I drove over Catawba Mountain, then higher into the Allegheny Mountains the following week, looking for signs of Harriett and her children in New Castle—a courthouse document, a marriage or birth record, anything. She had taken out the Billboard notice with the help of a friend named Anna Clark in Covington, Virginia, where records showed Harriett working as a maid for the Industrial School and Farm for Mountain Children and Homeless Boys, later renamed the Boys Home of Virginia. She and Anna had been neighbors in New Castle, a resort town the next county over, in the late aughts and early teens. And my hunch, guided by the 1910 census, was that Harriett (nicknamed Hattie) had followed the Clark family to Covington, a small city in the neighboring county, seeking a better job and a friendlier racial climate.
In 1910, around seven years before she moved to Roanoke and set up house in Jordan’s Alley, Harriett was working as a washerwoman in the company town of Fenwick, which had sprouted up on the outskirts of New Castle, with some three hundred residents. It had mushroomed to serve the flourishing Fenwick Mines, whose iron-ore deposits drew hundreds of workers to the lush highlands. Anna Clark’s husband, Porter, was a superintendent at the mines, and Harriett’s other neighbors were night watchmen, iron-company machinists, and miners.
Scores of Franklin County blacks and Italian immigrants—nearly all of them single men, or married men who’d left their wives and children back home—migrated to mountainous Craig County between 1900 and 1910 for work, part of iron-mining and furnace operations that extended through the Appalachian Mountains from New York to Alabama and beyond. The Italians’ goal, as one Craig County old-timer recalled it, was to save up a thousand dollars, then return to Italy, “where they would be considered rich.”
A smaller version of the Roanoke boomtown story playing out some forty miles to the south, Fenwick was an offshoot of the same post–Civil War story: the rural South was transforming from a self-sufficient, agrarian society to a capitalistic cash economy managed by absentee northern capitalists who were feasting on cheap southern labor, much of it minority. Timber, coal, and iron were the new economic drivers of the Appalachians.
The courthouse turned up no Muse/Cook documents, but some friendly court clerks told me about New Castle native Jerry Jones, the only one from the region who knew anything about the brothers’ connection to New Castle. A retired guidance counselor and an amateur historian, Jones had grown up at the knee of his great-aunt Leslie Craft (1896–1980). Jerry had spent many hours as a child listening to her and her sister discuss life during the resort town’s prime, back when it was a summertime playground for the wealthy (President Cleveland was a fan).
“My great-aunts would smoke cigarettes, serve candy laced with alcohol, and talk for hours,” Jones told me. They sometimes mused about the lives of George and Willie, having played with them as children and run into them once again, quite by chance, many years later—while visiting a circus. “Miss Leslie!” she remembered them exclaiming, in unison, as if they’d all been wading together in New Castle’s Craigs Creek the day before, their mother scrubbing clothes on a nearby rock.
The story had captured Jones’s imagination as a child, but that was as much as he knew.
“Who ever thought they would be the county’s most famous citizens?” he marveled. “It’s true: the last shall be first.”
On a wintry afternoon, I drove around the deserted mines, now part of the George Washington and Jefferson National Forests, with retiree Don Charlton. A seventy-nine-year-old Craig County native, Charlton made a career of selling land and other property, including several KKK robes he’d auctioned off four years before. “One of ’em brought sixty dollars,” he said, shaking his head.
In 1976, the Roanoke Times sent its first black reporter, twenty-five-year-old JoAnne Poindexter, up to the county to write a story headlined MINORITY OF 12 IN CRAIG; BLACKS LIVE THERE TOO. The county had just recently stopped paying to have the handful of black children bused across the state line to West Virginia schools. “There were times when the white people were lousy, and you wouldn’t have thought they had hearts,” one mother told Poindexter. “But I have no complaints… as long as my children aren’t bothered in school.”
Now, four decades since the integration of Craig County schools, Confederate flags still hang from homes surrounding the abandoned mines, tied to trees and displayed from sagging front-porch railings. Charlton said it would be OK if I took pictures of the scant shacks and the trailers that still lined the dirt road, never mind the NO TRESPASSING signs posted by unseen occupants. A broken tricycle was tipped over on the front yard of one unpainted wooden shack, and I could picture Harriett scrubbing the workers’ clothes in the creek behind it, pinning them on clotheslines to dry.
