southern book festival on booktv.

alice carey as a reader ofbook page i read a lot of book and one of my favorite this is year is "true vine" it took 20 years to inearth this saga with feign staking research on multiple fronts to inearth as she writes to entang am industry of truth. ...

with the idea of writing a story about the famous great uncle, it was clear that all personal details were going to be closely held.

trickling out in dribs and drabs on nancy's timeline. first time i could the sign said sit down and shut up. willy was not now or ever be available for comment. so, hoping to generate goodwill for a goofuture story, i write about the restaurant the menu was not written down. i would commit this to memory. tuesdays on spaghetti and lasagna and over other pork chops. wednesday is first and country fried steaks, and friday is ribs, get there early because it sell out early.

the lunch begins at 12:15 and not a moment before and later usually if nancy has to run home to check on uncle willie, in the midst of a bad day. and uncle willy's favorite was spaghetti. and she kept a painted rock on the cash register it was a gift from her nephew-- when i returned to lunch two days after my story ran because rib fridays were my favorite. nancy shook her finger at me and it was clear i was fot getting anything close to a pat on the back. her mother dot sat nearby, peeling potatoes and watching the young and the restless cringing about what her daughter had been about to say. nancy had been ready to send me packing when i walked into the restaurant and inquired about her uncle, but soft-hearted dot let me stay and do the restaurant feature. and in my youth i actually saw the very first episode of young

and the restless. i bonded quickly with dot over the characters and helping to peel potatoes in the kitchen before the episode was over, much to nancy's chagrin and victor newman was a scoundrel. now what your story about, nancy said. brought out a bunch of crazy white people, that's all. >> paying customers, i might have added, but she was in no mood for back talk. she walked past me with no further comment. she was leaving to feed uncle willy and turning him in his bed. she did many times,s a many as five times a shift. if nancy saunders had her way, his story would have left. she found the tale embarrassing and raw. the year was 1961 and black and white people i a like wanted to know were the light skinned brothers black or white. had they really been trapped in a cage and force today eat raw

meat. they deserved respect and not the gawkers that came at their house all hours knocking on the front door, some of her first memories people banging on the door the middle of the night. by the time i came on the scene, no one talked about circus greats, nancy, a no frills afro, at the temples and baked bread as good as her great-grandmother's harriet as cake. and even red who knew the family well and grew up in the neighborhood around the corner from the muses and is now a social sciences professor, he had never contemplated bringing the subject up with them. that's one exceptionally guarded family, he told me, you've got to take baby stems. you have to think of them as a tribe, they fallout with each other, but if you fall out with one of them, they will come roaring back at you like an army. it was ten more years before nancy warmed up enough to let

me and a co-writer author a newspaper series about her uncle and only after willy muse's death in 2001. he was 108. she didn't reveal much. she invited my reporter, jen, and a photographer in the house one time and made reference to a family bible we were not permit today view and for years after the series ran, whenever i visited the restaurant she hinted there was so much more to the story than we had found. she actually, when she would say things like that, she would call me scoop. our newspaper was the same one that in the version of the kidnapping story decades earlier. and looked the other way when city officials decimated two black historical neighborhoods, via urban renewal or as the people called it kneeing negro removal. they refused to print black wedding announcements for

brides until the mid 1970's, because of the wealthy white publisher, roanoke, had no black middle class. i myself had used a pair of pregnant black teens to illustrate a story about high pregnancy rate. and a story that went viral before that internet term existed and the made the girls an object of ridicule and even rush limbaugh joined in with a rant. when the girls dropped out of school shortly after my story ran, it was devastating. words linger and words matter, i learned and it's not possible to predict the fallout they can have on subject's lives. it would take me 25 years, finally, to earn something nearing nancy's trust, to convince her, i wasn't one more candy peddler intent on exploiting her relatives for the color of their skin or purely for my financial benefits. in 2013 when i hit a snag updating and wrote a story, an updated story on the pregnant

