The trains still pass by Jordan’s Alley, their cars still brimming with coal, though the fuel in many of them is now destined for markets overseas.
The ones that head south roll past the site of the old fairgrounds, the spot where an illiterate washerwoman, the daughter of slaves, managed to find and claim her long-gone sons, even though she was the wrong color, in the wrong neighborhood, on the wrong side of the law.
Harriett Muse’s bravery remains unmarked in Jordan’s Alley, and it goes unrecognized here, just south of downtown, where the trains now parallel a thirteen-mile greenway path meant to connect the various Roanoke Valley communities, provide outdoor recreation, and, in so doing, attract new industry to the region to replace the waning influence of the railroad and of coal.
Riding my bike on the Roanoke River Greenway path, I parallel the passing trains, too. I pass dog walkers and runners, young and old, black and white. It’s one of the rare places in Roanoke where the racial makeup actually reflects the diversity of the city’s census count, down to the immigrant soccer league playing Sunday mornings across the street.
My friend Zeor, a refugee from Liberia, comes to watch her sons play on those fields. “We were never called ‘black people’ before—until we moved here,” she tells me, tapping into Americans’ innate and unconscious belief in the reality of race as unequivocal divider. Our history of categorizing human beings as immutably black or white before we even know their names.
It’s one year after Ferguson, fifty years after the Watts riots, 150 years since the end of the Civil War. In the past year, thirty-two states have enforced new voter identification requirements that disproportionately disenfranchise poor and minority voters, and twenty-six unarmed black men have been fatally shot by police across the United States of America. Even Atticus Finch, it turns out, wasn’t the progressive lawyer we thought he was.
On the greenway, near the old fairgrounds and the new medical school, I ride over a freshly scrawled graffiti bomb on the asphalt. SLAVERY IS OVER! someone has spray-painted.
I think of Nancy’s young cousin, the auburn-blond Erika Turner, when I see it. She has cried, imagining the travails of her great-great-great-uncle Willie and his brother George. When she cries, Erika tells me, her hazel eyes turn green. A rising senior at a Roanoke County high school, she’s one of a handful of African Americans, occasionally the only one, in her advanced classes. When riots broke out in Baltimore her junior year, her classmates criticized the protesters and looters, asking, “What’s the sense in them burning businesses? What does that prove?”
The course was advanced placement psychology, and Erika, one of three blacks in that class, pointed out that the riots were not happening in a vacuum. They were precipitated not only by police killings, but also by a government-sanctioned history of violence, discrimination, and injustice as old as the country itself.
But this is a conversation that most white people, if suburban classrooms and greenway graffiti are to be believed, do not wish to have. More than half of white Americans think the country spends too much time talking about race, while just 18 percent of black Americans do.
In July 2015, I’m driving Nancy to the cemetery where Willie Muse is buried. She tells me she’s inspired by my account of her great-grandmother’s efforts to make the circus pay for her sons’ work. “I lost track of how many times she had to take those circus men to court. And if she was like that back then with no education, just think what she might be like today. She was… bad.”
There’s just one real problem with the facts as I’ve assembled them, she says, and it’s big:
“I do not and I will not believe that Harriett let her children go off with no circus,” she says. “As a mother, that was all she had to cling to—her children and her Christ.”
I remind her about the Billboard notice Harriett took out with the help of Anna Clark. I remind her of the initial 1927 newspaper coverage of the case, in which Harriett was said to have “contracted” to let her sons leave with the mysterious Mr. Stokes.
She reminds me of the institutional racism exhibited by countless publications during the Jim Crow era; of the Roanoke Times’ mocking attempt to capture the family’s voice—“for anxious and beseeching words from the lips of their ‘old mammy who yo all aint seen for all dese years’”—without ever actually quoting anyone named Muse.
She reminds me of the story that Willie himself told—about a man luring him and his brother into the back of his wagon with a piece of candy. I asked if Willie had used the word kidnapped. “No,” she snaps. “His word was stolen.”
