By the time Baby Dot’s daddy came home from work that night, there were so many people crowding the Ten-and-a-Half Street porches and front yards that the very sight of it made Herbert Saunders’s stomach sink. The neighbors were all out front, spilling onto the alleyway and dirt road.
There were strangers, too, a rare mix of black and white people who had converged from all quadrants of the city, drawn as if by some mystical, magnetic force.
So many people stood milling around the front of the clapboard shacks that Herbert’s mind went to the worst-possible scenario: he thought Baby Dot had died.
But the beautiful two-week-old baby hadn’t registered in visitors’ minds. Martian brothers who’d become stars of the Ringling sideshow were now staying in this working-class enclave? For the next several days, everyone in town wanted a look.
They came by streetcar. They came by automobile and on foot.
Harriett’s reunion with her sons had been “told of in the newspapers, others talking of it, all the while humming happy mammy songs,” the Roanoke Times reported in its usual racist language. “And the chapter of difficulties was opened.”
Twenty-four hours. That’s how long it took before Cabell thought to put out a tin cup for the “throng of curious” traipsing through the family’s front yard. If all those white men had profited from exhibiting Willie and George, why shouldn’t he?
By Sunday, the news was all over town. More than a hundred people had elbowed their way through the family’s tiny house. The admission price was “a free will offering, tenderly taken at the door,” a Roanoke Times reporter noted. “Eko and Iko sit with the two tin cups, grunting mystic words to the sweet accompaniment of falling dimes and quarters.”
Candy Shelton found his way to Jordan’s Alley, too. He offered Harriett Muse $100—a pretty pile of cash for the time, worth about $1,400 today—and the promise that he’d wire home $20 a month to her if she allowed her sons to return to the circus, which was due to perform in Richmond the next day. He pointed out the obvious—that the circus had more resources to keep the brothers fed, housed, and clothed than their parents could ever dream of having.
As the Roanoke Times described it, “To avoid any disturbance, detectives were called in to take a hand in the matter. The officers, however, could not settle the misunderstanding and departed.”
The paper continued in its characteristic mocking tone: “Still the woman refuses. No doubt her resolve is strengthened by the sound of falling dimes.”
The brothers would not return to Shelton and the circus, and despite “persistent efforts [that] failed to get them from the house, there was talk of resorting to legal channels for settlement of the affair, which causes the loss of two performers.”
Harriett sent Shelton and his cronies away.
With Ringling now threatening to sue, Harriett would have to formulate a legal strategy of her own.
As the popularity of movies, radio, and professional baseball surged, the circus was now past its peak. There was increasing talk from some corners that the sideshow would soon be banished. “Nothing now makes anyone wonder or exhibit interest in freaks; the public is merely disgusted,” the Elmira (New York) Advertiser claimed. The prediction was premature, though, as both the circus and its sideshow stepchild were still capturing the imaginations of rural and small-town Americans. In the 1920s, first-generation factory workers were seeking out paid leisure for the first time in their lives, and few thought to question the exploitation of people with disabilities.
In an era before Social Security disability or workers’ compensation, most agreed with managers like Clyde Ingalls, who patted quarter-paying customers on the back as do-gooders for supporting people who might have otherwise had to rely on charity. What other jobs, they argued, could the limbless man or half-lady hold?
“Put yourself in the shoes of some of these poor folks back in time,” Al Stencell told me. “Having some show guy come along and take two odd kids off your hands would seem like the right thing to do, for you and for them.”
The circus’s wave may have crested by the 1920s, but the brothers Ringling were still regarded as captains of industry, pointed out historian Greg Renoff, who has researched traveling amusements in the Jim Crow South. “The Ringlings had this aura of achievement and success; they were men of enterprise, on a par with the Carnegies. They employed thousands of people.”
That a black domestic worker had challenged such a formidable white-owned company at the height of Jim Crow was exceptionally unusual. “Blacks could not count on law-enforcement support at the time,” Renoff said. “The Klan was now a pseudo-respectable middle-class organization. Blacks couldn’t testify in court in some cases.
“There was no reason for [Harriett] to think that anybody in a position of power was going to help her.” The possibility of being lynched for confronting Ringling’s lawyers and Roanoke’s police probably crossed her mind, he said. (Of the 3,959 lynchings that took place in twelve southern states between 1877 and 1950, 83 of the victims were women.)
