Picture a life about as far away from rural Virginia as you can get. A life lived constantly on the move, spanning locales as disparate as Park Avenue and Paris, Texas.
Picture a life far removed from the Franklin County tobacco fields, one where people actually rode, ate, and slept in the railroad cars that passed by Jordan’s Alley at all hours of the day and night. Sweat-stained and stinky, traveling-show performers and roustabouts traversed the country by train, boasting a pride of calling that bordered on arrogance. They developed their own rhythms, their own hierarchy, and even their own language: people they worked with and who understood what they did were “with it.” Everyone else was a “mark.”
Now picture a single car, usually somewhere near the front of the train, full of human misfits—a bearded lady, a skeleton man, a conjoined twin complaining that she hadn’t slept because her sister was tossing and turning all night. The freaks, people called them, in politically incorrect language that fit right in with other offensive circus lingo. Which was fine by most of the freaks because, well, they had their own pride of calling, too. As the art photographer Diane Arbus once said of sideshow performers: “Most people go through life dreading they’ll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They’ve passed their test in life. They’re aristocrats.”
They would capture the imaginations not only of marks across America but also of America’s finest artists, starring in the short stories of Eudora Welty and Carson McCullers, the films of Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch, and the journalistic dispatches of E. B. White.
Modern sensibilities and medical advances would ultimately change, if not erase, the spectacle of the circus sideshow. Plain old decency would ultimately relegate the phenomenon to kitschy camp, mythology, and a curious set of resurgences evident in today’s cable-TV shows, Broadway-musical revivals, and reality television.
But a century ago, when the Muse brothers were young, they and other people who didn’t match physical norms were exhibited for profit and titillation in ways that today would be considered demeaning at best. They were gathered and displayed as a consortium of dwarves, giants, microcephalics, and fat ladies who (compared with today’s heavier body norms) don’t look all that fat.
Some freaks weren’t so different-looking physically, but they could perform special tricks—swallow swords or stuff dozens of balls into their mouth, or blow smoke out of their eyeballs. Women draped themselves in pythons and became knife-throwing targets, and men contorted their tattooed bodies into pretzel shapes.
All were exhibited onstage, arranged in a kind of off-kilter school-yearbook assembly. The dwarf usually stood next to the giant (who splayed his arms out like wings), the fat lady adjacent to the thin man.
The Congress of Freaks, they were called. Or the World’s Strangest People.
Money-hungry managers pitched them in ways that alternately humiliated them and enhanced their prestige and, above all, made money for the predominant form of American entertainment between 1840 and 1940: the circus.
The sideshow was so named because it was placed to the side of the main circus show or big top, under a separate tent and with a separate admission fee. More commonly known as the freak show, it was also called the pit show, odditorium, kid show, and ten-in-one—for the number of typical acts you could see with a single ticket.
Presented on a platform, under a tent and behind a thick canvas wall (to keep the nonpaying out), the sideshow was meant to instill fear and wonder in its audience. Capitalizing on the scientific naïveté of the day, it was also supposed to inspire educational curiosity. Once customers were inside the tent, a “lecturer” (oftentimes a magician who also performed tricks) would lead them on a walking tour from one attraction’s section of the stage to the next, describing each act. Then, one at a time, the freak demonstrated his or her special skill.
Limbless people, for instance, would roll a cigarette or write with a pen between their toes. Johnny Eck, aka the Only Living Half-Boy and the World’s Greatest Mistake, did acrobatics, sang show tunes, and told jokes. He was happy not to have legs, Eck told the audience, because he didn’t have to press his pants.
At seven feet seven and a half inches, the Texas giant Jack Earle was pretty much just tall. Circus publicity photographs featured him playing cards with his buddy Harry Earles, the dwarf who would become the lead character of Tod Browning’s cult classic film, Freaks.
As outlined by Lew Graham, Ringling’s longtime announcer and freak-show impresario, a freak act in the 1910s had to adhere to three basic rules: “The abnormality must be remarkable, if possible unique; it must be exploitable by an accompanying talent or dexterity; and it must be inoffensive to public taste.”
For example, he offered: “The fat lady may not be a repulsive mass of blubber; she must be delightfully curvaceous.” The midget had to be perfectly symmetrical and, above all, fabulously cute.
Before movies, radio, and TV, people saved their pennies for the one time of year when the circus came to town. The upper-middle classes and those aspiring to be like them wore their best clothes to the circus, then brought home photographs and other souvenirs to show off later to visitors. Giants sold oversized “giant rings,” so a person could have the tactile experience of seeing how small their own fingers were compared with the giant’s. Dwarves sold miniature Bibles.
