The brothers’ birthdays came and went, George’s on Christmas Eve and Willie’s in April, celebrated often around Easter—holidays now made all the more poignant for their mother.
D. W. Griffith’s film homage to white supremacy, The Birth of a Nation, based on the novel The Clansman, premiered in 1915, and Franz Kafka published his landmark novella, The Metamorphosis, about the absurdity of existence and the cruelty of power the same year. In 1916, not long after Pancho Villa tried to reclaim New Mexico, President Wilson announced he was running for a second term literally by throwing his hat into the middle of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus center ring—and forever cementing a cliché. (A lifelong circus fan, Wilson had wanted to accept Charlie Ringling’s invitation to ride an elephant, but his advisers nixed the idea of a Democrat riding on the symbol of Republicanism, and so did the Secret Service.)
As Americans shed their Puritanical prudishness, and factory work began to give people in rural areas and small towns money for amusements, the circus became the pinnacle of popular culture. Barnum, who died in 1891, may have been the Walt Disney of his day, but as the market for the circus grew, his successors were reaching more customers than the pioneer showman could have dreamed. In the American West, the Al G. Barnes Circus grabbed headlines with thirty train cars full of its wild-animal menagerie and circus-stunt acts, and had a near-monopoly in the western states. Farmers sold hay and grain so they could afford to take their families to the eye-popping shows.
At the turn of the twentieth century, ninety-eight circuses and menageries traveled across the country, the most in American history. The largest among them were traveling company towns, mammoth three-ring railroad circuses that rattled across the nation, toting more than a thousand employees and hundreds of animals.
In the Midwest and along the East Coast, Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey—the two entities combined in 1919—moved its version of a small city on a near-nightly basis, shrewdly timing its course to bring in the most dollars. In the South, that meant fall, after the cotton crop was picked, and right after its tour through the midwestern states, timed to capture the wheat farmers when they were flush with harvest cash. Its “big top,” or main performance tent, seated fifteen thousand people for its daily afternoon and evening performances, which were held at 2:00 and 8:00 p.m.
By contrast, the carnivals George and Willie Muse first traveled with were much smaller affairs. When they stopped in a town, they tended to stay for a week at a time.
But there were dozens of such shows back in the 1910s and ’20s—enough to take up several pages of news in Billboard, which was sold weekly in local pool halls, newsstands, and tobacco shops across the nation. For people who already worked in the industry but dreamed of “hopscotching,” or switching shows, Billboard was typically sold in front of the cookhouse entrance. It was also manna to bored teens who dreamed about ditching it all and joining the carny life. Circus people even had a nickname for Billboard, as they did for a lot of things. They called it the Educator.
Carnivals tended to be somewhat smaller affairs, with five or fewer rides, a Wild West show, maybe some clown and wild-animal acts, and a freak show with five or six exhibits. They were often sponsored by local Elks clubs as a way to attract new members, and Elks organizers would close the Main Street down for a week at a time to make way for the rides, acts, and food stands.
“Circus people thought they were more highbrow than a carnival, but the term wasn’t really applicable to either of them,” the collector and researcher Fred Pfening III said. “Watching a circus was a nonintellectual activity.”
But to a nation straining against its Puritan rigidity—“We have yet to learn again the forgotten art of gayety,” as Nathaniel Hawthorne put it—a traveling show was a break in the dreary monotony of farm and factory life. As Ringling pitchman Dexter Fellows noted, “People flocked to tent shows as though drawn by some overmastering spell,” often wearing their Sunday finery.
Barnum had been the first to go against midwestern ministers’ teachings that the circus was “Satan’s own show,” and he did it with clever subterfuge: he issued free passes to clergymen. Early in their careers, the Ringling brothers boosted their audience by taking advantage of the growing number of “drummers,” or traveling salesmen, who canvassed the country. They issued them special credentials that came with free admission privileges to any Ringling show.
George and Willie hadn’t yet caught the attention of such sprawling circuses. The regional carnivals they traveled among were fly-by-night affairs that changed names often to give the appearance of offering patrons something new, to entice return patronage. “Quite often the carnivals would change their name, as you would change your underwear,” said the collector and author Warren Raymond.
Stokes and Eastman had named the Muses the Ethiopian Monkey Men sometime during the 1914 season. They also exhibited them as Stokes’s Monkey Men and Eastman’s Monkey Men.
But it was the brothers’ next manager who would make the biggest impact on—and the most money from—George and Willie Muse. Sometime between 1914 and 1917, Candy Shelton anointed himself their caretaker and their captor, their supervisor and their sponge.
He changed their stage names regularly, and working with the tacit approval of subsequent show owners, he refused to pay them—or return them to their mother.
In a nod to the ghost of Barnum, for a time Shelton named them Barnum’s Original Monkey Men. At other times they were pitched as Darwin’s Missing Links, thought to represent something between ape and human—just as Barnum had done with William Henry “Zip” Johnson and the Bronx Zoo with Ota Benga—except when they were heralded as the Sheep-Headed Men, in which case the ruse evoked a ram.
Depending on the crowd, the brothers were said to have been discovered on a raft floating off Madagascar, or the Gulf of Mexico, or somewhere in the South African bush, cavorting with the springbok.