Why wasn’t Harriett arrested inside the sideshow tent? Renoff recalled the bravery of the black women who challenged Jim Crow voting laws in North Carolina’s small towns by storming their way into election offices in the 1920s, without being arrested or abused. The cult of motherhood in the South—where black maids helped raise most well-off whites—probably shielded Harriett Muse.
She hoped she’d be treated with deference because, back at home, the police chief probably had someone who looked just like Harriett washing his clothes and babysitting his kids.
She might not have held a lot of power, but what she did have she wielded as only a mother could.
Next came the battle with the bureaucrats. City officials turned up at Ten-and-a-Half Street to deliver the news that Harriett and Cabell had no right to convert their house into a theater without the proper permits. They stopped short of pressing charges but told them in no uncertain terms that George and Willie had to stop playing on the porch and drawing crowds.
“It all reverts to one simple question: Who will in the end collect the returns from the viewers of Eko and Iko—the mother or the showmen?” the Roanoke Times mused. The brothers had been “purchased” long ago by Barnum and Bailey showmen operating in California who had “keen business acumen,” the paper explained, incorrectly citing the name of the circus and omitting the source of that information entirely. They’d been made to work without pay and without their mother’s knowledge of their whereabouts—that much, it appeared, was fact.
The reporter fashioned a ballyhoo of his own as he described the scene on the Muse family’s front lawn: “Right this way, ladies and gents, we have the original albinos! Seeing is believing. Step up and don’t crowd the passageway. We know you want to see them but don’t let’s crowd!… They’ve appeared before the crowned heads of Irup, Europe, and Syrup. Ten cents, one dime, see the two albinos!”
Before the crowds quieted, before Harriett sent Candy Shelton packing, before the brothers had made up their minds about their own next steps, George Davis turned up with his gigantic camera.
Davis left no notes about his visit to the Muse family’s abode, just a single photograph that went out over the wires, appearing in dozens of cities where Ringling had performed, from Troy, New York, to Pittsburgh to Winnipeg. Taken in the harsh late-afternoon sun, the portrait appears posed behind the house—away from the crowds.
The family stands in front of an unpainted outhouse, with a hole for a window, broken trim boards, and a pile of coal slag strewn on the ground.
The portrait suggests questions more than answers, heartbreak more than joy. Flanked by Harriett and Cabell, George and Willie stand on homemade rag rugs that look to have been hauled out for the occasion. While Harriett and Cabell stare directly into the camera, the brothers avert their eyes, squinting as if in pain and looking at the ground.
George slumps his shoulders forward, frowning. Usually the confident one, this time he looks grumpy, like a child placed in time-out—though it’s possible the blazing sun is making him wince.
Maybe it has already dawned on George Muse what a fix the two of them are in: the life they’ve known for most of their time on earth has just left Roanoke for its next stop. Their stepdad is a brute who seems to have his own moneymaking schemes in mind.
Maybe someone else is standing off camera, coaching them to look miserable in the picture. A gloomy, hangdog expression would emphasize the mistreatment they’ve experienced at the hands of their circus captors. Maybe that someone else is an ambitious young lawyer hoping to shore up a lawsuit, down to the wrinkled handkerchief in George’s hand.
Or maybe they truly are sad, relegated to living in a ramshackle and wholly unfamiliar new place, and a very cramped one at that. The house at 19 Ten-and-a-Half Street is a one-and-a-half-room affair measuring just 517 square feet. Counting a sister-in-law residing there (presumably because their youngest sibling, Harrison, is still away in prison) plus Cabell and Harriett, George and Willie are now living in less space than they had on the circus train.
T. Warren Messick was not surprised when Harriett Muse soon showed up at his downtown Roanoke law office. He’d read about the dustup in the papers. He was a young defense lawyer, just twenty-seven, but already he’d made a splash. Members of the local bar association noted his ability to get charges dismissed or sentences lightened for defendants with little hope, particularly in the black community.
Squeak was his nickname. In the days before television, Roanokers used to leave their downtown offices to observe his oratorical courtroom antics. To confuse an eyewitness, Messick once had the identical twin brother of an accused client sit next to him at the defense table. He used him to underscore the fact that the witness could not positively pinpoint the accused—not when choosing between him and his twin, anyway.
Spectators were particularly enraptured by Messick’s closing arguments, delivered in the lilting accent of a central Virginia gentleman—he’d grown up in Virginia’s rolling Shenandoah Valley hills, the son of a farm manager—and punctuated by a rhythmic, repetitious flair. “Usually he would start his presentation with an appropriate story or joke that endeared him to his jury right away,” recalled his son, T. Roger Messick, who declared his delivery “smooth as silk.”
