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 vanilla, 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.
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 frequented 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.
Just before midnight, Willie’s labored breathing turns into intermittent gasps.
Birthday balloons still hover above his four-poster bed. The snow globes are next to the stuffed animals, the picture of Harriett on the wall. Nancy punches the button on his cassette player, and out comes the voice of Andy Griffith singing “Just As I Am.”
A hospice worker urges her to give her uncle permission to leave. Tell him it’s OK to go.
Shortly after midnight Nancy crawls into bed beside him, curls up by his side.
“God has left you here on earth for a hundred and eight years,” she whispers. “So I know y’all must have a special connection.
“Uncle Willie, will you please tell God, ‘We’re still struggling.’”
At 1:40 in the morning, eight days after his 108th birthday, Willie Muse dies exactly the way he wants to.
It’s Good Friday, 2001. God is good to me.
The Monday after Easter is bright but blustery. At the funeral home, a family friend sings:
He knows what’s best for me
Although my weary eyes, they can’t see.
So I’ll just say thank you, Lord.
I won’t complain.
Mourners process to the segregated cemetery, and clouds descend as they enter the gate. The morning had been bright, the temperature in the mid-40s, but suddenly a wind gusts in and the mercury abruptly drops.
As a line of cars wends its way into C. C. Williams Memorial Park, snow flurries begin to descend. It’s so confusing at first that people mistake the flakes for blossoms blowing off the spring trees.
The preacher reads as the casket is lowered, and all heads are bowed.
When the last amen is uttered, the wind dies down and, abruptly, so does the snow, the flakes melting at everyone’s feet. The sun comes out again, bright.
More than a decade later, mourners are still talking about the burial of Willie Muse, and not just because of the wind or the snow but mainly because of what happened next.
“It had been so warm that morning and then so cold,” says Diane Rhodes, the nurse.
“And then, just like that, a rainbow appeared, and everyone just stood there stunned. And we were all of one accord:
“Heaven was opening the gates. To welcome Uncle Willie home.”
But Nancy hasn’t spotted the rainbow, not yet. She’s busy pulling out large bags from the back of a cousin’s van. Then she’s untying the bags.
Then one hundred and eight balloons float into the air, and all eyes are on them, squinting.
It’s an Uncle Willie trifecta, a performance spectacle featuring his three favorite things: balloons, snow, and a rainbow—God’s promise after the storm.
As the balloons ascend, they split into two distinct clusters. The groupings seem to hover for a moment, as if taking one last look. Then they rise higher and smaller and, finally, drift out of sight.
Half the balloons are white, for purity. And half are blue, for the color of his eyes.