“Siamese twins were at the top of the pecking order because there were so few of them. Below that were the one-of-a-kinds, someone like Johnny Eck,” said sideshow researcher and collector Warren Raymond. “Giants were fairly common, and the good ones among them brought good money.”
Harriett Muse might have had no idea where her sons were. But they were actually becoming famous from Butte, Montana, to Binghamton, New York, where their pictures could be seen on cartoonish banners designed to mock their milky-white skin and African features—and draw more quarters and dimes.
As albinos, they were among the rarer finds, somewhere between a giant and a limbless man in the freak-show pecking order. Inside the tent, lecturers introduced George and Willie to ticket holders—or rubes, as the showmen referred, dismissively, to customers behind their backs—via a hyperbolic spiel, or lecture, which began like this:
The brothers were descended from monkeys in the dark continent.… With Neanderthal heads, caveman bodies, and tremendous shocks of hair that stand out on their heads like the wigs on Raggedy Ann dolls.…
Two Ecuador white savages… they are pure Albinos, with skins as white as cream, and with all of the facial characters of South African bushmen.…
All for the insignificant sum of one dime, two nickels, ten coppers, one-tenth of a dollar—the price of a shave or a hair ribbon—[you can witness] the greatest, most outstanding aggregation of marvels and monstrosities gathered together in one edifice. Looted from the ends of the earth.…
Sparing no expense, every town, every village, every hamlet, every nook and cranny of the globe has been searched with a fine-tooth comb to provide this feast for the eye and mind.… Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, and avoid the rush!
They were cast, in other words, as anything but what they actually were: a pair of black boys from Virginia with callused hands and alabaster skin. Boys who cried themselves to sleep at night.
They cried especially hard during their early days on the road, when their captors shushed them repeatedly. “Be quiet. Your momma is dead. There’s no use even asking about her,” Willie later recalled being told.
Tell that to a child long enough, and the repetition turns into story turns into truth. Tell that to a pair of boys dependent on you for food and shelter, for clothing and comfort, and as weeks turn into months and months into years, they’ll believe anything you say.
Especially if you hide them away from anyone who might tell them otherwise.
“Be quiet,” the men told them. “Your momma is dead.”
While their parents tried to carve out a life in the newly industrializing South, the Muse brothers traveled the country—and, eventually, the globe—by rail, by boat, and, later, even by airplane. I worked out a rough chronology of their early careers by scouring century-old issues of Billboard and Variety magazines, and newspapers ranging from the New York Times to the Big Spring (Texas) Daily Herald to the Baltimore Afro-American—archives that were not readily searchable online (or in some cases via microfilm) when a colleague and I wrote our initial newspaper series about Willie and George in 2001.
There were more surprises tucked away behind paywalls in esoteric databases and faraway circus-museum archives, especially regarding their earliest years as performers. A former circus owner and Canadian author tipped me off to rare, out-of-print books and more people to talk to (“Call Philadelphia Eddie’s Tattoo and ask for a sideshow collector named Furry, and be sure to tell him I sent you”). I was also helped by a collector in Silver Spring, Maryland, a specialist in souvenir giant rings whose wife is on the hunt for anything pertaining to Siamese twins. The couple own more than sixty thousand pieces of memorabilia, including a souvenir cup purchased by the Muse brothers for their own use and engraved with their show names at the Iowa State Fair.
A Roanoke sandwich-shop operator gave me a dusty duffel bag full of circus memorabilia collected decades before by a relative who’d worked as a handbill poster for the John Robinson Circus and said, “Keep it—just bring back what you don’t use.”
A Baltimore archivist directed me to other people to call, advising me to pay special attention to “visual clues”—photographs and pictures of sideshow banners—since I couldn’t assume I knew all their stage names. The one thing I could be sure of: nowhere among the copious press clippings would they ever be referred to as George and Willie Muse.
A sideshow collector in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, who was writing a book on the sword swallower and Muse brothers’ sideshow colleague Mimi Garneau put together an especially helpful binder of clippings and photographs. Bob Blackmar invited me to tour the basement he calls his Nauseum, with sideshow memorabilia from floor to ceiling that feature old posters, random beer lights, and a photograph of tattooed man Jack “Dracula” Baker, photographed by Diane Arbus for a 1961 issue of Harper’s Bazaar. “Jack is tattooed simply because he wants to be,” Arbus told the magazine. In Blackmar’s basement, a fuzzy copy of Arbus’s picture sat framed and propped against a black marble box containing Jack’s ashes. “I was his last living friend,” he said.