The truth was considerably less colorful. And more cruel. Heralded as “nature’s greatest mistakes,” George and Willie were modern-day slaves, hidden in plain sight, at a time when naïve and eager audiences didn’t think to ask questions about contracts or working conditions, and civil rights didn’t much exist for children, women, or blacks. Circus- and carnival-goers simply smiled and took the sideshow lecturer at his word.
For an itchy-footed farm boy from Powder Springs, Tennessee, trying to work his way up the carnival ranks—first in concessions and, now, as an act manager and lecturer/announcer—Candy Shelton waxed effusive in an ever-shifting spiel about the brothers’ geographic origins.
His distinguishing feature, according to a nephew, was that he was missing four of the fingers on his left hand. He’d been grinding meat on his family farm as a teen when the stool he was sitting on slipped out from under him. When he instinctively reached to right himself, his hand went into the grinder.
“He still had his thumb,” the nephew, Don Nicely, said.
When his family migrated to Detroit in the mid-1910s so his father could work the lines at Ford Motor Company, Shelton, the eldest child, was in his mid-to late teens. Rather than accompany the family, he joined a little-known traveling carnival passing through and headed south with it. Before long he had ditched the middle name his family members always referred to him by—Herman—and was christened Candy by fellow concessionaires.
According to Al Stencell, the sideshow expert and retired circus operator, the nickname stemmed from his first carnival job as a candy butcher. A pre–Civil War phrase that dates to the very first person to work selling candy in the carnival stands, it was initially used to describe the man who’d been the town’s meat butcher, and the name stuck.
Back in Virginia, Prohibition was proving a boon to the Franklin County moonshiners, who’d formerly catered to just the local market. In Roanoke, a black pharmacist who lived near Jordan’s Alley was tried for practicing medicine without a license and received a six-month jail sentence, though it’s unclear if he actually served the time. Still, John Pinkard’s mostly black patients continued flocking to the “yarb doc,” or herb doctor.
Pinkard was taking advantage of Roanoke’s segregation laws by developing a black subdivision on the Roanoke County outskirts called Pinkard’s Court, not far from the Franklin County line, touted as “exclusively for colored people.” With a flair for fashion and chauffeurs to drive his new cars, he erected a cast-iron arch at the entrance to the development and built his own fence out of ceramic jugs emptied of the alcohol he mixed with wild cherry bark, tobacco, and sassafras roots for his treatments.
Two generations removed from slavery, Pinkard’s Court represented black Roanoke’s aspirational suburban middle class, a neighborhood of matching two-story houses peopled by silk-mill and railroad workers. It would have made an impression on Harriett when she passed it en route to her shack on Ten-and-a-Half Street shortly after marrying Cabell Muse, in 1917.
Her hope was to marry a railroad man, someone who could take care of her and her youngest three children, who were now teens; maybe even buy a house.
The Great Migration was under way, the organic movement between World War I and the 1970s of six million African Americans from the rural South to urban centers in the northeastern, midwestern, and western states. Eager to escape the state-sanctioned violence encouraged by Jim Crow laws, former sharecroppers also migrated en masse to southern cities like Roanoke, an internal migration that was sometimes the first stop on their northward quest for freedom—for the vote, for the chance to make a living and acquire property, for the right to live without fear of being lynched.
As the historian Benjamin Quarles has written: “Whatever the Southerner had surrendered at Appomattox, he had not surrendered his belief that colored people were inferior to white.”
In Florida, a black person could be given thirty-nine lashes for “intruding himself into any religious or other assembly of white persons.” Mississippi blacks were allowed to vote only if they paid a poll tax, showed proof of residency, and read and interpreted a section of the state constitution.
In Virginia, too, poll taxes had been cemented by the addition of the so-called understanding clause, part of the new Virginia Constitution of 1902. The tax was $1.50 per head, to be paid six months in advance of any election, and voters could register only if they could read and explain any provision of the newly written state constitution.
The clause gave extraordinary powers to county and city registrars, who got to ask questions of prospective voters—and judge their replies. Answers from white Democrats were usually right; the replies of blacks and Republicans were often not.
Fearing Virginians would not vote to disenfranchise themselves, delegates had opted not to submit their new constitution to a vote and simply proclaimed it law. After various court challenges, the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals backed the politicians, ruling in favor of the new constitution. Voter participation dropped significantly, especially among blacks.
The segregationist-written constitution remained in effect until July 1, 1971.
It had been more than two years since she’d last been in contact with her sons. Harriett knew nothing of Candy Shelton or their whereabouts when Billboard boasted in March 1917 that Barnum’s Original Monkey Men “will undoubtedly be among the big money getters of the season.” George and Willie were now performing with the Fort Worth, Texas–based J. George Loos Shows carnival, where the banner attraction was Booger Red’s Congress of Rough Riders. A droopy-eyed Texan who got his start in the business running a traveling burlesque show, Loos was known for mentoring a host of carnival operators during his forty-year career.
“Quality first seems to be the slogan of this company… the shows are all clean and meritorious,” a newspaper in Corsicana, Texas, gushed after the carnival’s first performance there, in 1916—though it changed its tune a few years later when Loos was convicted of running an illegal gambling operation.
