Though Pete Kortes followed the employment contract with more integrity than Candy Shelton ever had, Harriett’s move to draw Wilbur Austin into the process proved prescient and astute.
Especially when the checks home from Kortes began to bounce, as happened on September 9, 1943.
And again in 1952.
And again in 1954, when Austin had to commission the Missing Persons Bureau to locate the brothers first in Vancouver and later in Montreal.
Every time the checks bounced, Austin had to figure out where they were, then travel there to personally collect the back pay Kortes owed, sometimes as much as $1,500.
How did he manage it? How did he track Kortes down across several states and into Canada? Those questions nagged at me, given what I’d heard about his mousy demeanor from relatives and fellow bar members.
Then I met Sarah Woods Showalter, who grew up in Jordan’s Alley with a front-row seat to the backroom dealings of Wilbur Austin Jr.
Austin’s secret weapon was John Houp. I’d seen Houp’s name in court documents and Muse financial accountings. He was the man—and the muscle—who accompanied Austin on his money-shaking journeys. I imagine he was also the man who’d told Shelton, in no uncertain terms, what might happen to him if he showed up in his neighborhood again.
Houp, a black bail bondsman and well-known store owner throughout Roanoke’s West End, and his polio-stricken wife, Miss Irene, unofficially adopted three-year-old Sarah after her mother abandoned her. An unwed pregnant teenager, Sarah’s mother had walked and hitchhiked the fifty miles north from Martinsville to Roanoke in 1936 after her father kicked her out. Four years later, little Sarah wandered into Miss Irene’s store—a block away from the home of Annie Belle Muse Saunders.
“I went to stay one night, and I stayed till I got grown and left for college,” recalled Showalter, who, at seventy-nine, still works part-time as a nurse in a drug-rehab facility. “Miss Irene instilled in me that you can do anything you want to do.”
Young Sarah became Miss Irene’s legs, fetching items from shelves for customers and taking the money to her in the back room of the store, where they lived. Irene would count out the customers’ change, then Sarah delivered it to them at the checkout counter.
Miss Irene became Sarah’s savior and personal hero, and Houp spoiled her with all the RC Colas her heart desired. One year, her biological grandparents in Henry County, near Martinsville, insisted she spend the summer on their farm. She was made to work from dawn to dusk, “can see to can’t see.” Her grandfather was employed by Bassett Furniture Company, where for many decades blacks earned much less than whites. To make ends meet, the family raised chickens and pigs and grew their own vegetables. Her cousins terrified her by throwing dead snakes in her path. If she shrieked, they teased her for being a city slicker.
Houp visited her every Sunday. She would cry, then he would cry. “He wanted me to come back,” but her grandparents were enjoying the extra labor and insisted she stay.
Finally, Miss Irene paid a visit and demanded, “Give her back now, or I’m not going to ever let her come back.” The ploy worked, but not exactly because of family sentiment, as there was no way the family could afford another mouth to feed during the winter.
“Lawyer Austin,” as Sarah called him, was in and out of the Houps’ store and home constantly; she described him with equal parts respect and bemusement. He was disheveled, with wrinkled suits and poorly cinched neckties—which he fiddled with constantly. In terms of confidence, Houp had him beat by a mile.
The two men called each other by first names, which was highly unusual between the races in the 1940s. In his brand-new gray Packard, Houp drove Austin to appointments, but he was definitely more colleague than chauffeur. (Besides, Houp owned the car.)
“They were like brothers, Wilbur and John; they were crazy about each other,” Sarah recalled.
As store owners and extenders of credit, the Houps occupied a place of prestige in the Jordan’s Alley pecking order, on a par with the minister of Jerusalem Baptist Church. White insurance men and postmen working in the neighborhood also stopped by regularly and ate the lunches Miss Irene cooked from her wheelchair.