By the time I wrapped up my research, I was tapped into a trove of freak authorities, from retired sideshow operators in Gibsonton, Florida (aka Gibtown, once home to Percilla the Monkey Girl and Grady the Lobster Boy), to act-specific memorabilia collectors (“My specialty is souvenir rings sold by Irish giants”), as well as to circus-interested sociology and theater professors across the country, one of whom spent hours analyzing my photographs, enthusing, “I find this very exciting!” And: “Historical menswear is my passion!”
The professor was speaking of a photograph of George and Willie labeled “1905” that had been unearthed from the massive archives of Howard Tibbals, a wealthy Florida benefactor and circus junkie who’d given $10.5 million to the Ringling Museum in Sarasota to preserve his collection of circus memorabilia. For decades, Tibbals had collected materials for his lifelong pursuit of building model circuses, which became the basis of the museum’s eleven-thousand-square-foot Howard Tibbals Learning Center.
“I hate sideshows,” Tibbals said when I reached him at his home in Longboat Key. Seeing people with disabilities displayed for profit made him uncomfortable, lending a dull and lowly cast, he thought, to his middlebrow hobby.
As the writer James Baldwin put it in his 1985 essay collection, “Freaks are called freaks and are treated as they are treated—in the main, abominably—because they are human beings who cause to echo, deep within us, our most profound terrors and desires.” The true grotesque, in Baldwin’s view, isn’t the monster or the freak but rather members of mainstream society who, clinging to safety, abhor differentness.
As they did Tibbals, sideshows made me uneasy. My tattooed twenty-one-year-old son raved about American Horror Story: Freak Show, insisting I watch it as research for this book. But forty minutes into the first episode, I had to turn it off. I couldn’t take any more of the murderous clown or the murderous Siamese twins (actually, only one of the twins was murderous). And the freak orgy, rendered as a kind of silent-film sex tape, was just way too dark. (“But Mom, freaks need love, too!” my son said.)
Watching Tod Browning’s Freaks, I bounced along a gaping spectrum of curiosity, pity, and guilt (for having pitied), as I conceded to my friend and former film professor Richard Dillard when he screened the movie for me in his theater classroom at Roanoke’s Hollins University.
“Yes, but in this film, the freaks are the good people!” Dillard said. The bad guys are the able-bodied circus workers who conspire to murder the sideshow-starring dwarf, so they can steal his fortune—until the freaks see to the bad guys’ comeuppance. “The freaks are leading their regular lives, and they’re functioning, but they’re never frightening or upsetting.”
Dillard went to his first sideshow in Florida, where his father was stationed during part of World War II. More fascinated than repulsed, he stands firmly in the camp of sideshow enthusiasts, who argue that most freaks were willing subjects, grateful for the work, and happily in on the sham.
“Most sideshow freaks took pride in being a burden to nobody,” author Al Stencell wrote in Seeing Is Believing. “The sideshow allowed them to escape being institutionalized or stuck inside a home… and gave them independence, self-worth, friends, and a support system to help them achieve as normal a life as possible.”
As the sideshow star Zip, born William Henry Johnson, was said to have told his sister on his 1926 deathbed: “Well, we fooled ’em for a long time, didn’t we?”
No one knows whether Johnson, who was arguably the world’s most famous freak, actually uttered that line. It could have been like 99 percent of all sideshow accounts: written by a reporter with a knowing wink-wink to the press agent who choreographed all the stunts, backstories, and jokey quotes. With brown skin, a diminutive stature, and a balding tapered head that P. T. Barnum accentuated with a tuft of hair at the crown, Johnson was said to be a pinhead, or someone with “microcephalous idiocy,” as the disability-rights expert and sociologist Robert Bogdan has put it.
Here’s how showman Barnum juiced up Johnson’s narrative after a freak hunter “discovered” him in New Jersey in 1860 at the age of four: gorilla explorers had found him naked and walking on all fours along the river Gambia. Zip-the-What-Is-It? (as he was originally named, reportedly by Charles Dickens) ate only raw meat and spoke gibberish, and was therefore “a most singular animal,” as Barnum said, “something between man and monkey, without a language.”
When Barnum handed Zip a cigar, he ate it, as instructed. “He has been examined by some of the most scientific men we have, and pronounced by them to be a connecting link between the wild native African and the brute creation.”
From an early age, Zip was smart enough to participate in the ruse, a relative later told reporters. After all, Barnum had paid him a dollar a day not to talk.
But which freaks were in on the joke, and what of those whose abilities didn’t rise to the level of informed consent?
And which category fit children like George and Willie Muse?
Tibbals doubted he had anything on the Muse brothers in his archives, but he did send me to a friendly Ringling Museum archivist who was midway through sorting the collection Tibbals had donated, including piles of yellowed scrapbooks compiled by other circus buffs. A few days later, she e-mailed a photo of the young Muse brothers that Tibbals had acquired decades earlier (and had either never seen or forgotten).