While it’s not clear how Shelton and Loos met—both listed Fort Worth as their home base in official documents over the next decade—they oddly shared a left-hand deformity: Loos’s second and third fingers were webbed.
And they shared an affinity for African-American performers, judging from a 1916 classified ad taken out by Loos: “FREAKS WANTED FOR TEN-IN-ONE. Colored pianist, also singers and dancers with good wardrobe and ability for [minstrel] show. Talkers and man to handle show.”
With a novel freak act now in his possession, Shelton used his salesman’s gift of gab to exploit their differences: he knew how to exaggerate their attributes to patrons inside the sideshow tent.
As their manager, Shelton would have negotiated the brothers’ contracts with the carnival or circus owner, outfitted them, and arranged for their photographs and banners. He made sure they got fed—but maybe not that well, judging from their skinny stature in the Tibbals photo.
The arrangement was probably not unlike the contract written for Johnson (aka Zip), made between his manager, Captain O. K. White, and Ringling Brothers, which outlined monthly $40 payments to White, with proceeds from the photo souvenirs split evenly between Ringling and White.
And like the Muse brothers, Johnson was paid only in food and board.
“Zip was treated like a trained dog,” said Pfening.
A similar contract was written for George Bell, “the colored giant” and minstrel, who stood seven feet eleven inches tall (and wore a size 23 shoe). But that agreement was issued directly between Ringling and Bell, with the latter signing an X. Bell was paid only $12 a month but appeared to have more agency in his circus dealings. As Pfening put it, “I am sure Bell was of at least average intelligence and just got screwed being black in a lousy time to be such.… He had no need for a representative to handle his financial affairs, as Zip did.”
Freak-show hierarchy, then, paralleled the order of the day: a white giant working during that same period for the Ringling-owned Forepaugh-Sells Brothers Big United Shows earned $25 a month, which was paid to him directly—more than double what Bell earned.
Traveling by rail in sixteen cars, the Loos carnival featured not only the Monkey Men but also a musical group called the Dixieland Minstrels, “an array of talent that will be hard to equal in the colored minstrel line.” (Carnival workers dismissively called the minstrel shows plant shows, short for plantation.)
The Loos show also exhibited a fat girl named Jolly Vallera, “who has a neat frame-up… and is everything that the name of fat girl implies,” and Booger Red’s Wild West act, featuring twenty-five riders and ropers. Boasting that it was the only outdoor amusement enterprise that had been on tour more than four hundred consecutive weeks without closing, Loos took out ads in Billboard proclaiming, “You Can’t Lose with Loos,” and promising “SUCCESS” and “PROSPERITY” in an all-caps spiel.
Shelton displayed his ambitions early on, working his way to bigger jobs and better shows. “Most people in management start out with smaller jobs and work their way up,” Al Stencell told me. Many workers who managed acts had secondary positions, their so-called cherry-pie jobs, and Shelton was frequently also listed as both a manager and ticket seller in circus programs.
Ticket sellers often engaged in shortchanging customers—a common practice that shortchange, or shortcake, artists took pride in. They developed elaborate dialogues and faux-counting routines designed to distract or confuse the circus-goer while they were busy palming a quarter (or more) from the person’s change.
Shelton could stretch the truth to match the arm span of a circus giant. In 1920, he told census takers in Belton, Texas, where he and his new wife, Cora, were wintering, that he was the manager of a traveling sideshow when he was really just overseeing one of its acts. In 1923, he bragged to a newspaper reporter in Hamilton, Ohio, that he owned his own circus when, again, he was only managing one of several entertainers.
Shelton not only pocketed the Muse brothers’ earnings; he also kept the money he made by selling their photos, proceeds of which were split between him and the lecturer, who spoke inside the tent as the acts were being exhibited.
Shelton is mentioned sparingly in press accounts and doesn’t even merit his own file in the country’s circus museums. But Harry Lewiston, a longtime contemporary of Shelton’s who was also a ticket seller and sideshow manager at many of the same circuses, described the lifestyle unblinkingly, down to the shortchanger’s code of honor: “That we would never short change a child, a woman, a cripple, a man with a child in his arms, an elderly person, or a man we didn’t think could afford the loss.” (Circus operators shortchanged more often than carnival operators because they were only in town for one night—and less likely to draw the ire of police.)
“Ringling and all the big shows would go on and on about being clean ‘Sunday School shows,’ which was pure B.S.,” Stencell told me. “The only reason for anyone taking a job around a show as a ticket seller was to shortchange.”
The circus was a grift-filled enterprise that attracted adventurers and others drawn to society’s fringe, especially those eager to ditch sad histories and societal restrictions. Some circuses even hired professional pickpockets to circulate throughout the carefree crowds—as long as they split their take with management.
Shortchangers were aided and abetted by “fixers,” or “patches”—circus employees who arrived at new venues and immediately headed out to grease the palms of public officials, policemen, and fire marshals, persuading them to bend the rules.
Lewiston, for instance, employed his show’s patch every time he exhibited the naked hermaphrodite Mona Harris, against a town’s decency laws, as his show’s “blow-off,” or special-admission attraction offered at the end of the regular sideshow.