Messick was such a raconteur that he frequently moved himself to tears.
A military-school graduate, Messick spent his downtime grouse hunting in Montana or fishing at his riverside country home. He celebrated the end of every workday by drinking a Scotch at his desk, though not as many as the gossip-prone members of the local bar claimed, said his junior law partner, Harvey Lutins, whose nickname was Little Squeak.
While all the other lawyers in town showed up to court in austere black suits, Messick wore sport jackets. “He looked like he was going out for a party,” recalled Lutins, at the time of our interview in his mideighties and still practicing law. (He died in late 2015 at the age of eighty-seven.) “Only Mr. Messick could do that and get away with it.”
Later in his career, Messick and his second wife, Jean, lived above his law office, located in a sprawling Victorian home not far from downtown. The office was adorned with plush Oriental rugs, leather chairs, and game animals he’d hunted and had stuffed. He kept an African-American manservant named John on call, along with a live-in maid, Pearl. She regularly fetched drinks for Jean, who favored thick furs, diamonds, and toy-sized dogs. “It was really a circus over there,” said Nancy Barbour, whose former husband, Stuart Barbour Jr., was another Messick protégé.
Messick’s cases, his attire, his office—he kept it all teetering, barely, on the edge. His entire life was played as if it were all just one squeaker of a game, down to his final breath. (In 1962, Messick mistakenly thought he was dying of stomach cancer. To relieve himself and his family of the expected agony, he committed suicide by shooting himself in the stomach on the banks of the Roanoke River in front of Gray Rocks, his second home.)
Messick got so invested in his cases that he frequently let details he deemed unimportant slip. Lutins remembers showing up for work early in his career to find that the power to their offices had been turned off. His boss had forgotten to pay the bill.
Money didn’t motivate him, Lutins said, adding that when Messick learned that one of his own partners had stolen the firm’s funds, he testified at the trial—on the embezzler’s behalf.
“Blacks thought Mr. Messick could do magic with the law, getting them off a charge or getting them less of a sentence, and sometimes he did,” said Buster Carico, the longtime Roanoke Times reporter. He remembered a case in which an African-American man arrested for theft was convicted and sentenced to minor jail time. He’d been represented at trial by a court-appointed defense attorney.
“Next time I’m gonna steal enough to hire Lawyer Messick,” the man said as he was led away to jail.
Messick adored his maid, Pearl. He trusted her so much that he tasked her with delivering the annual Christmas bonus—cash—to the underlings in his practice. “My wife and I were paupers in the early days, and every Christmas Eve, we’d wait for the knock, and say to each other, ‘Is that Pearl at the door?’” recalled Lutins.
But Messick was more pragmatic than political when it came to race. “Mr. Messick was not a civil rights guy. He had no political party affiliation,” Lutins said.
Once when examining a black witness on the stand in a rural Bedford County case, Lutins referred to her, politely, as Mrs. Smith. It was the late 1950s, and the judge was so incensed that he called a recess to excoriate Lutins and Messick, who was providing legal backup, as second chair, on the case.
“Mr. Messick, you did not tell your young associate how we examine colored people here in my court,” the judge said firmly.
“You’re right, Judge,” Messick said, deferring to him. “Harvey, we don’t call the witness Mrs. Smith. We call her Mary”—meaning, without deference and using only her first name.
The trial reconvened, and Lutins continued, this time peppering Mary with questions.
“That’s the way it was, and nobody said nothing about it,” Lutins said. “Colored folk were not entitled to the dignity. Women weren’t permitted to sit on juries. It was a different world back then.”
Warren Messick went along and got along. He would try just about anything to get his clients a break.
“He didn’t mind the rough-and-tumble cases,” Buster Carico said, citing the 1949 murder of a beautiful high school coed and class leader in a prominent Episcopalian church. Messick represented the defendant, an Eagle Scout and choirboy who admitted to police that he’d killed the girl. Pieces of his flesh were found under her fingernails, indicating a fierce struggle, and when he was arrested at school the next day, his face was marred by scratches. The case made national and international headlines, and it was featured in popular detective magazines of the day.
Not only did Messick keep his client out of the electric chair, the murderer would end up serving only a small portion of his ninety-nine-year sentence. During his closing remarks, Messick exhibited his usual flair. He pulled a metal case from the pocket of his sport coat, unfolding it to reveal photographs of his own teenaged children.