teens, more than 20 years after the original explosive first story, it seemed fate that one of them, now a 37-year-old mother of four lived around the corner from the roanoke ranch house. after some angry relatives tried to bully the relatives, physically threatening me and demanding a meeting with my newspaper bosses, nancy reassured me you don't need their permission to do the story just like you really don't need mine to write the book, not really, you don't. and yet, months earlier, nancy's permission is exactly what i sought. on the eve of publishing my first book about a third generation factory owner who had battled chinese imports to save the company, i had given her an advanced reading copy of factory man, and a chapter on race relations i'd found particularly hard to navigate. and mistreatment of workers, and the treatment of black domestic workers who resorted to wearing two girdles at the

same time as the defense against their boss's groping hands andout right rape. nancy said it's been that way down through history. a friend of my mom, she'd be vacuuming down the steps and the husband will be feeling her from behind and my mother had to fill in, and she told the man first thing, don't make me open up your chest, by which dot meant with the tip of my knife. and nancy had come a long way from the days of sit down and shut up. it was no ways a gimme when i called her in november asking to pursue her uncle's story as a book. she had retired closing the shop. i wanted her help devilling into the family story and with the muse still living in true vine. i'll think about it, she said. and the message was theer, i was not to call back, she would call me, november 11th, i wrote

it in my calendar, thanksgiving game, christmas came, i sent her a christmas card, ps. here is my phone number. more than six weeks later, oh, she enjoyed making me wait. i waited to give it to you so i could give it to you as a christmas present. it was christmas morning nancy decide today let me write her uncle's story under one condition, no matter what you find out or what your research turns up, you have to remember in the end, they came out on top. i knew the story's ending already, i assured her, i'd already interviewed several people, nurses and doctors, neighbors and lawyers, all of whom declared the late life care she'd given as impeccable. i was less certain who had forced them into servitude and the humanity and the work compensated. how exactly, during the harsh

years of jim crowe had george and willy managed to escape. >> how frustrating was it all those years knowing that this remarkable story was so close and yet, so far away? did you ever feel like giving up? >> well, i did give up because she said no. she actually said, i asked her, i said, you wouldn't-- you didn't even let me interview him and say i would hold the interview until after he passed away 'cause that was her rule, she didn't want anything written about him until he passed away. she said, oh, you're too curious. she didn't think i could hold the interview. i said if i would hold the interview i would, but she didn't believe me. and now she says, oh, when you walked into that shop the first time and you just thought i would give you the story, i said to myself, scratch has met her match. i was scratch and she was the match.

>> you call yourself a unicorn in the ranks of journalism because in this globe trotting world you stayed in one place roanoke for decades. how has your staying power allowed you to write both of your books, both of which required very deep reporting. >> not many books are written from rural america. i live in a city, a valley of about a quarter million and most reporters move on after a few years, i mean, with some of our best reporters are now at the new york times and done great stuff and i've decided to stay. i stayed at the roanoke times for 25 years, i'm no longer there, but you see, i'm still writing stories, this began with my time at the roanoke times and so, i'm able to write these stories because i have time on my side. >> robert caroll says time equals truth. maybe she didn't want to talk

in 1991, and let me do a restaurant feature. i thought sometime maybe she would let me do the story and it became how the places in town or people in town i call my story beacons. they're people who can lead me to other people in the community and at the time in the early '90s, and newspapers across the country, diversity was a big push. i mean, newspapers were much better staffed then, and i had this fantastic first editor, her name was wendy, tough as nails. the paper had emphasis on having moore black editors and more black reporters and doing stories reflecting the diversity in our community. and so, that if i was writing a general story about something, and roanoke has a 23% black population, if one of my four sources in the four source story was an african-american, she would send --

wasn't an african-american, she would send it back. that was wonderful training and led me to a beat that the paper called, i was the family's beat reporter, but really what i did was-- i had been trained to work outside of my zip code and to be getting stories that nobody else really had the entrees into because i had spent time with immigrants, refugees, care givers for the elderly, veterans with ptsd and i had really kind of made my-- that my beat. so, one of my favorite characters in the book is-- he passed away recently. al holland. he was a muse, a distant relative. a civil rights leader in roanoke and he was a 11-year-old boy in 1927 when harriet muse got her sons back and his job after school was, he would-- he would help a blind man sell brooms on the city market that he made. and so, he had this wonderful,