A red-haired, buxom woman who had both a penis and a vagina, Mona also “had a split personality as far as sex was concerned,” Lewiston wrote. “She seemed to be equally attracted to both men and women, and would carry on a romance with either sex if she got the chance.” State sodomy laws criminalizing homosexual acts might have been the law of the day, but a culture of sexual openness permeated the live-and-let-live circus culture.
“There were a lot of gays in show business because back then it was about the only career open to them,” Stencell said. “Those shows were full of interesting and ethnic people, and people running away, and criminals and everything else.
“But for gay people especially, the circus was a place you could escape to and make money, and not worry too much about being accepted.” Though no one was much coddled.
One beloved gay colleague of Stencell’s was a cook who would counter slurs from his straight coworkers by slipping the cellophane from individually wrapped slices of American cheese into their grilled cheese sandwiches.
The fact that, from the earliest years of Barnum and Bailey Circus, James Bailey had deemed wives to be “time-wasters,” preferring to hire bachelors, may have also hastened the preponderance of gay men in the circus. (Single men were also easier to fit on train bunks than married couples, fitting in bunks stacked three high or two to a bunk in coaches.)
High jinks were permitted behind the scenes, as long as the big top could still be broken down in an hour or so, then packed onto waiting railcars. And paid cherry-pie job or not, every employee was expected to earn his or her keep. In towns where officials refused to be paid off by fixers, Mona Harris made herself useful by babysitting the show’s microcephalics when they weren’t onstage.
The sad backstories, of course, were never part of the ballyhoo. For “Darkest Africa,” a sideshow Lewiston ran in the late 1930s, he freely admitted that he had “bought” four microcephalic teenagers from their parents, Beulah and Joe House, resurrecting an earlier act. Their heads were shaved, except for a bushy knot at the top, in the style of Zip. Cast as African pygmies, the House children had been taught years earlier to perform various “native” dances, “knowing full well that if they didn’t they would be beaten” by an earlier manager, a Mississippi showman who’d “owned” them for a spell before returning them to their impoverished parents.
When Lewiston rediscovered the family living in a ramshackle Memphis shack, Joe House greeted him warmly with “We sho’ missed you, Mistah Lewiston. And we sho’ do miss that money,” according to Lewiston’s account.
So Lewiston engaged with their parents to buy the children back at a rate of a hundred dollars a week, plus food and transportation, with the caveat being that African Americans were not permitted to ride in the sleeper cars with the other performers; they had to sleep sitting up in the coach cars, and they had to eat in a separate cook tent and dining car, Lewiston wrote.
The Houses eagerly accepted that deal, and the children were happy on the road, Lewiston claimed, though “they were still retarded as ever” and often refused to use the toilets provided for them, openly urinating in front of audiences and “adding to the amusement of the crowd.”
In such a lurid and unseemly environment, where children and disabled people were bartered like horses, it is not known exactly how or when George and Willie Muse crossed paths with Shelton, who in 1916 was working as a carnival announcer and usher for Paul’s United Shows, a competitor to the Loos shows.
“Candy Shelton, that’s the man that took them, and that’s the man that told them their mama was dead,” insisted their niece, Dot Brown, Nancy’s mother, in a 2001 interview. “And when you keep telling a child for so long that ‘your mother is dead, and there’s no need to go back,’ the child believes it.”
More recently, Nancy described the brothers’ complicated dependence on their manager as Stockholm syndrome. Though the term wasn’t coined until 1973, when hostages held in a Swedish bank developed an attachment to their captors, it has been used to describe scenarios ranging from Patricia Hearst’s helping her kidnappers rob a California bank in 1974 to, more recently, the nine-month kidnapping of teenager Elizabeth Smart, who was tortured and sexually abused.
Candy Shelton was the “onliest person Uncle Willie ever said anything bad about,” Nancy recalled. But when they were young, Willie and George learned that he was also the key to their being fed, housed, and clothed.
The captor is your abuser, but he’s also the only person who can keep you alive.
Despite the inconsistencies in the story of their early circus careers, documents show the parallel narrative streams converging into a single moving current from the time Shelton took charge. And often the ripples turned into rapids.
Shelton’s reputation wasn’t so stellar among his colleagues, judging from a 1920 Billboard ad taken out by managers of the Loos show, offering a twenty-five-dollar reward for information leading “to the whereabouts of J.H. (Candy) Shelton, Manager of Iko and Eko Monkey Men.”
Shelton had absconded with George and Willie Muse, chasing a bigger show and more pay—and not for the last time.
In an as-told-to biography that is as self-servingly promotional as Lewiston’s is blunt, showman Al G. Barnes recounts running into the unlikely trio in the mid-to late 1910s. A native Canadian, Barnes had started out as a wild-animal trainer, beginning with a pony and a “talking” dog: he spent months training his childhood pug, Rowser, to say the words I won’t, yes (which the dog emitted in a sort of sneeze) and the name Barney, then worked out a monologue routine featuring those words as a kind of punch line. The animal acts were a common feature among earlier, smaller circuses in the late 1800s, and the inspiration for another cliché that breached the circus-tent walls to become part of the American vernacular: the “dog and pony show.” Barnes owned one of the largest train shows in the West, based in Southern California. It had quickly grown into a thirty-car traveling spectacle of dancing horses topped by dancing girls, an “aerial” lion act (lions riding on the backs of horses), tiger and elephant attractions, and a sideshow run by Bobby Fountain.