Addressing the jury, Messick turned up his upper-crust drawl.
“You are not trying a gang-stah,” Messick said, arguing for leniency because the girl had, after all, not been raped. Because the choirboy had completed forty-eight merit badges, went to Sunday School faithfully, and taught swimming at the YMCA.
“You are not trying a mob-stah,” he continued.
“You are trying a boy.”
After a sixteen-year prison stint, the murderer started a new life in another state and went on to lead a remarkably unremarkable and upstanding life, with T. Warren Messick to thank for it all.
“I sued Ringling once,” Messick mentioned to Little Squeak occasionally over the years, in typical understatement.
But Lutins did not recall Messick elaborating on the lawsuit he filed against the circus a few days after it left town in October 1927.
Lutins said he probably accepted the Muse case to build what was then a fledgling practice. “That case had ‘sex appeal,’ as he would describe it. He took it because he could get a lot of mileage out of it—you know, as long as they spell your name right. That’s how you build a new practice: get the neighbors to know your name, and the newspapers to write it down.”
Roanokers would soon know the name of T. Warren Messick.
Just three days after Harriett reclaimed her sons, he filed two pleadings for $50,000 each, against both Ringling and Candy Shelton, on behalf of George and Willie Muse.
The legal complaint was pure Messick: furious and fiery, as finely rendered as a Clyde Ingalls ballyhoo. In florid prose, he traced their kidnapping back to Robert Stokes, alleging they’d been lured away from their mother and displayed as freaks in a traveling sideshow “against their will for a period of time, the exact period your petitioner does not know.” Though a Roanoke Times writer covering the reunion explained that Harriett had first “contracted to let her two tots go with a man by the name of Stokes” in 1914, it’s unclear whether Harriett ever used the word contract or the name Stokes, and Messick certainly didn’t mention her having a monetary agreement with Stokes in his legal brief, insisting only that the boys were “wrongfully taken… without the consent of their parents.” (The reporter cited Roanoke police officers, not Harriett, as the source of his information.)
If she or someone else in the family did initially let them leave with a carnival operator, maybe Messick chose to omit that uncomfortable detail. It’s also entirely plausible, given the media’s treatment of African Americans, that the two written sources for Harriett’s alleged culpability—the 1914 Billboard notice and the 1927 newspaper reunion stories—were one-sided affairs, entirely dictated by show managers and/or police.
Regardless, the brothers had indeed been wrongfully taken, if not initially by Stokes, then, a few months following their 1914 departure, certainly by Shelton.
The remainder of Messick’s timeline has been backed up by numerous written accounts: sometime in 1922, Candy Shelton had sold their services to Ringling Combined Shows, whereupon the brothers were displayed “against their will” and turned into “slaves” for four and a half more years, Messick wrote.
The brothers could not read or write and had not gone to school. “They were carried to all parts of the United States” and made to “exhibit themselves against their will.”
They would have “escaped from the said principal defendant, from its clutches, from the clutches of its agents, servants and employees,” Messick wrote. “But at all times your petitioner and his brother were carefully guarded and as a further means to prevent their escape and in furtherance of the business of [Ringling], in order to enrich itself, [Ringling] has not paid them one single, solitary, red penny for their services… only board and very little clothing.”
The Associated Press carried the lawsuit story, and so Messick’s rhetoric was repeated—not one single, solitary, red penny—in dozens of cities and towns where the Ambassadors from Mars had played.
The Danville (Virginia) Bee headlined: LURED FROM HOME, KEPT IN SLAVERY.
The Syracuse Journal: MOTHER SUES CIRCUS TO GET BACK SONS.
In Harrisonburg, Virginia, where Messick’s parents still lived, the Daily News-Record added more color to the report, calling the brothers “youngsters” and describing how they’d “longed for their mother and searched the crowds which viewed them daily for her familiar face,” while she had enlisted the aid of humane societies and social agencies, to no avail: “They were tired of being considered wild men from the astral world, tired of shocking people by their queer forms and circus makeup, tired of the stares and the squeals of other children, tired of being exhibited without their consent and without the knowledge of their parents.”
To the Big One, Messick’s opening salvo was nothing more than a single bullet glancing off an elephant’s hide. The next day, Ringling’s own formidable lawyer fired back in the courts and in the press. The Muse “youngsters” were not at all tots, as Messick had led the public to believe, but “grown men of the age of 35 years.” Rather than being stolen, John M. Kelley argued, they were “engaged by us through their manager exactly as we engage all our attractions.”