It was my first physical evidence of the Muse brothers as child performers.
Dated 1905 (probably in error, I would later learn), the portrait had been printed as a souvenir postcard sold by circus performers as a way to enhance their managers’ earnings. In post–Civil War America, visitors entering the parlor of a well-appointed home would often be shown lavish photo-album collections—posed family portraits capitalizing on the brand-new photography craze but also pictures of famous people, from Abraham Lincoln to General Ulysses Grant to, even, “human oddities, who were not only fascinating but quite acceptable as Victorian houseguests—as long as they stayed in their albums,” as Bogdan wrote in his 1988 book, Freak Show.
If the date on the card was correct, the brothers would have been twelve and fifteen years old. In the picture, they stand stick straight, their arms pressed against each other from their shoulders to their hands. An inch or two taller than Willie, George is devoid of expression. Like a junior-high choirboy following instructions to stand stiffly, he gives nothing away. His arms are perfectly taut at his side, his fingers outstretched and dainty-looking, the calluses presumably gone.
Willie leans forward slightly, his posture more tentative. His bow tie is crooked, and his expression befuddled, possibly afraid. His fingers are clasped and his mouth agape, as if awaiting inspection—or maybe a whack on the head.
Maybe they’re just uncomfortable, stuffed as they are into woolen suits that look two sizes too small. The suits are respectable garments designed in the trendy-for-the-time Edwardian style, commonly manufactured by Brooks Brothers and similar brands. But there’s more to see in the too-short sleeves and wrinkly stress lines running from the back of their necks to their armpits: “They’ve already been wearing those suits for a couple of years,” pointed out Joshua Bond, a costume historian at the College of Charleston.
With knickerbockers for pants and hair pulled into short, white-blond dreads, the look evokes a pair of innocent young kids. And yet it doesn’t.
“To me, it looks manipulative, like they’re trying to say two things at once,” Bond said.
Between the tight suits and the off-center bow ties, “they were dressed with some care for the ruse but not really that much attention to detail.”
As if a showman, for instance, had kept them from their family and had no intention of truly caring for them himself—or taking them home.
The showman gave the boys stage names right off the bat. For the next half-century, the monikers would morph, with added appositives, occasionally disappearing for a year or two at a time but always returning to the singsong names that forever bound them together: Eko and Iko (pronounced “EE-ko” and “AYE-ko”).
Spellings changed occasionally, such as when they appeared in The New Yorker magazine as Ecko and Iko. Their ethnic origins shifted in the media narrative, too, from one circus season to the next.
The boys had been discovered floating on a barge in the Gulf of Mexico. Along the Amazon. In the wilds of Ecuador. Off the coast of Madagascar.
Their albinism was the main draw, of course, the only thing that really set George and Willie Muse apart from ordinary African-American children—before the circus got hold of them.
Black albinos were considered important finds for a sideshow operator, something the average person didn’t run across—a blurred boundary between black and white. One in 36,000 Europeans is born albino; for people of African descent that figure is higher, one in 10,000, with particularly high incidences among the Zulu and the Ibo of Nigeria. Usually caused by a deletion in the P gene, the most common mutation disables one of the enzymes (around day twenty-eight after conception) used in the making of skin pigment. The absence of pigment makes albinos sensitive to light; the red in their eyes’ whites are actually the retina’s blood vessels showing through.
Many are legally blind at birth, from a condition that cannot be corrected with glasses and has sometimes historically resulted in them being stereotyped as cognitively impaired when in fact they’re not; they suffer from horizontal nystagmus, which makes their eyes rotate back and forth. “The eyes are trying to focus, but they can’t,” said Bonnie LeRoy, a genetic counselor at the University of Minnesota. And when they walk into the bright sun, “they squint because it hurts. They can’t block out the sun with the iris because they have no color in their iris. Even indoors, many wear sunglasses because the light still hurts.” (The Dutch dismissively called albinos kakerlaks, or cockroaches—things that scurried around in the night.) During the rise of Nazism in Germany, people with albinism were despised as being “effeminate.”
The biblical Noah was thought by some scholars to be the first albino, evidenced by text in the Dead Sea Scrolls that described him as having “the flesh of which was white as snow, and red as a rose; the hair of whose head was white like wool, and long; and whose eyes were beautiful. When he opened them, he illuminated all the house, like the sun.”
Many modern-day pop-culture depictions of the condition are sensational and dark, portraying albinos as villains and henchmen. In films like The Da Vinci Code and The Matrix Reloaded, albino villains drive around cities at night, shooting people—which would be impossible, of course, given that often they are legally blind.
