The family says whenever a carnival or fair came to town she went looking for them. For at least 13 years, Harriet Muse searched for her sons. 'Oh,' he says, 'I heard they kidnapped them and kept them for several years.'īut Macy uncovered another version of the story that involved the Muse Brothers' mother. 'Every so often, not regular, maybe three or four times a year, they'd come around, stop by our town and put up a tent.' What was the story about the Muse Brothers? I ask. 'You thought they'd got 'em at the carnival in Rocky Mount,' Macy prompts him. But that's not what A.J Reeves remembers. Some said they were taken outside the church. You don't want to get kidnapped like the Muse brothers. When a carnival came to town, kids were told: Be careful. This was the Jim Crow South, where blacks never felt really safe. Reeves.ġ02-year-old Reeves has lived in Truevine his whole life the Muse Brothers were a cautionary tale for blacks in the Roanoke area when he was growing up. But there are other versions of this story, as we learn when we visit the nearby home of A.J.

In the story the family and many old timers tell, the Muse brothers were working in a tobacco field when they were kidnapped by the man who would exploit them and control their lives for many years. 'They said they worked the shift from daylight to dark, which they called 'can-see to can't-see' or 'can to can't' for short.' George and Willie Muse were frequently exhibited as Eko and Iko, dubbed the Sheep-Headed Men, or sometimes Ambassadors from Mars. Today, it's Mexican guest workers pulling the tobacco on this farm, but in the early 20th century it was mostly the work of black sharecroppers, like the Muse family. We stop by one farm where workers are picking tobacco leaves and loading them on a truck, a process they tell us is called pulling. Truevine is little more than a crossroads with a church on one corner, an abandoned general store on another, and some houses scattered here and there. Their story, as the family told it, begins in the tiny hamlet of Truevine, about a half hour's drive from Roanoke. She took care of them in their old age, and was fiercely protective of them - because as young men they had been stolen from the family, exhibited as freaks and paid nothing for years.

It took Macy years to win Saunders' trust but eventually she opened up about her uncles, George and Willie Muse. 'And she pointed to a sign on the wall and it said 'Sit Down and Shut Up.' And she kind of meant it.' 'When I first sort of sauntered in there and said, 'surely you're gonna let me write a story and interview your uncle - 'cause Willie was still alive, he was over 100 then,' Macy remembers. There was one woman who stood between Macy and the story: Nancy Saunders, grand-niece of the Muse Brothers and owner of a well-known Roanoke restaurant. I went out to Roanoke to talk to her about it. Macy eventually did get the story, and it became her new book, Truevine. almost 30 years ago, a colleague told her about the best story in town that no one had ever been able to get: Two young African Americans, the Muse Brothers, had been stolen by a carnival in the late 19th or early 20th century - and exhibited in sideshows, because they were albinos. When journalist Beth Macy first moved to Roanoke, Va.

George and willie muse