There were few remnants of what had passed for Fenwick a century before: no signs of the commissary, a hospital, the separate black and white churches, the school, or mule stable, all of it infused with ethnic tensions as seventy Italians and thirty black workers lived on one side of the tracks and thirty-seven whites on the other, with some fifty children among them. To distinguish everybody, the homes of white families were painted gray, and the homes of blacks red. The non-English-speaking Italians lived in gray houses and were given the most dangerous jobs in the mines.
There was a school for children of white workers but none within walking distance for blacks—though blacks and whites were allowed to attend film screenings, in separate sections, at the playhouse. In January 1914, a five-year-old whose family lived near Harriett at Fenwick burned to death while playing “with fire which it had kindled in the yard when its clothing took fire.”
In my newly discovered scenario, the teenaged George and Willie would have worked dirty, menial, and dangerous jobs, especially given their visual impairment.
Geographer Lori LeMay, who researched Fenwick history for the U.S. Forest Service in the early 1990s, said the few black children living at Fenwick were put to work servicing the tipple, culling piles of rock near the spot where ore cars were emptied. The miners, she said, dropped their clothes off for Harriett to wash—outside, in an iron kettle over an open fire—next to her small company-owned house.
A local named Old Man Wilson sold dandelion beer, homemade pies, and other goods to the workers, who knew they were being ripped off by the high prices at the company commissary. Fenwick was an isolating place for black families; the only other black woman there was married to the stable boss, the man who took care of the mules that carted the ore out of the mines. The mules were kept underground during the week but allowed to graze outside the stable on Sundays—to keep them from going blind.
They must have captured the attention of the young George and Willie, animal lovers with poor vision and extremely sensitive eyes. Harriett had listed them as being just nine and eleven in the 1910 census, though other official documents have their births listed several years earlier—which would put them at sixteen and nineteen during the Fenwick stint. Maybe she kept them officially young to keep them from working inside the mines?
And what of the mysterious Mr. Cook? Census records showed a Hattie and Moses Cook living together in Roanoke County in 1900—he worked as a farm laborer, she stayed at home. But when I looked for proof of their marriage and/or subsequent divorce or his death record, it was as if he had vanished from public record. (Only Tom, the third son, would officially, albeit briefly, use the Cook name in adulthood, in his 1930 census entry. On his 1924 marriage license, he was living in Cabell Muse’s rented house and went by the name Thomas Muse.)
Though I never established the Muse brothers’ paternity with certainty, months later I discovered the name of their paternal grandmother, America Cook, in an errant 1920 census document that had the entire family misfiled under the name Mules. That information led me down more inconclusive paths, ancestry tracks that were muddied by generations of systematic servitude, illiteracy, and careless record keeping on the part of census takers.
America Cook was most likely a former slave, born in Virginia in 1827. After the Civil War’s end, she worked as a housekeeper and remained living in the household of John Cook, a miller and white landowner who had probably been her slave master. In 1870, she was living with John Cook and her two mulatto children, twelve-year-old daughter Elizar and toddler Henry, who was one and a half.
Though the handwritten census documents are literally hard to read and even harder to project onto the Muse family tree, my best guess is that Henry Cook was George and Willie’s father, and that landowner John Cook was the brothers’ grandfather. That was a common, though rarely recorded, scenario in the Reconstruction-era rural South, especially in and around Truevine. And it’s another reason why African-American ancestry is so hard to track.
Hanging on his bedroom wall, an incomplete family document still occupies the mind of ninety-four-year-old J. Harry Woody, a Truevine native who lives in a four-square home in Roanoke’s West End. It’s his grandparents’ 1878 marriage license. Where the young couple’s parents’ names are listed, there’s a single line where the groom’s father’s name is intentionally blank, as if he were immaculately conceived.
“My great-grandfather was a white man,” Woody told me, recounting the story his father told him. “See, the landowner would have sex with his black maid, and then tell her that she should feel honored that a white man would want her!” he exclaimed from his living-room hospital bed.
“It was happening from slavery all the way down to when I was growing up” in the 1930s, he added. “They’d force all the maids, and they had kids of all different colors.”