International advocacy and research groups to support people with albinism have surged in recent years, particularly in response to disturbing news accounts in Malawi and Tanzania, where modern-day witch doctors have murdered and kidnapped albinos, claiming that potions made from their harvested body parts have magical powers. With his antibullying platform Positive Exposure, fashion photographer Rick Guidotti has launched a campaign to show the beauty of people with albinism and to include positive messages about children with all kinds of genetic differences, including cleft palates and mobility issues.
“As an artist, it’s our responsibility to steady that gaze a little bit longer.… To start seeing beauty in difference,” he said in a popular TED Talk.
But it was centuries before the stigma surrounding albinism would lift enough to create a space for Guidotti’s stunning albino supermodels. (Sunglasses weren’t even mass-produced until 1929.) The negative stereotypes were embedded in the mind-set of America’s most heralded founding father, the author of the Declaration of Independence.
A little more than a century before Willie Muse’s birth and a hundred miles north of Truevine, a future president named Thomas Jefferson had become fascinated with black albinos. And perplexed. In 1783, he surveyed his fellow plantation owners in Virginia, asking them about the presence of slaves with unusually white skin. Henry Skipwith wrote back to tell him about three sisters whose skin is “a disagreeable chalky white” while their parents are “the ordinary color of blacks (not jet).”
Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was still decades away (1859). The word scientist hadn’t been coined (1833). And the mysterious gorilla of Africa was not yet known to the scientific world (1847).
Jefferson compiled his findings into a catalog of the state’s flora, fauna, and mineral deposits, placing albinos squarely between his accounts of fish and insect varieties in his taxonomic tome, Notes on the State of Virginia. A major book, it also put forth Jefferson’s suggestion that Africans had sex with apes.
Governor of Virginia at the time, Jefferson was grappling with the genetic quirk of black albinism, nervous that it might dissolve the boundaries between the races. The skin of the albino was “a pallid cadaverous white, untinged with red,” he wrote.
With life around him in chaos—his daughter had recently died, the Revolutionary War had just come to Virginia, and the approaching British troops had forced his government out of Richmond—Jefferson was desperate to bring order to the natural and social world, according to the literary critic Charles D. Martin, who explored the topic in his 2002 book, The White African American Body. For slave owners like Jefferson and his neighbors, black albinos raised an ominous specter. “The image of the African American deprived of blackness—slaves transforming, degenerating, possibly regenerating—fired the political imagination and insinuated its way into the debate on race,” Martin wrote.
In 1791, the Philadelphia painter and museum entrepreneur Charles Willson Peale stumbled upon a mulatto slave named James whose skin had begun turning white over the course of many years, a rare condition called vitiligo. (It’s the same pigmentation disease that pop star Michael Jackson would struggle with near the end of his life.)
Peale painted his enigmatic portrait, titled it James the White Negro, and hung it in his Philadelphia museum, later known as Peale’s American Museum, part of the nascent nation’s efforts to sanction gathering spots that weren’t taverns but salonlike places where citizens could meet and mingle to discuss taxonomical displays and other educational and cultural pursuits. Peale also exhibited people with missing limbs and albinism and other “human curiosities,” as he called them, but he thought such attractions got too much frivolous attention, insisting that it was more scientific to study regularly occurring specimens, not the unusual. But the paying public disagreed.
Such museums were designed to have a civilizing impact on nineteenth-century Americans, who were fascinated by physical abnormalities—and to underscore notions about white superiority. An influential physician of the time speculated that black skin was the result of leprosy, arguing that lightening skin or vitiligo spots were actually a kind of early-stage cure for blackness.
One well-known case was that of Henry Moss, a black Virginian whose skin began to lighten radically in his midthirties. While Moss began exhibiting himself for money in Philadelphia taverns in the late 1790s with great success, museums soon became the dominant place to learn about oddities, especially in New York City’s Bowery District.
Though Peale had been the first to exhibit albinos, it was Phineas Taylor Barnum who added the bling. He brought together dramatic and musical acts with freaks (he preferred the term “oddities”) in his American Museum, located at the intersection of Broadway and Ann Street, in the heart of bustling New York. He transformed the stuffy, scientifically focused museums into amusement centers where families brought picnic lunches and spent the entire day.
The so-called father of modern-day advertising—Barnum was, after all, credited with the phrase “There’s a sucker born every minute” (a slogan he believed, though never actually said)—he was the first businessman to advertise aggressively, hanging banners on the exterior of his museum and luring in passersby with lively storefront bands. He spun wild yarns about his human exhibits: albinos, fat people, bearded ladies, giants, dwarves, and gypsies. Barnum’s so-called dime museum, which hosted some forty-one million patrons, spawned a major new form of entertainment that endured from the 1870s to the turn of the century.