The terms of the contract among Shelton, Ringling, and the Muses were not disclosed, nor could I find a copy of any 1920s-era contracts on file in the Circus World Museum archives or anywhere else, including in the Roanoke and Richmond courthouses. (As for the brothers’ ages, they appear to have been closer to thirty in 1927, though no one, including their mother, could pinpoint with certainty when they were born. Official documents created for them later in life, such as draft registration and Social Security cards, say George was born in 1890 and Willie in 1893—their birth years seemed to gravitate further back in time the older they got.)
Bespectacled and with an ever-present cigar in his hand, Kelley was a Baraboo native who’d grown up with the Ringling brothers and represented them and the company from 1905 to 1937. Among his favorite stories was his response to a lawsuit sparked by a 1917 circus parade in Omaha. A runaway horse had destroyed property and injured several bystanders, resulting in a $25,000 claim. An especially damning eyewitness account from a socialite, the wife of an Omaha newspaper editor, had Kelley’s case circling the drain. But Kelley had thrown the witness off-guard with a simple question—“How old are you, ma’am?”—that played on the socialite’s vanity.
The woman responded exactly as Kelley had hoped.
She fidgeted, swayed, and “blushed in the throes of evident dread.”
Kelley used her stammering to discount her entire testimony and won the case.
In the late 1910s and early ’20s, Kelley had helped turn John Ringling into a tycoon. He had rushed to the scene of an Oklahoma oil strike, fortuitously located near one of John’s newly acquired rail lines. Kelley quickly secured eight thousand acres of oil leases that would bring millions in profits and lead to the creation of Ringling, Oklahoma, a company town named for and laid out by John himself. Kelley had elevated the self-titled circus king to oil baron.
Though eventually their partnership soured, Kelley always exhibited a deep love for Ringling history, founding the Circus World Museum in 1959, long after he retired. He revered Baraboo, unlike John, who had looked down his nose at the hometown folk and called them Baraboobians.
Stepping into an intrafamily money squabble in the wake of Charles Ringling’s death, in 1926, Kelley had accused the grand pooh-bah, John—then the remaining original partner and heir—of being lazy, distracted, and moneygrubbing. Six years later, he helped the remaining heirs incorporate the business and orchestrated a power shift from John to Samuel Gumpertz.
With offices in Chicago and, later, Manhattan, Kelley was no one to trifle with, and he was used to frying fish much larger than the ones Warren Messick caught along the river at Gray Rocks. He was a master at combing legal documents, down to the prenuptial agreements he’d insisted John nail down before his second marriage, after Mable died.
Still, Kelley prided himself on knowing the minutest goings-on of the Big One, including its sideshow contracts. A coworker recalled watching him unfold his long, gangly frame from his car, stomp into the circus office, and announce, “Boys, I have a great idea for next year. We will feature a sight denied past generations—a man… from the wilds of Borneo. Adam Forepaugh did it in 1864, and we will do it,” too.
“The Ringlings paid their people ten percent less [than other circuses] because they had taken control of the market,” said former Circus World Museum archivist Fred Dahlinger, who currently writes and does circus research for the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota. Though Dahlinger knew nothing about the 1927 Muse case, he had strong doubts about the charges Messick brought against Ringling and found it hard to believe that George and Willie Muse had ever worked without pay.
“In terms of business practices, they were not fly-by-night; they were very honorable,” Dahlinger said of the company. “And they would have known if they had talent that was not being paid” or otherwise held in peonage by their manager, he insisted. “They were rough people, but they did not welch on financial obligations.”
He did not at all buy the argument that Ringling might have been just as culpable in exploiting the brothers’ labor as Shelton, which is why Messick named them in the suit.
But Dahlinger was so insistent about the fairness of Ringling business dealings that, since I was unable to find a contract between the Muses and the circus or Shelton and the circus, he suggested I look toward the contractual obligations written for Clicko, the Wild Dancing Bushman, the Muse brothers’ sideshow coworker for many years. Franz Taibosh, who actually did hail from South Africa, suffered at the hands of a brutal early manager but was rescued by Ringling legal agent, or fixer, Frank Cook, who found him near starvation and ill clothed in an unheated Bridgeport, Connecticut, apartment. Taibosh had been performing in the Barnum and Bailey sideshow, unpaid and under the care of his harsh manager, Paddy Hepston. He took his temper out on Taibosh in frequent alcoholic rages and compensated him only in food, booze, and cigars.