As proof, he points to the thin skin of his forearm, the color of coffee with full-fat cream. “And didn’t none of them ever claim their children,” he added, his eyes blazing, more than a century later, with the indignity of his own father’s fatherlessness. “They were ashamed to claim their children, but they weren’t ashamed to force sex on the maids.”
I wondered aloud how the white children living nearby identified him. Like Janet Johnson and A. J. Reeves, he remembered walking miles to Truevine School—“sixty kids and one teacher in a single room”—while the white children took county-furnished buses and taunted the black walkers along the way.
“They called me nigger!” he said, and scoffed.
Then he changed the subject, staring at a prepublication postcard I’d given him that featured the cover of this book.
Mr. Woody positively lit up, reading the tobacco field on the cover like he was divining tea leaves, and this is what he saw: “Looks just like tobacco from the thirties,” he said, pointing to the yellow-tinged leaves. Immature plants, still months away from harvest. The yellowed leaves meant that the farmer who planted the crop was poor—and probably black. “Back when blacks wasn’t able to buy fertilizer because they didn’t have the money to pay for it. You can tell that ’cause the leaves are turning yellow before they got to be full-sized.”
He wanted to know when this book would be for sale. Publication was still more than six months away. He said younger people, black and white, needed to understand the harsh realities of their ancestors. “They think we’re lying! They say, ‘That was then, this is now.’ They think everything was roses, but ain’t nobody making any of it up.”
I’d been sitting at this bedside for going on two hours. It was a crisp April morning. He’d ended the interview twice already, saying he was tired, then kept telling stories when I stood up to go.
Fenwick itself was a short-lived enterprise, closing in 1924, two decades after it opened, when ore discovered in Minnesota, Ohio, and Pennsylvania was found to be easier and cheaper to extract. The town bank, the railway spur, and several of the resorts followed suit. The buildings that housed them are long gone. Some were moved when the mines closed; others were buried when the area was turned into a wetlands and recreation area.
Don Charlton recalled his mother writing letters for an illiterate elderly black man who had worked at the mines and remembered the way he pulled three cents to pay for the stamp from his coin purse. Uncle Ed, as Charlton called him, wore a pungent asphidity bag around his neck as a talisman. Popular at the time, especially among African Americans, the bag contained rotted herbs that were believed to ward off polio and the flu.
Judging from the New Castle Record, the biggest news of the day, not counting the heated debates over Prohibition (the paper was pro) and women’s suffrage (con), focused solely on the land-owning whites: Whose cousins were coming to visit to take the healing waters of Craig? And what on earth had happened to the prominent citizen convicted of murder who had broken out of jail, the last trace of him being a set of bloody footprints found on the top of Burks Mountain?
His trial had been such a spectacle that Anna Clark took the train from Covington to her old New Castle hometown to watch it unfold.
Charlton and I drove past the clear, rushing creeks that have drawn visitors to Craig County since Thomas Jefferson’s time. He pointed out the old rail bed that once held the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway spur, which probably carried Harriett and her children to Covington, where so many blacks migrated for work in the thriving paper-mill factories—and to escape the burgeoning presence of the KKK.
Charlton beamed at the gorgeous Fenwick Mines Recreation Area, a U.S. Forest Service park shelter. With a boardwalk for the wetlands and its handicapped-accessible creek-side trail, the mining site has become a big draw for birders, especially those chasing red-shouldered hawks and pine warblers—proof, as a cultural geographer researching the area once noted, that “humanity’s disruptive influences can be erased from the earth.”
In 1998, KKK chapters from Maryland and Tennessee held a picnic at the area. It was not a rally, a park-service employee assured the media, just a “pitch-horseshoes-and-eat-hot-dogs sort of thing.”
Nancy Saunders knew her great-grandmother Harriett had worked briefly at the Episcopal Diocese–run boys’ home in Covington sometime before her move to Roanoke in the mid-to late teens. She’d wondered what it must have felt like for Harriett to watch the homeless boys play on the spacious grounds, attend school in the charming brick cottages, and entertain visits from Santa and Boy Scout leaders—while her own sons weren’t just homeless, they had vanished entirely, and to where? Not even their original carnival managers seemed to know.