Barnum initially displayed William Henry Johnson as Zip the Man-Monkey to capitalize on Americans’ fascination with all things Darwin, whose theory of natural selection argued that humans descended from an apelike ancestor.
So Barnum dressed Johnson in a fur jumpsuit and had him carry a stick, then hired Civil War photographer Mathew Brady to take his publicity shots, art-directing Johnson to pose in positions mirroring early drawings found in natural-history taxonomies of apes.
Off and on throughout his early career, Johnson was displayed inside a cage, with a “keeper” nearby who made up stories about him walking on all fours before his “discovery,” eating raw meat, and being a cross between a native African and an orangutan. He was an immediate favorite of Barnum’s—and a favorite target of press mockery.
As the Bowery grew sleazier, city dwellers moved on to newer amusements like popular song-and-dance acts. But the freak show still prevailed in cities and towns across America’s heartland, in circuses, carnivals, and street fairs. By 1900, there were one hundred traveling circuses in America, and the sideshow was a highlight.
Piggybacking on the craze for Darwin, a full-time occupation had been birthed: freak hunting. As one circus publication described it, “Scouts are sent abroad to outlandish places searching for that human being upon whom nature has played a trick. It is a hard job, and freaks are frequently found in places where you least expected to find them.”
In New Jersey, for instance (Zip).
Or in Mount Vernon, Ohio (the Wild Men of Borneo).
If an act actually did hail from a foreign country, the details were exaggerated to portray the performers as cannibals, polygamists, or dog eaters. Facts changed with the season: a New Zealand albino named Unzie was said to have been found by a benevolent explorer who saved him from being sacrificed by his own tribe. A more realistic account went that Unzie was taken, by permission of his parents (and with remuneration to them), by an English colonist and first exhibited in Melbourne, Australia, before being brought west.
Among the most celebrated albinos in the sideshow, Unzie was said to see in total darkness—a member of the Night People, as albino blacks were sometimes called. He fixed his hair in curling papers when he went to bed at night, then brushed it out and into a six-foot-wide mushroom in the morning.
“I never tip my hat to the ladies,” he used to say from his freak-show platform, wearing an elegant high hat and dress suit. “If I should, they’d think a bombshell exploded.” After which he promptly removed his hat, causing his enormous white hair to bounce out as if his head were submerged within a cloud.
As dime museums gave way to circuses and movie theaters entered the public domain, many predicted the freak show as entertainment would spiral to a close. A Washington Post reporter wrote a premature obituary in 1911, using a morose midget named Mike as his expert source.
Mike described sneaking into a movie theater to watch a silent film—“If people could see us passing along [out in public] they wouldn’t pay over their dime at the door”—only to have the popularity of moviegoing then threaten to put his kind out of work. “We didn’t imagine that we were going to our own funeral,” Mike said.
The reporter bade a premature good riddance to the pastime of profiting off the misfortune of others (though he did sympathize with sad, unemployed Mike). “No good ever came of staring at the frog-boy, nor of questioning the ossified man,” who’d lived out his final years as a hermit, six feet tall and just eighty pounds. He’d been found dead in a hut on the outskirts of Providence, Rhode Island, a few months earlier.
“Is it not a healthier sign of the public mind that it is no longer interested in the sad misfortunes of others?”
And yet, as dime museums faded, circuses and carnivals did nothing of the sort. Factory jobs made entertainment affordable for ordinary people, many of whom now had a modicum of leisure time, with half-days off on Saturdays and modest vacations. The country’s booming railroad system carried traveling entertainments deeper into America’s heartland and kept the freak hunter busy, judging from frequent ads in Billboard, the weekly trade magazine:
WANTED—FREAKS… NOVELTIES… STRANGE PEOPLE.… Any act suitable for a real, live Pit Show. Send photo. State salary with full particulars.
WANTED—Fat Man, Midget, Glass Blower, Magician, anything suitable for high-class Pit Show.
In a special column called “Freaks to Order,” Billboard ran a weekly compendium of abnormal births, leaving no species unturned: twin lambs born on a Bluffton, Indiana, farm, one black and one white.
A cat in Cynthiana, Kentucky, birthed a kitten with the head of a fox terrier. A child was born in Kankakee, Illinois, with two heads.
A man in Binghamton, New York, couldn’t stop walking owing to a nervous disease. He paused only to take brief naps, standing up.
So you can see how a pair of albino brothers from rural Virginia might have made it into a show of this sort. But though modern-day relatives had always believed George and Willie were kidnapped around 1899 from Truevine, some of the facts I uncovered were casting doubts on the timeline that had been handed down through generations.