Cook not only rescued Taibosh; he made him welcome to such an extent that he lived with Cook’s family, quite happily, for the remainder of his career, as related in Neil Parsons’s 2010 biography, Clicko. And not only that, he even adopted Taibosh, “and by what political machinations I’ll never know—since Taibosh could not read—got him made an American citizen,” recalled circus heir Henry Ringling North, in a candid memoir.
Cook had wheel-greased Taibosh’s emancipation, Parsons wrote, describing a relationship that was certainly parallel to dealings between the Muse brothers and Candy Shelton—but only to a point. Shelton did not have the clout of Cook, and therefore the brothers never enjoyed the “pet” status that Clicko had among many Ringling managers.
North fondly recalled playing with Taibosh as a kid: “He’d let me pull his kinky hair, which would stretch out a foot or more and, when I let go, snap back like a rubber band. He called my brother ‘Johnny’ and me ‘Bonny’ to save the bother of adding an entire new word to his limited vocabulary.” When Taibosh learned of his impending American citizenship, he bounded up to young North and shouted, “Bonny, me American citizen now, no more nigger son of a bitch.”
The Muses did not enjoy the insider status accorded Taibosh, who was treated like something between a fraternity brother and an eccentric, dementia-addled uncle. “Cook ensured Taibosh had all creature comforts, including those of the flesh; they partied and ate and drank” together, Parsons reported. “As Taibosh’s manager, Cook dealt with all money matters. In essence the arrangement was that, in return for Taibosh’s summer pay minus pocket money, Cook would provide Taibosh with a winter home.” During the circus season, Taibosh slept in the same dormitory Pullman car as the other sideshow performers while Cook traveled separately, in a management car.
Not surprisingly, Parsons wrote, Taibosh’s command of English greatly improved after he became liberated from Hepston, and his lilting South African accent charmed the crowds in the sideshow and in the circus backyard. (His first language was Afrikaans, but Hepston had spent years hiding him away from potential paying audiences and instructing him to grunt and yell when onstage.)
Taibosh was not a fan of George and Willie Muse—“he was rather snooty about them,” Parsons told me in an e-mail. But the brothers were well liked both in the press, which considered them good copy, and among the rousties, who recalled them pleasantly strumming guitars and “laughing and singing until the train started to roll” on humid summer nights.
As The New Yorker put it in the magazine’s lawsuit coverage, the Muses were widely considered “good examples of contented freaks.” They loved monkeys and kangaroos, the magazine reported. It also mentioned their appearance at the hairdressers’ convention, where their dreadlocks were unveiled in a publicity stunt involving permanent waves. “If the waving machines on exhibition at the convention could wave Ecko’s [sic] ropy locks, they could wave anything, even a telephone switchboard. But it never happened. The freak remained happily in a corner with a plate of ice cream.”
Lawyer Kelley won the first volley in his battle against Messick, who could not squeak past the shortcut he’d taken in hastily writing his initial legal pleading. Like the press, Richmond judge Beverly T. Crump issued no comment at all about the brothers’ claims of enslavement. But he agreed with Kelley that Messick had mistakenly labeled the circus a “corporation” when in fact no such entity existed. Despite becoming captains of industry, the Ringlings technically still operated the business as an informal family partnership, just as they had back in the old wagon days of Baraboo. (The circus incorporated several years later, in 1932. Its Baraboo winter quarters had moved to Bridgeport in 1919, and a decade later John Ringling bade the Baraboobians a final good-bye by shifting the operation closer to his mansion in Sarasota.)
There being no corporation to sue, Crump deemed the case quashed.
But Messick left the door open for another suit by persuading the judge to keep the matter under advisement while he took one more stab at it. Meanwhile, he angled quietly for a settlement, presenting it as a way to keep the kidnapping story out of the press and to preserve Ringling’s “Sunday School” image.
Not that anyone in the press viewed the charges seriously. In fact, reporters took even greater liberties to embellish Clyde Ingalls’s ballyhoo about the brothers by turning the brouhaha into yet another joke.
In Wisconsin, an editorial writer opined that sideshow customers, not the Muses, had suffered the most harm: it was a hard blow to patrons who had paid out their good coin to see authentic citizens from another planet. They felt they had been wickedly imposed on by those slick fellows of the circus.
In Norfolk, Virginia, an editorial writer reframed the story, comparing it to ghostwritten celebrity gossip: as long as the newspaper world can stomach this sort of faking in its own household without nausea, it is in no position to steam up over Ambassadors from Mars.