But the scenario of Harriett mothering children by someone other than Cabell Muse, whom she wouldn’t marry for seven more years, came as an unlikely detour on the family’s long-accepted timeline. (Neither Willie nor George ever mentioned the surname Cook, according to family members, and when Harriett and Cabell married, they both listed themselves as single on the marriage license.) The implication that Harriett may have initially contracted with a traveling carnival to put her boys to work was another, even bigger surprise.
If that version was true, it would replace the narrative of two child sharecroppers being plucked from the fields.
I was more than a little nervous about broaching the new revelations with Nancy. “She still doesn’t trust you all the way, but she’s working on it,” her best friend, Marsha, told me a few weeks before. (Halfway through the reporting of this book, Marsha attended a talk I gave at the Library of Virginia in Richmond, introducing herself only afterward—then reporting back to Nancy what I’d said publicly, during the Q&A, about this book. “She has me checking on you,” Marsha said, winking.)
For months, I’d been e-mailing Nancy every new photo I found featuring her uncles—and never once gotten a reply. I’d mailed her reprints I’d had made of a portrait of the brothers for her cousin Louise. Nancy returned most of my phone calls, but only after several days, sometimes weeks, had passed.
But I knew the Hattie Cook surprise could be unwelcome news. To ease (and speed) the conversation along, I delivered a small Christmas gift in early December, one that represented our two common interests—plants and food. I left a ten-dollar pot of rosemary on her front porch, though the metaphor didn’t hit me until later: rosemary is a symbol of remembrance, as in Would it kill you to return my calls?
The tug on her southern manners worked. When Nancy called a few hours later to thank me, we exchanged pleasantries. Then I told her about the Billboard article.
She was stunned, recalling the marriage license located a month earlier between Harriett Dickerson and Cabell Muse—from 1917, much later than the family had imagined. “After that, I was wondering if they were even Cabell’s children,” she said. “But I swear I never knew their mama was a Cook!”
This time she was curious, open, and not at all defensive. She seemed relieved by the possibility that she was not kin to Cabell Muse. Long ago she’d adopted her uncle Willie’s position that Cabell was a philanderer and a drunk, and—as I would soon learn—a very tragic figure.
She had long wondered why many of her nonalbino relatives were extremely light-skinned and now wondered if George and Willie’s father was perhaps white. Her grandmother Annie Belle, who helped raise her, was so pale that many mistook her for white. Nancy herself is very light-skinned. And though she is not technically albino, Erika Turner, Nancy’s teenaged cousin—who has albinism on both sides of her family tree—often gets bombarded with rude questions from classmates about her auburn-blond hair and hazel eyes.
“To be albino in the African-American community, you don’t fit in anywhere. You’re not black, and you’re not white; it’s hard now, but back then, it would have been extremely hard,” said Bonnie LeRoy, a University of Minnesota professor and genetics counselor.
George and Willie’s father, whoever he was, was probably teased mercilessly because of his sons’ condition. Even in modern times, some fathers at the clinic where LeRoy counsels families with albinism, skeptical of the child’s paternity, have abandoned their families altogether, she said.
“Maybe Mr. Cook’s the one who sold them,” Nancy said, referring to Willie and George.
It was the first time she was willing to entertain the idea that maybe they hadn’t been kidnapped from the start, despite what Willie himself had always maintained. But she firmly and resolutely believes that Harriett was not involved. “I don’t dispute what you found, but I can’t imagine all these years and all these people who knew the family, and nobody brought it up before,” she said.
Besides, as she’d told me many times before, Uncle Willie himself insisted they’d been kidnapped. “And my uncle Willie was not a liar.”
Nancy’s mother, Dot, had made the same argument. So had her grandmother Annie Belle, who was just a toddler when the boys left home. Neither had ever mentioned the name Cook—even though Cook must have been Annie Bell’s childhood name.
But what if Willie himself didn’t actually recall? Maybe he was too young when it happened to remember, or too traumatized? Maybe he’d heard the story so many times that what he remembered wasn’t the reality of having been kidnapped—that piece of candy coming toward him, proffered by a stranger in a sweltering tobacco field—but the memory of hearing that story told?