The brothers had definitely been exploited, made to work without pay, then traded between various showmen like chattel. They were without question sequestered from their family for many years, just as Mother Ingram had observed: The circus owned ’em, you see.
But an alternative narrative was taking shape around the genesis of their circus lives, a story stream that would parallel, and sometimes conflict with, the family’s long-standing, sacrosanct account.
And the water in that alternative stream wasn’t just murky; from the family’s point of view, it was fraught.
What is certain, though, is that sometime during the drought-ridden summer of 1914, the brothers from Truevine gave their first documented sideshow performance.
A few months earlier, the Great American Shows had been launched by Morris Miller and Ben Klein, veteran carnival operators who had assembled twelve train cars full of attractions, a carousel, concessions featuring everything from candy to handicrafts, a merry-go-round, and a Ferris wheel. Klein had gone south in search of “show property,” according to Billboard, and Miller to Buffalo, New York, to buy up tents and railcars from two carnivals that had gone belly up. The operation carried its own lighting plant and a cookhouse, the tent where all staffers were fed.
As usual, the carnival was an exciting draw for the lot lice—the nickname carnies and showmen gave townies who gathered to watch them unload and lingered on show grounds. Lot lice were an integral part of the show world’s free advertising; even those who couldn’t afford admission to the big show would often hang around and spend their scant dimes on sideshow admission, concessions, or souvenirs—then spread the word to their friends.
Moose Lodge No. 159 of Flint, Michigan, gave the show its banner week of the season, according to a Billboard write-up submitted by Klein late that summer. The lineup featured trick horse riding and high-diving dogs; Alex Thomas, a weight juggler and strong man; Colonel Fred, the horse with the human brain and musical education; a midget show; and Professor John Zenga’s Excelsior Concert Band.
It also featured two albinos performing under the name Eastman’s Monkey Men, part of the show’s seven-in-one freak show: aka Willie and George, exhibited probably as they were in their woolen suits in the Tibbals picture, as normal—and scared—teenaged boys. (The scrapbook photo dated 1905 was, thus, most likely taken around 1914 or 1915.)
All urban sideshow obits aside, there was no need—yet—to dress the Muse brothers up in costume: being black with white skin was still different enough. Especially in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where the newspaper described them, simply, as “monkey-face men.” As another freak-show historian described the spiel:
Let me tell you about these other two strange creatures you see before you! Very strange indeed! Not only are they… from the heart of deepest Africa.… They are “albinos”—weird creatures in whom normal pigmentation does not exist! In fact this is why we are able to bring them to you today. They were rejected by their fellow tribesmen because of this strange condition!
That summer the carnival traveled from Flint to Elkhart, Indiana. The only day it rested was Sunday, when blue laws forced businesses to close. That explained the long-standing tradition of the “Sunday boil-up,” when troupers bathed in makeshift bathhouses to delouse and boiled their clothes in buckets, creating a smoky haze visible for blocks around their campsite.
So they moved from Chicago Heights to DeKalb, Illinois, from Ligonier, Indiana, and on through Kentucky before ending the show in November with a weeklong engagement in Hot Springs, Arkansas, where they wintered and those with cash on hand took advantage of the nearby casinos, healing baths, and, if they could afford them, ladies of the night.
One of the show’s top draws was the Motordrome—or Wall of Death—a daredevil act in which motorcycles raced around a cylindrical track pitched at an angle of eighty-four degrees, daringly performing “feats that seem impossible.” The riders were German immigrants, and one of them would leave abruptly the next fall, called away by the German army to enlist as a lieutenant in the motor squad.
The Ford Motor Company had just announced its revolutionary eight-hour workday. Charlie Chaplin featured the incompetent Keystone Cops in his second silent-film release. England merged two African territories to form Nigeria. And the archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated, triggering the start of World War I.
How much George and Willie knew about any of that is unclear. During their earliest carnival seasons, their ears were probably more attuned to what was happening in the insular world behind the canvas: in Ottumwa, Iowa, an eighteen-year-old carnival barker named Clarence McCormick murdered the boss of his twenty-year-old snake-charmer girlfriend, Ruth McCullough, on account of the boss “getting too friendly” with her.
With their mother foremost in their thoughts, George and Willie might have noticed that black sharecroppers in the Deep South began turning out in greater numbers at their shows. In the fall of 1916, profits at southern carnivals boomed; for the first time in years, attendance was not marred by the dreaded boll weevil, and earnings were up.