As Barnes tells it, an early manager—Stokes, perhaps—had been traveling with the Muse brothers in a small midwestern town, exhibiting them under timeworn names that didn’t adequately cash in on the public’s fascination with all things exotic and savage, from the Monkey Men to the Ministers from Dahomey, an African kingdom (now Benin) that had been an important location in the Atlantic slave trade.
Cast as albinos from Africa, the Muses did nothing but stand there blankly while a lecturer made up wild stories about them, punctuated with a few kernels of geographic truth.
When spoken to, they replied in gibberish, as instructed.
Shelton “didn’t know how to exploit them,” Barnes declared. “In fact, he knew little or nothing of showmanship.”
But with his decades of experience, the man known as Governor Barnes and the Prince of Showmen knew he would eventually figure out how to perfect their act.
“I quickly realized their possibilities,” Barnes said in his memoir. “And when the manager asked me to permit him to join the show with the boys, I agreed, thinking I could buy them from him.”
That season, the Muse brothers morphed from the Monkey Men to the Ministers from Dahomey to Darwin’s Missing Links to, finally, the name they used for the duration of their stint with Barnes: Eko and Iko, the Ecuadorian Savages.
Showmanship, as Barnes viewed it, required a continental shift. And fiercer facial expressions.
The brothers were now featured exhibits of the Barnes Big Circus Sideshow, located stage left of Barnes’s three-ringed big top. The sideshow had always taken a backseat to the big top, where Barnes’s menagerie reigned supreme. In his book, he imbues the animals he describes with more humanity than he does the Muses, for instance.
The spectacle was a rich, two-hour stew of wild animal acts, dancing girls, music, and clowns—all billed as “The Show That’s Different.” The highlight was Mabel Stark (real name: Mary Haynie), pitched alternatively as the Greatest Woman Animal Trainer in the World and, later, when she worked for Ringling Brothers, the Intrepid Lady Trainer. Stark was hailed for her ability to tame lions, tigers, and even sea lions, though she was mauled several times throughout her fifty-seven-year career and carried lifelong scars. (She credited her cat-training prowess to strategically doling out meat rewards, as opposed to just beating the tigers into submission, as her predecessors had done.)
A brunette with Barnes (she turned blond for Ringling), Stark took her work seriously, clad in a militaristic white suit and trousers—especially when she had her bare hands (or head) in the mouth of a lion. At the height of her Barnes act, she would sit astride a lion on a platform that slowly ascended inside the tent. With the lights dimmed, a shower of fireworks would emanate from her head as she reached the top.
With the GIs returning from World War I in the spring of 1919, Barnes played on the patriotic fervor of the day and the increasing popularity of wild-animal shows by dedicating one of his lions to the returning 303rd Infantry. He introduced himself to each town he visited by leading a parade of circus acts from astride a six-ton elephant named Tusko as a prelude to each show.
A few years later, during a stop in a Washington logging town, Tusko escaped, upsetting cars and knocking over trees, fences, and telephone poles. Barnes eventually unloaded him on a carnival operator, but the elephant continued to unleash “a trunkload of trouble” before his death, at the age of forty-two. Criminal poisoning was suspected.
It was common practice for most of the larger rail circuses operating from Barnum’s day through the late 1920s to kick off every stop with a free parade to drum up customers for their shows—until the ubiquity of the automobile finally made the practice unwieldy. Newfangled traffic lights messed up the processions, and it was hard to turn corners in a sixteen-horse wagon without bumping into parked cars.
In his sideshow, Barnes strived never to display anything that would “offend good taste.” Always on the lookout for new finds, he had once enlisted a freak hunter who had adventured to Africa, where he captured a “hideous-looking Negro” with a foot-long tail. Arriving in San Francisco, the man had been quarantined at Alcatraz Island, where Barnes inspected him and deemed him “too repulsive” for display. Later, when the Smithsonian Institution made an “exceptionally large offer for the specimen,” Barnes lamented—in the interest of science, of course—that he had already sent him back.
Barnes’s favorite freak (and best moneymaker) had been a woman with two bodies, both perfectly formed from the shoulders down. “We found her in the backwoods of Texas where she was living on a ranch with her husband and three children,” two born from one side, and one from the other, he wrote. “She traveled with the show for several years… and the women especially were very taken with her,” asking to examine her after the show, which she permitted. Her husband became a ticket seller and didn’t get too mad when his coworkers ragged him with Mormon bigamy jokes.
Despite his claim of being highbrow, Barnes had intuited what Stencell came to define as the three keys to sideshow success: “Displays of sex, horror, and strangeness consistently open the purses.” The best showmen adapted to the fact that two heads trumped one, and three breasts trumped two.