Or maybe Willie Muse remembered his early days in the circus the way a child, any child, recalls the first time a parent inflicts pain, even unintentionally. My own mother loved me to the moon and back, and yet my first recollection of her is a story I’ve never recounted before out loud or in print—because it makes her look bad. She accidentally burned me with a cigarette during a raucous game of euchre while I was seated on her lap at our kitchen table.
This is nothing like contracting with a carnival showman to put your two young teenagers on a train, granted, even if you thought he’d bring them back. But who is anyone to judge the pressures facing an illiterate washerwoman raising five children alone in rural Virginia during the harshest years of Jim Crow?
Nancy seemed excited that I’d found a new story thread, albeit one that raised more questions than it put to rest.
“Old people, you know they could keep some serious secrets,” she said, finally.
She would see if she could nudge anything new out of her ninety-two-year-old aunt, Martha Turner—the only living member of her mother’s generation.
But the Cook name was also a mystery to Martha, she reported back a few weeks later.
Serious secrets weren’t unheard of between showmen and the parents of sideshow acts. Circus-goers had long clamored for exotic acts from the so-called Dark Continent, and several African Americans had been recruited to portray African natives. Black sideshow musicians, many hailing from New Orleans, took jobs playing such African “savages” on the side.
“There was a circus term for it, even,” said Bernth Lindfors, a University of Texas literature and African-American studies professor who has written about black sideshow performers. “You’d pretend to be someone running around with a spear and a grass skirt, and that was your ‘Zulu ticket,’” he explained.
That was certainly the case with William Henry “Zip” Johnson, whom Barnum claimed to have found in West Africa in a “PERFECTLY NUDE STATE, roving among the trees and branches, in the manner common to the Monkey and Orang Outang.”
But Barnum hadn’t been the first to display Johnson, the son of former slaves William and Mahalia Johnson. In 1860, he bought the rights to exhibit him from the much smaller Van Emburgh’s Circus, located in Somerville, New Jersey, not far from Johnson’s hometown. Many years later, a woman claiming to be his sister recounted that he’d been sold at the age of four “by his parents in need of funds.” The details of that initial contract have been lost to history, but the Johnsons had six children to feed, and the money offered by that first circus must have felt like a fortune to the newly freed slaves—even if their teenaged son was forced to screech and rattle the bars of his cage, pretending to eat raw meat.
One obituary writer noted that for the first ten years of his career, Johnson “had almost to be forced to mount the platform,” suggesting that he was coerced, at least initially, to perform.
Was the remuneration worth the early family loss? Or was Johnson better off playing the role of Zip?
How do you measure a life?
In dollars, by Barnum’s accounting. And so, regardless of how much Barnum supposedly grew to love his favorite performer, he also fiercely controlled his every movement onstage and off, from profit margins to publicity stunts. Johnson’s true backstory was suppressed in trumped-up press accounts and steeped in a racist, exploitative climate that underscored the ideological mainstream of the day: black people were subhuman.
Like Johnson’s backstory, the genesis of George and Willie Muse’s career is largely undocumented. If their mother did initially contract with the Great American Shows, it is clear from her beseeching notice in Billboard that she was “anxious to learn the whereabouts of her two sons” and to get them back. Being black, illiterate, and husbandless at the time, she certainly wouldn’t have had the upper hand in contract negotiations. “She couldn’t read her own name if you put it in front of her,” Nancy said—and if she did sign a contract, it was only with an X.
Like her sharecropping relatives on settling-day, she was dependent on the honor of the white man to explain, and live up to, the written word.
Billboard updates written by the show’s business manager, Ben H. Klein, made the touring company sound like the most cheerful and beneficent family-oriented affair. The wife of his partner, Morris Miller, ran the candy concession and held down the fort with Klein while Miller went on buying forays to Chicago, for instance, to shop for new train cars. (Miller’s goal, he told Billboard in 1914, was to double the carnival’s size, amassing a twenty-car train, by the next season.)
The carousel operator took a vacation to his home in New Kensington, Pennsylvania, to visit his wife. And Klein himself vacationed on a two-week “pleasant sojourn” before returning to find that carnival-goers in Ligonier, Indiana, “were wearing a smile that won’t come off.”