“The Southern darky is in clover this fall,” noted a Billboard writer in racist language that was ubiquitous in most white-run newspapers of the day. “For years he has been in debt to the cotton merchant and storekeepers, who have held him up from year to year, but this fall cotton is king, with a capital K. The colored man is out of debt… and the colored girls are decked out in gaudy raiment and flashy boots and money is being literally thrown away.
“The showman was quick to take advantage of the changed conditions, and some sections of the South are fairly overrun” with one-night carnival stands, the magazine noted.
It was while researching George’s and Willie’s early days in the circus that I came across the thread of evidence that first made me doubt the Muse family’s long-held beliefs about how the boys came to be in the circus and led me to ask: Had they really been taken from a tobacco field without warning in 1899? Or was it possible that Harriett actually did, at least initially, know where they were?
The first written reference I found to Eko and Iko, from a 1914 Billboard story, did not dovetail with the stolen-from-Truevine narrative that Nancy and her relatives had long championed.
The account would call into question several basic facts: where exactly the Muse brothers had lived, when they were born, their real surnames, their paternity, and—most critically—the birth of their circus careers.
“Those sideshow people had complicated lives,” said author Al Stencell, a Canadian sideshow expert who left his hometown as a teenager to run the candy-wagon trailer for a traveling carnival and never looked back. (“My mom didn’t want me to go. My dad said, ‘Oh, he’ll be home in a few days; he’ll get tired of it.’” He was on the road full-time with a Toronto-based circus by the next year, 1963.)
“So much of [the narratives] are made up,” Stencell said. “But you can’t just say, ‘I found this three-armed kid sitting on his porch so I scooped him out to save him.’ Somebody had left him on that porch alone!”
Dozens of sideshow operators he has interviewed over the years have told him about attractions ambling up to the ticket box and begging: take me in. Some were dropped off by relatives hoping to unburden their families—in exchange for cash.
Few freaks, Stencell maintains, were kidnapped outright.
Another historian, a former Circus World Museum curator, cautioned me not to be like most industry outsiders, writers who condemn sideshow employment without garnering a broader historical understanding. “A question that needs to be answered: What would the guys have done had they not been on tour, especially in the 1910s?” he wrote.
Where were the brothers, and what were they doing? Harriett Muse must have been wondering that in the fall of 1914, when somehow it came to her attention that George and Willie had gone missing from the Great American Shows carnival.
“How are the wonders ‘Eko’ and ‘Iko’ doing?” mused an anonymous reader of the New York Clipper, a trade publication, a few months later.
The day after Christmas, a friend apparently helped Harriett write to the Readers’ Column of Billboard, explaining that she was “anxious to learn the whereabouts of her two sons, known as Eko and Iko.” True to the marketing hype, the resulting notice in the magazine described them as being of Ethiopian blood, but with perfectly white skin and curly white hair: “They were exhibited by Charles Eastman and Robert Stokes with Morris Miller’s Great American Shows. Eastman separated from Stokes, leaving the boys in his charge, and it is thought that Stokes is exhibiting them in store shows” or dime museums.
Tips about their whereabouts, including “information direct from Stokes,” should be sent to Eastman’s address, on West Thirty-eighth Street in midtown Manhattan—today the site of a cellphone store.
Harriett wanted them back immediately, the story implied, though it’s possible that Eastman was the author of the notice. They were supposed to have been returned to her at the end of the season, in plenty of time for Christmas.
Lacking any mention of a kidnapping, the reader is left to assume that they had left her care temporarily not some fifteen years before but that summer, with the showmen and possibly with her permission—until one of the men decided the brothers belonged instead to him, and took off with them.
I’d heard of James Herman “Candy” Shelton, the brothers’ longtime manager. He’d put truth to the idea they’d been abducted, even if not initially. Until his dying day, Willie Muse would curse Shelton and call him a “dirty rotten scumbag,” saying it was Shelton who had “stolen” him and his brother as children, kept them from their mother, and exploited them for decades for his own personal gain.
But Stokes and Eastman were brand-new names to me.
And in a way so was Harriett, since in her introduction to Billboard readers she went by a different name entirely: Hattie Cooke.
Census records showed her living under that name (though this time spelled Cook) in 1910, with her five children, whose last names, including George’s and Willie’s, were also given as Cook. Though she was recorded as married, there was no father listed as living in the home.
A renamed and reconfigured family had turned up in a different locale entirely, and a very unlikely one at that. They were living in the secluded mountains of New Castle, Virginia—a resort town at the turn of the twentieth century better known today for its marked absence of black people, an active KKK chapter, and a tourism board that sponsors the Annual New Castle Open Carry Day, which actively promotes the wearing of handguns in public as an exercise of Second Amendment rights.
A branch in Truevine had sprouted a story tendril in a surprising place, and it was up to me to follow its fickle, creeping path.