Nary a reporter wrote a word about how the Muses felt.
Meanwhile, a Kansas journalist reported—correctly—that life in Roanoke amid the drugstore crowds was not exactly brimming with excitement for the famous duo: now they sat around the fireside of the old home “shack” and seemed lonesome for the crowds who used to visit them each day.
In February 1928, Messick pulled out another squeaker—he got the Big One to settle with the Muses. Details of the settlement he brokered with Ringling were not reported in the media, though the Roanoke newspapers insisted it was “a highly satisfactory adjustment of their claim.”
Evidence of the case no longer seems to exist in city or state holdings in Roanoke and Richmond beyond Messick’s initial brief, Kelley’s response, and myriad newspaper accounts. I have personally looked for them, hired a legal researcher to look for them, begged lawyer friends to cajole law librarians and clerks into looking one more time on my behalf, and combed accounts by sideshow historians, who have likewise come up dry.
“Efforts to bring an appropriate case against the circus were frustrated,” the Canadian historian Jane Nicholas summed up, vaguely, in a 2014 article. She shared my exasperation about the difficulty of trying to envision lives that were seemingly well documented—only never from the subjects’ point of view. “There are so many stories missing, especially of [sideshow performers who began as] child performers,” she told me. “Young performers weren’t seen as children, only as people who brought an economic benefit. They weren’t hidden away from the public. They were there for the public. So even though the sideshow did provide them with work and a place to be, it was still exploitative.”
Missing documents notwithstanding, Nicholas encouraged me to keep digging. If we only wrote the histories of the people who left detailed records, she said, “we would only get to know about the really privileged people. You have to piece together your evidence with empathy and conjecture,” using the materials at hand.
At the stately Library of Virginia, where researchers are restricted to laptops and pencils for note taking and where I was asked to lock my belongings away (a routine part of theft prevention), a clerk who spoke in brief, hushed tones hauled out museum-quality storage boxes containing the court case on a large wheeled rack.
There wasn’t much to see.
Folded into thirds and wrapped in neat bundles tied in orange lace bows, the trace legal leavings bore no hint of the reality of George and Willie Muse. The boxes contained fewer than ten pages, mostly just the original filing by Messick and Kelley’s response.
Messick declined to disclose the amount Ringling ponied up as the brothers’ unofficial back pay, nor did he offer his own lawyerly reflection. He hinted that a federal peonage suit might be in the works. We also know he gave a short press conference, with George and Willie on hand, “their long sheep-like hair waving like banners in the breezes that waft through the Federal Building. They talked, and not without a touch of longing, of the old trouping days,” the Roanoke Times wrote. “The drab narrowness and cramped horizons of Ten-and-a-Half Street fail to touch the spark of their esthetic emotion as the Ringling ballyhoo of the big top once did.”
Messick also implied that he and Kelley had come to a new agreement over the Muses’ employment. He hinted that the brothers might be willing to return to the circus—but only if they were paid adequately and allowed to visit their family during breaks.
If their salaries were sent home, maybe their mother could get away from the neighborhood’s noisy nip joints, its cinder-filled air, the screeching and clanking of all those rail-yard brakes. Maybe, instead of doing other people’s laundry, she could just do her own, out of earshot from the loud racist parrots up the street.
Maybe she’d have a space for gardening, which she missed. Maybe she’d buy a respectable piece of property in Pinkard Court, the black suburban enclave on the outskirts of town.
Maybe, George and Willie hoped, Harriett would figure out a way to leave Cabell, who wanted, more than anything, not to buy his wife a home but to score the ultimate status symbol in 1928: a new car. Outside of the black doctors and lawyers in town, he’d be among the first African Americans in the city to own his own set of wheels.
Ringling dispatched Shelton back to Roanoke to further sweeten the deal: if George and Willie returned to the sideshow, he promised, the circus would find roustabout work for their younger brother Tom. He could tour the country now, too, helping erect the big top alongside scores of other, mostly black laborers. Shelton even hoped to land them all a wintertime gig in London with a British-owned circus called Bertram Mills. They could play before King George V!
The Roanoke Times pondered their predicament:
“The curtain of the drama has only commenced to rise” on the brothers’ next act. “Eko and Iko sit snugly by a fat stove in their Ten-and-a-Half Street abode while the indulgent daddy supplies the fuel.”