In Fort Wayne, a newspaper referred to George and Willie only as “strange creatures,” highlights of a small sideshow affair that also featured the “smallest woman in the world.”
But George and Willie never made it to the carnival’s Hot Springs, Arkansas, winter quarters. By the late fall of 1914, their co-manager Robert Stokes had broken off from the Great American Shows and was exhibiting them as a solo act (or single-O) in store shows and dime museums, according to Harriett’s Billboard notice. George and Willie were now being exhibited as the Ethiopian Monkey Men—very much in the vein of Zip, only full-sized and albino, and not yet so famous.
Where Stokes took them next is unclear. In one showman’s account, George and Willie performed during that period in a Boston dime museum called Austin and Stone’s, a block away from Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market. An offshoot of Barnum’s American Museum, the venue exhibited carnival freaks and curiosities, both real and phony, with a stage next door for vaudeville acts. Presiding over the spectacle was a barker named Professor William S. Hutchings, a former Barnum and Bailey Circus lecturer whose spiels were so loquacious that Harvard forensics professors liked to dispatch their students to observe him and take notes.
“The Professor was loath to use one word if eight or nine would do,” one showman wrote of Hutchings, who ended every story by mumbling “Marvelous, marvelous!”
Austin and Stone’s was so cutting-edge in its day that it even had its own air-conditioning system: large blocks of ice were placed in a trough and covered by a grate running along the center aisle. As one advertisement ballyhooed, “Our Lecture Hall always maintains the leading curiosities of the day from all parts of the world, and lectures on the same are delivered hourly, by PROF. HUTCHINGS, the most eloquent descriptive orator in America or Europe.”
The details about the Boston museum were all true. But George and Willie could not have performed there, I realized, after discovering the museum had been torn down in 1912, shortly after the professor’s death. The demolition paved the way for the new vaudeville theater, Scollay’s Olympia, where comedian Milton Berle would get his start, sometimes performing in blackface.
For the Muse brothers’ earliest career, then, my timeline relies only on Harriett’s anxious plea for more information and the Tibbals picture: George and Willie standing there in their too-small suits, looking not very marvelous.
The man who printed the picture, in fact, turned out to be so much better documented than his teenaged subjects: Albert R. Bawden lived in Davenport, Iowa, where he ran a novelty postcard-making service and print shop with his brothers in the 1910s and ’20s, and also worked as treasurer of a local bank. His wife held society luncheons while Albert ran the local merchants’ bowling league, his average a respectable 170.
The novelty-postcard business was thriving, judging from the hundreds of weekly Billboard classifieds. In fact, in every nook and cranny of the country, any number of enterprises seemed to be eager to sell goods to traveling showmen—or to join their tribe. From a sampling of one of the six-page classified spreads:
Porcupines perfect for “a good pit show attraction” could be purchased by writing to “FLINT” in North Waterford, Maine. One could find a fellow in Kansas who promised to display his own brand of “DARE-DEVIL DEED-DEFYING DANGER and death in an entirely new and unequaled motorcycle act.”
With this molasses-slow version of eBay, a buyer could locate such hard-to-find items as shooting galleries, popcorn wagons, and a rebuilt Edison moving-picture machine.
And people, too, according to the messages and ads:
“The thinnest man alive”—or in Chattanooga, anyway—was keen to join a store show or carnival. An aging but still employable “good freak born with feet and no legs” could be leased by contacting Eli Bowen in Thayer, Indiana. (Bowen had supposedly been discovered by Barnum at an Ohio country fair and already had a long career as the Legless Acrobat—but, now seventy-four, he seemed to be hearing the call of the road.)
The father of Fred Pettit wanted to hear from his wanderlust-filled son, who’d presumably run away with the circus, “before too long.”
An elderly couple sought a house-sitting job for traveling show people.
The so-called Kid Albino from Stamford, Connecticut, who doubled as a famous hypnotist, offered himself for hire to any “high-class vaudeville act.”
And a multitalented family consisting of man, wife, and child posted a notice about its “BIG NOVELTY ACT,” promising to deliver “real fancy shooting; we also use whips, violin, cornet, piano and sing.”
