topped by waving American flags.
ARE THEY AMBASSADORS FROM MARS? it says at the top, just to the left of the banner for Jolly Irene (real name: Amanda Siebert), who at 620 pounds likely suffers from an untreated thyroid disorder.
Harriett Muse is not your typical mark, or rube. She finds her place near the back of the crowd as the inside lecturer wanders from one performer to the next, giving his spiel.
As the crowd follows him, she nudges her way toward the front.
George and Willie are halfway through “Tipperary” when their mother’s face comes hazily into focus.
There are worry lines on her forehead, a deep crease between her brown piercing eyes.
She’s wearing a hand-sewn black dress, its collar cinched by a safety pin, a belt circled loosely around her waist. Her dress is so long that it almost touches the tops of her creased, laceless shoes.
Georgie spots her first and stops playing the moment he does. He elbows his brother, in a scene the family would recount often, with pride, over the years.
They tell the story so often that each member recites it consistently and verbatim, down to the stilted, old-fashioned vernacular the brothers often used.
“There’s our dear old mother,” Georgie says. “Look, Willie, she is not dead.”
The crowd is puzzled when the brothers drop their personas, along with their instruments, and rush from the stage.
They greet their mother, folding themselves into her tall, sturdy frame.
Ingalls is so flabbergasted that he can only resort to his fallback cry for his bandleader, P. G. Lowery, “Bally, P.G.!”
He who hustleth while he waiteth, Lowery is no doubt thinking as he stifles a grin, then strikes up his band.
But all the Dixieland jazz on the planet will not cloud this astonishing reunion, this almost-surreal instant in time.
The memory of this moment will outlive everyone inside the tent. It will surface and resurface. It will be repeated so often and for so long that one day people will just assume it’s a myth.
Their mama went down there and got them…
It had come to her, you see, in a dream…
Don’t wander off from me at the fair, now, or you’ll be kidnapped, too.
Before the Dixieland is over, Candy Shelton appears. Who is this woman, and why is she disrupting my show?
Harriett stands firm, clutching her sons. It’s dawning on her that he’s the man in charge, the man responsible for the trafficking of her sons.
For the thirteen years of family holidays, birthdays, and weddings that have passed without word of their health or whereabouts.
She will not leave the fairgrounds, she insists, unless George and Willie accompany her home.
But they are Shelton’s children, he has the nerve to insist. They are his property. He even has documents, somewhere, paperwork proving that they have the same last name!
A scrum of Ringling executives arrives to try to shore up Shelton’s claim, men in dark suits and fedoras—the people George and Willie call City Hall.
The police are on their way, too.
The Ringlings are powerful people, they remind the maid. They’re multimillionaires who have the ear of presidents, their own railway lines, and mansions in several states.
Still, standing amid the sawdust in her dusty oxfords, Harriett refuses to budge.
In an act of extraordinary defiance, a stance that could have easily landed her in jail, she does not move when eight Roanoke police officers converge on the lingering, growing crowd, everybody eagerly listening and watching for her next move.
“They are my children!” she says.
And, pointing out the obvious: “Can’t no white man birth two colored children.”
So what happened?
According to newspaper accounts, Harriett tells the officers that years ago, she had contracted for George and Willie to travel with a carnival operator named Stokes, who was passing through the area. Conflicting news articles have her meeting the original carnival operators in Roanoke, Covington, and Clifton Forge. (One account even placed the transaction in an unnamed Tennessee city.)
But after a few months had passed, someone who she now believes is Shelton—this man—lured them away from Stokes, then refused, for thirteen years, to bring them back.
During their entire absence, George and Willie have told their mother, Shelton lied and told them she was dead.
Harriett had called on social service organizations to help her find them, she explains to police, and she’d been searching for them in crowds ever since. She even took out a notice in Billboard.
With nightfall approaching, the day’s performances over, the candy butchers, troupers, and rousties begin folding up the show, preparing to depart for Lynchburg, the next stop.
But the drama is still unfolding. Shelton and the executives insist the Muse brothers join them as they prepare to take the gilly back to the train station.
Reluctantly, George and Willie say they’ll get back on the train. “But only for a moment,” the paper explains, awkwardly attempting to convey Harriett’s dialect without directly attributing it:
“For anxious and beseeching words from the lips of their ‘old mammy who yo all aint seen for all dese years’ turned their thoughts.
“No, they would not go.”
It wasn’t a likely outcome, but by the end of the verbal tug-of-war, the police tell Shelton the Muses are free to leave with their mother if that is their wish. It was a shocking turn of fortune, given the widespread record of police abuse and unfair treatment of blacks by the courts in 1927. (That year, blacks were incarcerated at a rate three times higher than whites; by 2010, the rate differential had doubled. According to recent Bureau of Justice Statistics, one in three black men can expect to be incarcerated in their lifetime.)
But Harriett relayed her side of the story firmly and convincingly to police. “Off they went with their mother while beneath the big top disturbed showmen tore their hair and appealed to the law,” a reporter recounts.
“The law was helpless. Eko and Iko are certainly privileged to go where they choose, the law averred.” The brouhaha is presumably not big enough to draw Prosecutor Kent Spiller’s attention, for at no point is he recorded as weighing in on the legal back-and-forth.
And so the Big One pulls away from Roanoke without its Martian ambassadors.
And so George and Willie, finally, are home.
Across town that night, George Davis prepares to lug out his monster camera. He imagines he just might nail the photograph of his career.
On Ten-and-a-Half Street, the Muse family reassembles, finally, in Harriett’s humble abode. Word has spread throughout Jordan’s Alley about her bold move, and the neighbors converge to greet the long-lost relatives—to see the showstopping spectacles for themselves.
The brothers oblige, pulling out their instruments and playing a few songs on the front porch.
“They had been gone since childhood,” ninety-eight-year-old A. L. Holland recalled of the reunion. For years, he remembers, people talked about that magical, mysterious night. “It was like the prodigal sons coming home.”
It’s well past dark by the time the tired maid from Truevine rests her head for the night, with nary a rainbow in sight.
But Harriett pauses to thank God, finally, for delivering her sons from the storm.
The quarters are cramped in Jordan’s Alley, the shotgun shacks crammed three and four to a lot—so close you can hear neighbors sneezing and shouting and doing all manner of Lord-knows-what. For the first time in recent memory, the brothers prepare to rest their heads not on a creaking train-car bed but on solid earth. The trains in the rail yard couple, and people couple, and soon the surprising cacophony of everyday life in Jordan’s Alley gives way to the smell of something even more surprising—and delicious—coming from the oven. Ash cakes.
After all those years, they can’t quite believe they’re in a house with their dear mother, who after so many years is baking her humble bread.