Crowds strolled by as the lecturer Eddie Thorn (“The Innovator”) took turns exaggerating the qualities of the various performers, beginning with snake enchantress May Blasser, who demonstrated her python-charming prowess. Snake handling was a popular sideshow act of that time, judging from the myriad Billboard classifieds to buy and sell snakes.
Next they watched the “peerless” Billy Pilgrim, born with no arms or legs, roll a cigarette with his mouth while Fountain’s wife, the sideshow’s “xylophone artist,” played a song. Mabel Gardner presented a show with talking cockatoos, while Carmelita the Lady with the Marvelous Hair and Nettie the Texas Fat Girl simply sat or stood as Thorn hyperbolized away. Eko and Iko were on the billing, though accounts from that time don’t mention exactly what more, if anything, they did beyond standing there and answering an occasional question or two.
At an Ohio stop in the fall of 1919—Barnes’s farthest trip east in a while—the Cincinnati Times called the entourage “by far the oddest and most entertaining show ever seen in Cincinnati. The modern and smooth-faced Noah, which is Barnes himself, has Jack Londonized the circus, kicked out vaudeville and set up only that which is of red-bloodedness and highly satisfactory with a preface which is all beauty and muscle.”
A few years later, another newspaper gushed, “The whole show proved to be as advertised, was fine from Eko and Iko in the sideshow, to the grand ensembles under the big tent. There was only one drawback. There was just too much for one pair of eyes to see.”
In Scranton, Pennsylvania, Eko and Iko took top news billing out of a Barnes cast that included 1,080 circus performers and workers, with a picture of the brothers looking fiercely at each other, in profile and frowning, their hair jutting out every which way. BODIES OF ZANZIBAR YOUTHS ARE COVERED WITH FINE WOOL, the headline trumpeted.
Three days later, the same paper described the brothers’ marching in the pre-show parade as “Eko and Iko, two wild and uncivilized men from the jungles of Equadore [sic], who are covered with wool from their heads to their feet.” Marching next to them were Mr. and Mrs. Tiny Mite, the Smallest Married Couple in the World, and John Aasen, the Norwegian boy-giant, said to be not just the largest but also the tallest man alive. Tusko, the paper noted, was sitting this parade out due to his bulk, which varied by several tons depending on which press agent was spinning the numbers. “He only weighs ten tons,” the Scranton reporter wrote, up four tons from an earlier account.
George and Willie’s mother had been married to Cabell Muse since 1917, and around that time the couple relocated the family to Roanoke. But the brothers had no idea what was happening with their relatives back home—or even where that home was.
They later said they’d believed all along that their mother was still alive, but it seemed possible they might never see her again.
As Barnes recounted in his book, the circus returned later in fall 1919 to its winter quarters in Venice, California. That’s around the time Eko and Iko’s manager—who is unnamed in Barnes’s account but presumably was Stokes, working with Shelton—asked to borrow some money so he could travel east.
Barnes boasted about the transaction in loan-shark terminology, underscoring that the “boys,” now grown men, meant nothing more than chattel to him. “I lent him the desired amount, taking the boys as security,” he wrote. “He stated that if he did not return, I might have the boys. He did not show up again, so we started out with the boys next season.”
Around that time, Barnes anointed Shelton, then twenty years old, the Muses’ sole manager and caretaker. By this time Shelton was already working as a ticket taker for the sideshow and may have been co-managing them earlier with Stokes or another intermediary manager (Barnes doesn’t say, and I could find no other direct references to pre-Shelton managers in the trade publications between 1915 and 1918).
Shelton immediately “realized the boys’ possibilities,” asking if he could pay off the debt contracted by the former manager and thereafter work with Barnes on a percentage basis. “I agreed to do this, and we made the boys a paying proposition,” Barnes wrote, candidly.
In a photo from 1922, Al G. Barnes stands in front of a sideshow tent with his arms draped casually over George’s and Willie’s shoulders. Willie squints and leans to the side, clenching his fists, while George looks more relaxed (or at least open to the pose), his hands steepled elegantly in front of him. On Barnes’s left hand shines a gleaming wedding band, acquired from his second wife after an extended fifteen-year divorce battle, including five separate lawsuits filed to end his first marriage. The divorce was granted in 1921 on desertion charges; Barnes married a different woman the next day.
But that didn’t go so well either. Barnes filed for divorce against his second wife in 1923, claiming she horsewhipped him, and six years of litigation followed.
“The legal battles he engaged in, most of them due to domestic difficulties of one sort or another, never seemed to lessen his zest for life,” a reporter wrote in Barnes’s 1931 obituary. “As he rushed from tent to tent he would shout his answers to the reporters drawn there by a new lawsuit.”
With the shift in management, the Muse brothers’ native lands changed, and a new anthropomorphic tale was honed: “There was a story to the effect that the boys were members of a colony of sheep-headed people inhabiting an island in the South Seas; that they had been captured after many hair-raising escapades, and that they were the only specimens in captivity,” Barnes had written.
The captive-history narrative only added to the irony of their present lot.
They were already captives, of course—just not in their native lands.
But what Barnes claimed next would bedevil the brothers from Truevine for most of their lives: “The boys had a very low grade of intelligence, and the press-agent story fitted them well.”