Despite such a wide range of documented human spectacle, for two years the Ethiopian Monkey Men were curiously absent from both the media and the marketplace. If Stokes was exhibiting them in stores, as Harriett believed, he was being quiet about it.
Back home in Virginia in late 1914, it had just become illegal for any child to be employed in factories, shops, mines, mercantile establishments, laundries, bakeries, and brickyards. The groundbreaking labor activist Lewis Hine was in the process of photographing several small children from Roanoke, including twelve-year-old Mamie Witt, who was helping support “an able-bodied, dependent father,” and a seven-year-old, Frank Robinson, who swept the floors of the Roanoke Cotton Mill in bare feet. Across the nation, Hine’s muckraking photographs began to change the way Americans thought about children’s rights. (“I counted seven apparently under fourteen and three under twelve years old,” he wrote of one Roanoke factory.)
Teenagers working in the sideshow may well have thought, “These people are going to stare at me anyway, so why shouldn’t I get something for it—and help my family out at the same time?” pointed out historian Jane Nicholas. That had been the case with the legless, teenaged Bowen when he hired himself out to a traveling showman, shortly after his father’s death, to help support his mother and seven siblings.
Besides, it was easier than sorting rock at the Fenwick Mines.
“One of the hardest things for modern audiences to understand is, parents sometimes did this, and yet they still loved their children. It’s that combination of love and financial need that can be so hard to tease out,” Nicholas told me. “People will say, ‘If they really loved their children, they wouldn’t have done that,’ but people do all sorts of things for their children.”
During the time the Muse brothers began performing, Nicholas pointed out, adults could legally and literally mail children—by affixing stamps to their shirts and putting them on a train.
I wondered if the Muse brothers felt like the dislocated and orphaned Eskimo Minik, who had been brought to the United States in 1897 at the age of six or seven with his father and four other villagers from Greenland at the request of exhibit-hungry explorers and museum directors. They’d been displayed to paying customers aboard the ship Hope, then housed and exhibited at the American Museum of Natural History. They were ostensibly there to be interviewed, examined, and measured, but all except Minik and his father died soon afterward from diseases their immune systems were not equipped to handle.
From a patronizing New York Times account written in October 1897: “The unfortunate little savages have caught cold or warmth, they do not know which, but assuming it was the latter their sole endeavor yesterday was to keep cool. Their efforts in this direction are a source of amusement to several scores of visitors.”
When Minik’s father died the following February, the museum faked a funeral for him to deceive Minik about the body’s whereabouts, wrapping a corpse-length log and covering it with fur. It was nine more years before Minik discovered that his father’s body was actually inside a glass case at the museum. His impassioned quest to retrieve his father’s remains and give him a proper Inuit burial—the subject of a remarkable 1986 book by Kenn Harper called Give Me My Father’s Body—was not successful during his lifetime.
“You’re a race of scientific animals,” Minik said in 1909, railing against the museum. “I know I’ll never get my father’s bones out of the American Museum of Natural History. I am glad enough to get away before they grab my brains and stuff them into a jar.” (It wasn’t until 1993, many decades after Minik’s death, that his father’s remains were repatriated for burial in the family’s home village. Four years later, a commemorative plaque was installed at the Greenland gravesite, with a phrase that translated to They have come home.)
Uprooted and orphaned, Minik lived what Harper described as a “tortured and lonely life,” unable to entirely adapt to either country. “It would have been better for me had I never been brought to civilization and educated,” Minik told a reporter after he’d journeyed back to Greenland, only to find himself missing America and then returning to New York. “It leaves me between two extremes, where it would seem that I can get nowhere.”
While Minik’s narrative varies greatly from the Muse brothers’—especially the ending—the two arcs share parallel threads of cultural, familial, and geographical displacement. When the literate Minik eloquently describes what it was like to be dislocated, ripped from his family, and exhibited at the dawn of the twentieth century, I can picture Willie and George feeling exactly the same way:
“Aside from hopeless loneliness, do you know what it is to be sad—and to feel a terrible longing to go home, and to know that you are absolutely without hope?” Minik wrote about the period following his father’s death. Even after being “adopted” by a kindly family, he still cried most of the time and fretted constantly about the possibility of being returned to the museum.