Sarah remembers delivering groceries by foot across the community, especially to Jordan’s Alley, which old-timers still refer to as Jerden’s Alley. She walked the red-dirt roadway next to Harriett’s old house, the one on Ten-and-a-Half Street, and around the corner to Annie Belle and Herbert Saunders’s house, on Jackson Avenue, which had a backyard that abutted the noisy rail yard.
“It looked like West Virginia back then,” she recalled, pointing out where the Muse rental homes once stood. “The houses were ramshackle and facing all kindsa different ways. It was the ghetto.”
When we drove around Jordan’s Alley together looking at it, I asked her to elaborate on what she meant by ghetto, and she said: “Ghetto is… you know, the kind of poverty that doesn’t ever quit.”
The next day, she phoned me back; the word ghetto had been niggling at her. She wanted me to know about a now-defunct company, Boswell Realty, which owned the slummiest homes in Jordan’s Alley for many decades. The company had hundreds of units, in fact, in the wider West End and other low-income neighborhoods. Boswell hired imposing rent collectors who often cruised the neighborhood proudly in their long black Buicks. A few manipulated and sometimes forced teenaged girls in the neighborhood to have sex with them. “You know, give them a dollar or two,” longtime resident Madaline Daniels said.
If Jordan’s Alley was the most impoverished section of town, the people living in Boswell housing were a micro-community representing the poorest of the poor. According to old city maps, Boswell crammed two to four dwellings on a single lot. Mention that company to anyone who grew up there during that time, and they all flinch, remembering the rent collectors in their Buicks and those Boswell Realty signs.
“We had a Boswell house where the toilet was on the alley,” recalled Lawrence Mitchell, a retired city landscaper in his mid-seventies. “We had sewage but not water to it. So you had to take a bucket of water and pour it in there to get it to flush. The city eventually made my mother put the toilet on the back porch.”
Mitchell said they referred to the ramshackle Boswell dwellings as a “half-a-house.” Until the late 1950s, he remembered, most people in Jordan’s Alley shared backyard water spigots with their neighbors.
J. W. Boswell had been an early Roanoke rental-property magnate, with strong ties to bank boards, city officials, and tax assessors. One of his earliest tenants recalled him collecting rent on horseback and, later, in a Reo automobile with a crank on the side. His son, John Boswell Jr., inherited the company and was a city councilman in the 1960s, when two of Roanoke’s black neighborhoods, Old Northeast and Gainsboro, were torn down. It was part of the nation’s postwar “urban renewal” efforts to clear out the so-called slums, often by the power of eminent domain.
It was happening in cities across the country. In New York, urban renewal director Robert Moses oversaw the evictions of a half-million residents, most of them poor and black, to make way for expressways, luxury apartments, parks, cultural centers, and the United Nations, among other developments. Moses’s FDR Drive shares some traits with a four-lane expressway that would cut through Roanoke; for the purpose of clearing land for such amenities as the Roanoke Civic Center, a postal headquarters, and a sprawling white-owned Ford dealership, the city used federal dollars to demolish (and burn; it was faster) some sixteen hundred black homes, two hundred businesses, and twenty-four churches. “People look at urban renewal, but it was Negro removal. That’s all it was,” a black civic leader remembered.
Officials forced the migration of thousands into the brand-new housing projects they were building on the outskirts of the old neighborhoods, as well as to the edge of Jordan’s Alley in Southwest, where they were aptly named Hurt Park. Other, smaller portions of Southwest were demolished—including Annie Belle’s church—so the city could erect a four-lane bridge across the railroad, replacing the two-lane trestle bridge that smelled of creosote.
But most of the Boswell properties survived urban renewal, as did many of the original shotgun homes in Jordan’s Alley. A few of them—including Madaline Daniels’s century-old house, weathered and worn but with huge boxwoods that border her cozy, glassed-in front porch—are still intact, still bearing witness the way old places do.
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.
It fell to Houp to handle the arrangements, and to collect the brothers from Kortes, this time so they could pay their respects to the woman who had done so much for them, and whose actions had both complicated and simplified their lives.
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.