For the next several decades, that assertion would rear its head repeatedly, inspiring heated debate among their caretakers, lawyers, and relatives, and scholars, too. Were George and Willie born mentally incapacitated, or did the environment they were thrust into—kept away from their family and denied education—make them that way?
Or were they in on the ruse and pretending to be dull-witted, per Candy’s orders, just as Zip followed the instructions of O. K. White?
It’s also possible that, like their enslaved forebears, George and Willie feigned servitude to give the impression of being attached to their captors. A survival technique designed to make Shelton think they were more childlike than they were, the behavior could have become internalized, as the historian Stanley Elkins has described in his famous but controversial study of slavery’s effects.
Maybe George and Willie hid their opinions and their wits because they were champion observers of life during Jim Crow. Maybe they instinctively understood that it was dangerous to know too much. As the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar wrote in his landmark 1896 poem, “We Wear the Mask,” about black Americans forced to hide their frustration behind a façade of happiness:
We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask!
One other plausible explanation, according to albinism expert Bonnie LeRoy: during the early twentieth century, the brothers’ rapid eye fluttering was routinely misinterpreted as a symptom of mental impairment. “It’s still not uncommon for people to misdiagnose albinism, or not to understand that the vision isn’t correctable, or that the patient is cognitively fine.
“But back then, there would have been very minimal understanding” of horizontal nystagmus, she said, a condition also known as dancing eyes.
Housed among the freaks, the brothers were already trapped in the “rigid caste system of the circus,” as Lewiston described it. Sideshow folks “didn’t mingle with the big top performers except in dice and poker games.” But big-top performers refused to acknowledge sideshow workers when they met them on the street.
Freaks, then, were the most isolated of all, tucked away from nonpaying eyes lest they exhibit their wares for free. They were often moody, and most of them were illiterate, one prominent manager wrote, adding that “they succumbed quickly to professional jealousy.”
A keen audience observer, Barnes was astute enough to understand that simply being albino was no longer freaky enough at a time when the nascent movie and radio businesses were competing with the circus. As early as 1901, a Billboard writer had observed that albinos no longer brought in customers the way they once did. “They’re too common,” he wrote. If they could also sing and/or dance—or were married to women who did—the act was more valuable.
Novelty—something the public had never before seen—was always the goal.
To be a big draw in the 1920s, the brothers would have to up their game.
Barnes credited himself for what happened next: “We taught them to play a mandolin and guitar so that they could strum the instruments passably well.” It’s likely they had picked music up earlier, either from their neighbors in Truevine or from the minstrel shows that traveled with Loos.
But as Willie himself told the story, the first time Shelton gave them instruments, it was meant to be a joke. A photo prop, the instruments were placed in their hands for a pitch-card pose. Shelton assumed they had no marketable skills beyond their appearance. He had no idea they harbored the potential to hear a song one time—and re-create it on just about any instrument.
By all accounts, music came naturally to George and Willie, especially playing stringed instruments. Relatives recall Willie insisting he was the better player—and singer—of the two.
I’ll wear my high silk hat and frock tail coat
You wear your Paris gown and your new silk shawl
There ain’t no doubt about it, babe,
We’ll be the best dressed in the hall.
“Eko and Iko could play anything,” one of their coworkers told Stencell. “They could hear a tune just one time and play it perfectly.”
Finally, the brothers had something they could take solace in, besides each other.
In an undated photograph from their Barnes stint, George and Willie look to be in their late teens or early twenties. Posted under tent frames, they sit in chairs draped with striped ribbons. Willie holds a banjo while George clutches a saxophone, a ukulele balanced against his knee.
Their costumes are bolder and sharper than before, and they’re certainly better-fitting, with wide-lapel jackets, short pants, and above-the-knee socks. The first time I saw the photo—found during a late-night search online—I glimpsed a white horizontal stripe above their knees and instinctively thought I was seeing straps designed to tether them to their chairs.
The next day, I realized, I’d mistaken the narrow space between their socks and knickers for shackles, when in fact what I was seeing were stripes of bare, white skin. It was a powerful reminder to look beyond the story I expected to find as I set out to untangle a century of whispers from truth.
I’ve spent hours trying to suss out that photo, my favorite from the stack, seeking the opinions of historical-costume, circus, and music experts alike. George’s chin is raised, almost defiantly, while Willie looks straight into the camera, this time with confidence. His right hand is held in the playing style known as clawhammer, thumb out from the body of the banjo and fingers tucked.
Popular among old-time mountain musicians, clawhammer is a style of playing first popularized in minstrel shows of the 1820s and ’30s in which players thump their downstrokes on the strings. Plantation owners sometimes sent musically inclined slaves to New Orleans or New York to learn the violin for their cotillions. The earliest banjos, made of gourds, horsehair, and animal hides, were brought to the United States from Africa by slaves. But when slaves were alone in their quarters, African souls seeped into Irish fiddles, and a new style emerged.
Minstrelsy was originally performed by white banjo players who copied black music and performed in blackface applied using the singed bottom of a cork. As the scholar Eric Lott has argued, it grew out of the theatrical genre’s encapsulation of both white desire for and fear and loathing of African Americans. The caricature was a warped meshing of cultures that was as strange and unsettling as the sideshow itself. In the 1830s Barnum even got in on the act, naturally, promoting jig-dancing contests between an African-American New York City dockworker and anyone who would challenge him.
