George and willie muse skin#

Willie and George had no support but each other, in a situation that was as close to slavery as one could experience in post-1865 America. They also faced the debilities imposed by law and custom on black Virginians.Īfter leaving Truevine, the Muse brothers found themselves under the control of an unethical manager who kept their earnings and blocked them from communicating with their family. Their pigmentless irises were easily damaged.

George and willie muse skin#

The sun could burn their unprotected skin in minutes. Her limited financial resources in turn limited her ability to protect two young children whose genetic makeup meant that outsiders would always stare. Part of this story is the history of Jim Crow, the system of segregation that kept Harriet impoverished, illiterate and disfranchised. Digging through newspaper clippings and the entertainment trade press, Macy found a story far more complex than the account of kidnapping and passive suffering she had overheard in Roanoke. Macy accomplishes this by doing the legwork to find historical details about George, Willie and Harriet Muse that a woman busy running one of the best joints in town simply didn’t have time to do. In her new book, Macy, a journalist and the author of 2014’s acclaimed “Factory Man: How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local - and Helped Save an American Town,” tells the story of her quest to earn Saunders’s trust. It read: “Sit Down And Shut Up.” That’s what Macy did.īut that’s not where this story ends. In response, Saunders simply pointed to a sign on the restaurant wall. Instead, local legend whispered, in 1899 a man from the circus had kidnapped the two as boys out of a tobacco field near Truevine, a black community near Roanoke where their mother, Harriet Muse, had lived.īeth Macy asked if she could have Nancy Saunders’s family story. Macy had heard from a photographer that Muse was “the best story in town, but no one has been able to get it.” She knew that Muse and his brother, George, albino African-Americans, had been exhibited for much of the 20th century as sideshow “freaks.” She had also heard that they hadn’t run away to join the circus. Nancy was the great-niece and caretaker of Willie Muse. In 1991, Beth Macy, a feature reporter for The Roanoke Times, walked up to the counter of the Goody Shop to ask Nancy Saunders to give her something. That includes the power to decide who tells what story, and how. Of course, American history isn’t about reconciliation over sweet tea. We could sit down in the Goody Shops of the South and, at our adjoining tables, eat the yeast rolls and pork chops of reconciliation. Marches had been marched and speeches spoken. Black children had waded through spitting mobs to desegregate whites-only schools.

African-American students had done the hard work of lunch counter sit-ins. In spaces similar to Nancy Saunders’s Goody Shop, a black-owned Roanoke soul-food spot, white liberals quietly congratulated themselves. Once upon a time Southern white liberals from towns like Roanoke, Va., thought interracial public sociability would redeem America’s national history of slavery and Jim Crow segregation. TRUEVINE Two Brothers, a Kidnapping, and a Mother’s Quest: A True Story of the Jim Crow South By Beth Macy Illustrated.