like kind of insider view to the story and he was there when they came home that night. and so, he's 98 when i interviewed him for this book, but i knew him because i had done numerous articles on it before and so, i just think because i had made those connections in the community, i was able to get people to trust me, but it was really the time. the fact that i'm still there. this is-- these are my people. i know them and they -- they trust me. >> and maybe, if she had said, yes, go ahead, 25 years ago, you wouldn't have been ready to write this book. you'd have people like joanne poindexter and-- >> yes, joanne was the newspaper's first black reporter, so, the neighborhood in roanoke, the truevine west end and the microvillage in the west end only the old people refer to an as jordan's alley or jordan's alley and joanne was able to -- who still, she

doesn't live in the neighborhood anymore, but goes to church there and she was able to put me in touch with 80, 90, 100-year-old people who could help me bring that neighborhood alive. >> one of the questions of the story is like what happened, how did she get them back and also, were their lives better in the circus than at home and begs, how was life in jim crowe in roanoke, virginia. what was that like? was it better than life on the road? so i was able to drive around with these older people and, i didn't always drive around, but i always got my best stuff when i drove around. it kind of reminds me when your kids are teenagers and they don't want to talk to you except when you're in the car because you're looking at something else. people, not only what they would seeing would jog their memory, but comfortable because they're facing forward in it. i did that, it was a technique i used, it's not technique, it's nothing special, but i did

that a lot in factory man and i did drive people around the same places and start to hear some of the same stories and next time i could say so-and-so said this and that's my mo, i drive around with my phone on record with their permission. >> you also say that kitchens are a great place to do an interview. >> oh, yes, kitchens. you all know kitchens, right? that's where everybody land at a party, right? everybody is in the kitchen, even though the host doesn't want you there because people are just more comfortable in the kitchen because that's where we live. so i always ask, if we can do the interview in the kitchen, i usually have some questions written out and, my recorder and it's easier and i also take notes because i don't trust the recorder, and it's easier if i have all of my stuff on the table. that's what i say really because i want people to be in the kitchen, that's where they live. >> and by staying in one place, you haven't limited yourself in

terms of material because just a few blocks away from this, another person wrote another best seller from jordan's alley. >> yes, rebecca immortalized henrietta, she was a block away from-- in jordan's alley a block away from where the muse family lived on 10 1/2 street. remarkable that these-- i think every place has remarkable stories. and in this tiny place, they're very different stories. >> very-- very similar, but different. >> yeah, well, the facts in the story that you wrote are so few and far between that photographic evidence and research played an important role. >> yeah. >> and at what point in the process did you realize that they would be so vital ap how did you use them? >> there was a circus historian that i was interviewing named dick flint and he reminded me

that the circus managers would often change their names and the brothers were very-- they called darwin's missing link, the ambassadors from mars. the sheepheaded men, the ecuadorean savages, they were never called george and willy muse. if i got in a data base, i could type in eko and iko and it wouldn't bring up the other names. i had to be cognizant of that and also, the photographs themselves just became a great reporting tool because those are-- the news clippings were so skewed against-- they never reported what the brothers actually saw and even the stories about the reunion. they never recorded what the family's point of view was and even went to the point of quoting harriet muse in dialect and quotes of the wrong person, they didn't actually talk to her. but the photos i photograph--

these are the earliest photos of child exhibits and when i saw it, they looked like scared young brothers, had been taken from their mother. they were told that she was dead and they should quit crying, and i just studied it and then somebody said, you know, there's-- there's a person in charleston named joshua bond, a professor, who studies historical costuming. i sent him the picture and he blew it up and he saw so much more in the picture than my eyes could see. he noticed, he said the seams were stretching. he says these suits are about two sizes too small. they're kind of nice suits, so there was some care given to ruse of these boys eastman's monkey men, but the suits are too short.