By the 1860s and ’70s, black musicians had reclaimed the co-opted music for their own use, and blacks and whites alike “blackened up” so they could get work. (The term “Jim Crow” came from a minstrel song of that period called “Jump Jim Crow” and was initially used pejoratively by whites to describe someone acting like a stage caricature of a black person.)
Minstrelsy began a slow decline with the advent of the twentieth century, but it held on for a few decades in the rural South. It was quite popular, in fact, among blacks and whites in the Piedmont area of Virginia, where George and Willie were born.
“Clawhammer-style playing is what you would have heard in rural, isolated places that didn’t have access to traveling medicine shows or vaudeville shows or that kind of thing,” said musicologist and historian Kinney Rorrer, who hosts a popular public-radio show called Back to the Blue Ridge.
“You look at that picture [of George and Willie] and those costumes, and you think of minstrel shows immediately,” Rorrer said. The music was popularized by Al Jolson, the white singer who claimed that performing behind a blackface mask “gave him a sense of freedom and spontaneity he had never known.” Comic entertainer Bert Williams, the last major black entertainer to perform in blackface, rose to play with the Ziegfeld Follies, where his humor was as critically acclaimed as it was complicated. Blackface minstrelsy reinforced horrific racial stereotypes, while it also elevated African-American music and made Williams one of the highest-paid black entertainers of his time. W. C. Fields called him “the funniest man I ever saw, and the saddest man I ever knew.”
Rorrer described minstrelsy as “a patronizing mentality, an attempt to see black people, slaves, and their descendants as ‘the happy darkie,’ as the expression went. They were supposed to be so happy because being enslaved wasn’t so bad if you were able to play the banjo and sing and dance.”
Rorrer came away from studying that picture with a question: Did circus people really teach the Muse brothers to play, or had they already learned how in Truevine? Though he was a few years younger than the Muses, a Franklin County musician named Lewis “Rabbit” Muse would go on to become a heralded country blues player, sought out for ethnography recordings and radio and festival performances, popular among black and white audiences alike.
Loose-limbed, light-skinned, and long-jowled, Rabbit also played kazoo and danced a jig that blended tap with mountain flatfooting. He called it “the dance that don’t have no name; I just get into all kinds of shapes.”
Rabbit decided to take up the ukulele, his main instrument, after seeing a traveling minstrel show around 1920. When he left home to try show business for himself, his father intervened.
“My daddy had to come and get me off the train,” he told the Roanoke Times in 1977. “He sent a policeman in.” And though he would go on to record such tunes as “Darkness on the Delta,” Rabbit did not stray far from home again. He started a family band with a cousin on the washboard, his mother on accordion, and his father singing and playing guitar. When he wasn’t working as a sawmill laborer, Rabbit was often with his band, playing house parties and county fairs, jamming in tobacco warehouses and on the streets.
What difference did the gift of music create in the brothers’ lives? They still couldn’t move about freely, still signed their names with an X. They still were told that the person they loved most in the world—their mother—was dead. Their vision problems were growing by the year, providing future circus pressmen with an endless array of “night vision” jokes.
But from minstrelsy to American jazz, the mastery of music gave marginalized blacks a freedom and power that many white musicians of that era couldn’t fathom. African Americans bent rhythms and upended traditional white tonal patterns. They threw in swoops, growls, slides, and glissandos, infusing the music with a passion and spirituality that made it uniquely their own. “It’s why I’d much rather listen to old black jazz than old white jazz,” Rorrer said. “It was music played by people who couldn’t read or write their names, but they could play with more authority than anyone out there.”
And, whether they were pretending to be from Ecuador or from Ethiopia when they played it, Willie and George now had something that connected them, even obliquely, to their roots.
It also gave them something to do behind the scenes of the sideshow, and in the cookhouse, dressing tents, and stables where the show folks hung out.
Music seemed to lessen the brothers’ misery, and it made them special for something, finally, besides the strangeness of their skin.
It gave them a skill they would each carry with them, literally, to their graves.
For several seasons, Barnes recalled, the Ecuadorian Savages made for “a great feature in the sideshow, until the new owner [presumably Shelton] had a better offer from another circus and left my show,” likely in 1922 or 1923.
The name of that casually mentioned circus is curiously omitted from Barnes’s account. At the time, a dozen large railroad shows competed for the best fair dates in North America. But Barnes was talking about the circus that had boasted Jumbo, an elephant so huge and so famous that its name had long ago slipped into the American vernacular.
The circus that was the home, for decades now, of the zany and inimitable Zip.
It was the circus that employed Lillian Leitzel, the so-called Queen of the Air. So famous was the looping aerialist during the Roaring Twenties that she was known the world over by just her last name.
Not long after the two largest circus entities on the planet had merged their traveling tents into one mega-show, this circus played to as many as two and a half million people in some 125 cities and towns.
Pick your superlative. It was either the Big One or Big Bertha, or the Greatest Show on Earth.
It was the golden age of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Combined Shows.
And the Muse brothers were now among the most elite of freaks.