When he enrolled in college, Minik felt like a “freak to those about me,” he wrote. Only after being taken in by a farm family in New Hampshire, where he labored in obscurity as a lumberjack, did he describe being content. But he died soon after, of the Spanish flu, in 1918. He was believed to be twenty-seven or twenty-eight.
Unlike in Minik’s case, there was relatively little media discussion of the ethics of exhibiting black sideshow performers, most of whom were unschooled and unable to leave a written record of their own experiences. The New York Times noted in 1914 that Zip was the oldest freak still performing with the Barnum and Bailey Circus. The reporter gushed as he recollected Barnum’s 1864 Cooper Union lecture, “How to Get Money,” with Zip and the Wild Men of Borneo flanking him onstage. “Zip is almost entirely devoid of mentality, but a peculiar look comes over his face whenever there is shown to him a photograph of his first protector and for that matter, owner, the late Phineas T. Barnum,” the reporter wrote.
The so-called Wild Men were forty-pound dwarves named Hiram and Barney Davis who lived on a farm outside Mount Vernon, Ohio, when their family was first approached by a showman in 1852. Their parents initially declined to part with them, but the mother reportedly changed her mind when the showman returned with an irresistible pile of cash.
When Barney Davis died at eighty-five, in 1912, his niece held his funeral at her home, pointing out that her uncle was a real person and not a freak. While Barnum had pitched them as being monkeylike and having paws, she pointed out Barney’s perfectly formed hands and told mourners that the brothers conversed easily, though they’d been instructed to speak gibberish in their act.
“I wanted people to see that they were not freaks,” she told an interviewer. “Wouldn’t you have done that for them?”
The Davis brothers’ specialty—which they displayed while decked out in short pants and leotards—was performing feats of strength, routinely lifting the heaviest volunteers in the audience as one of several featured stunts. Dressed elaborately in an effort to aggrandize their appearance and inflate their status, they were like the Muse brothers in that their looks deviated from that of the general population, but they were otherwise able-bodied and capable of demonstrating talents.
As with the Muse family, the Davises had lost track of the brothers by the time they had become regulars in the circus world. In 1880, they even instituted a lawsuit to have them declared legally dead—at the same time Hiram and Barney were about to be hired on with the Barnum and London Circus.
A century before the Internet, it was harder for an isolated family in rural America to keep tabs on far-flung relatives—even those who appeared on the front pages of the New York Times. It was not so hard, then, to whisk a person’s loved ones away and never return them, leaving their families to lie awake at night, wondering if they were dead or alive.
The Muses’ special skill? Nothing the showmen recognized right off the bat.
But it wasn’t long before someone heard them singing a popular song, an Irish ballad recorded by tenor John McCormack in 1914 that soon became a World War I anthem, sung by soldiers on their way to the Western Front. The brothers began a lifelong obsession with “A Long Way to Tipperary,” a ballad about longing for home:
Christmas 1914, their first of many away from their mother, people were talking about the unexpected Christmas Day truce along the Western Front. Snatches of “Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht” had been heard drifting across a frigid Belgium battlefield, littered with fallen soldiers. Silent night, holy night. Men who’d been shooting to kill put their weapons down for the day, allowing corpses to be recovered and buried.
Back in Virginia, Harriett followed news of the war, and she sang along with the radio at work.
It’s a long way to Tipperary,
It’s a long way to go.
It was quiet in the tiny Boys Home quarters she shared with her three youngest children. Harriett waited for a response to her Billboard notice, but every day after the mailman had come and gone, Anna Clark sighed and shook her head.
In her mind’s eye, George and Willie were frozen at chin height, their blond curls still short. She prayed George was reminding Willie to stay out of the sun.
She must have known it by now: she had been duped. The boys might have been kidnapped by the circus, or they might have been loaned to it. They might even have seen it, at first, as a kind of adventure. But they were most certainly trapped in it now, wherever they were.
She would never reveal to them—or any of her other relatives—how they came to join the circus.
She would take that serious secret to the grave.
But first, Harriett Muse would right the wrong done to her boys. Their mama was very definitely not dead, not yet, and she wanted them back. One day George and Willie would know that with certainty.
And so would the circus.