“I’m not questioning what you found,” Nancy says. “I’m telling you how I feel about it, based on the love and connection that Uncle Willie had with his mama.”
What exactly transpired between Harriett Muse and an itinerant showman in the summer of 1914 will probably never be known. After drilling down more rabbit holes than I can count, I’ve had to settle for an imperfect and incomplete story line, uncertain but for its ripple-free reflections on memory, power, and race.
It’s late afternoon and 90 degrees, the sky so cerulean the Blue Ridge Mountains are visible for miles in every direction. We enter the gates of the cemetery, which holds more than twenty thousand graves—many of them Roanoke’s earliest black rail workers and domestics, still housed in unofficial segregation, like most of the people in the surrounding neighborhood.
In one of the cemetery’s oldest sections, the physician I. D. Burrell—the man who died on the train to Washington after Roanoke’s white hospitals refused to admit him in 1914—is buried beneath a tall granite obelisk. Three of the city’s five Tuskegee Airmen are buried nearby with dignified headstones, including a pair of brothers who joined the elite group of African-American military pilots. (One died in a 1943 training exercise, and the other, who signed up to complete his brother’s mission, died in a 1949 crash during the Berlin Airlift.)
We pass the cinderblock cemetery office, and near a cluster of stately hickory trees, Nancy points to the section with Willie’s grave. She comes here several times a year—before Christmas, on his birthday, and on Mother’s Day, when she also visits the graves of her mother, Dot, who died in 2004, and her grandmother Annie Belle, who died in 1983.
Crabgrass creeps over the right side of the granite marker, which is flush with the ground, and dried grass clippings lie heaped on one side.
WILLIE MUSE, the bronze marker says in raised capital letters, and beneath an outline of praying hands, it reads GOD IS GOOD TO ME.
A week later we return, this time during office hours. We need help paying our respects to the unmarked graves created before the family could afford memorial niceties: George’s in 1972, and Harriett’s in 1942. Cemetery employees only know exactly where George is buried, since records before 1952 were not retained when the cemetery changed hands decades ago. (Nancy didn’t realize Harriett was buried here, too, until I found her death certificate earlier in the summer.)
Groundskeeper Brian Nichols takes us to the far edge of an area referred to as the space graves, the humble unnamed section behind the office where people were buried in order as their bodies arrived, one next to the other, in largely unmarked graves and typically nowhere near their relatives. We walk out to the section he figures was dug in July 1942, when Harriett died.
If you look closely down the row, he shows us, you can make out the indentations where the ground is sunken in just so, the outline of the graves as straight and rectangular as a set of xylophone keys.
“Is it true he used to play tunes on a plastic string guitar, and you could tell what songs he was playing?” the groundskeeper asks Nancy. Yes, and Willie could also play songs using a range of notes he created solely by snapping his fingers.
In the car we put in Willie’s homemade recording, now converted from cassette to CD. And, like an aural apparition, there he is, his a cappella baritone steady and clear.
I replay the CD after I drop Nancy off. As I cross the Tenth Street bridge over the railroad tracks, I make my way back to Jordan’s Alley—that name only rarely crossing the lips of the area’s oldest residents. The new Habitat houses here are vinyl-sided and modest; a few have posted NO TRESPASSING signs.
Their backyards are so deep they’ve erased all traces of the red-clay road that once passed for Ten-and-a-Half Street. Lodged between two backyard chain-link fences is the only visible remnant of No. 19—a scrubby, half-dead mulberry tree, a tangle of ivy and periwinkle rooted at its base. I snap a few pictures, pick up a single lichen-covered mulberry twig, and return to my car.
The rail yard still clatters in the distance. But it’s barely audible over the music of Willie Muse: It’s a long way to Tipperary / It’s a loo-ong way to go.
It’s the Irish war ballad, of all things, that sticks with him the longest—a song with the power to summon, with pride and astonishment, the memory of his “dear old mother” under a sideshow tent.