Given Cabell’s behavior in the nip joints and at the back-alley craps matches, the family was surprised he hadn’t already absconded with that chauffeur car he drove for work. And though they couldn’t stand Candy Shelton, George and Willie had come to realize that the indulgent daddy was maybe even greedier.
That winter, the brothers found themselves engaged in much less glamorous work—playing music in the storefront window of a downtown Roanoke drugstore. Their frowns were even deeper set. A. L. Holland remembers watching them there when he was just ten years old. They were sitting on stools, playing a mandolin and guitar. They spoke very little but played beautifully, Holland said.
Before and after school, Holland worked as a blind man’s assistant, leading him around town, helping him sell brooms for seventy-five cents apiece. “Every time he sold a broom, I got a nickel,” Holland recalled.
“It had been a very happy time; everybody was glad to see the Muse brothers. The whole town was talking about it.” But after a few weeks of it, “they looked real sad to me,” he said. He had never before seen hair like theirs, and “as a kid, I was a little bit scared of them.”
Holland was not the only one.
“We were afraid to get close to them,” another Roanoke native told me in 2001. He recalled George and Willie standing inside the family’s front door and waving shyly to passersby.
It was George and Willie’s decision to heed Candy Shelton’s plea and rejoin the circus in the spring of 1928, with Tom in tow, according to family members. They wanted to help support their mother, especially in light of the way Cabell was burning through the settlement money. They probably also missed the relative freedom of the circus backyard, a familiar place where a person happening upon them was not apt to walk the other way—or call the police about wild savages on the loose.
Maybe they believed their dark-skinned brother, with his normal vision and streetwise ways, could help them navigate a more independent life. Shelton would continue to manage their act, but they would not be so constantly under his thumb. Census records from 1930 show the three brothers living in the multiracial, immigrant-rich Hell’s Kitchen section of Manhattan during the off-season, in an apartment building that also housed actors, theater ushers, and factory workers.
Were their fellow sideshow workers glad to see them back under the tent? Unclear. Did managers treat them better now? We’ll never know.
Opening-day circus coverage in the New York Times noted only that George and Willie hadn’t missed a beat during their Roanoke hiatus. The reporter only briefly noted the reunion drama and didn’t even mention the lawsuit. In a Fellows-fed story subtitled EKO AND IKO ARE HAPPY, the brothers had been “found by their parents last Winter after they had been missing from home for some ten years,” the paper explained.
The story was pure Fellows fodder, a page-three gimmick that mainly focused on Habu, the man with the iron tongue, who supposedly had just suffered two nervous breakdowns because he could not hoist an elephant, or even a baby zebra, with his tongue. He lifted items—a heavy-looking bucket, for instance—via a hook that was placed in his pierced tongue. (“This is actually a gaff,” Al Stencell said of Habu’s gimmicky hoax. “A U-shaped piece fits around the tongue” and is covered up with a cloth in front of the mouth while the hook is pretend-inserted.)
“Yah,” the brothers were quoted as saying of Habu, as if in unison. “He’s gloomy,” they supposedly chorused.
Nothing was written about the conditions of their employment, past or present, by either the Times or the New York Evening Post, which noted only that the Muse “twins” had returned to Ringling “dressed to kill in their crimson flannel dress clothes.”
A few years later, The New Yorker finally spelled their stage names correctly but cruelly recollected their 1928 return to the circus as being motivated by… food. “The fried chicken had soon given out at Roanoke. Their relatives and friends had at first looked on them as heroes and wonder men, but gradually came to regard them as flitter-witted gormandizers.”
During Ringling’s Madison Square Garden 1928 season opener, the brothers seemed captivated only by the menagerie, the Post reported: they watched the tigers pace, their heads turning “patiently, regularly, back and forth together as they leaned silently on the rail, as absorbed and fascinated as any bucolic from Jackson, Miss.… [though] without a doubt they’d seen this phenomenon before.”
During a June stop in Buffalo, the Muses were once again such a draw that six patrons came close to trampling over a reporter during their mad rush to get to the platform where they were playing. Annoyed, the reporter ended up with mud plastered across his trousers and shoes as he pondered how the crowd had come to be under the spell of the “bearded twins from someplace or other in the South Seas Islands.”
In a pitch card taken around that time—a photo the size of a postcard that was sold as a souvenir in penny arcades, candy stores, and amusement parks—the brothers have graduated from Martian ambassadors to Eko and Iko, Sheep-Headed Cannibals from Ecuador.
George appears to be scouting out something in the distance—people to eat?—while Willie crouches on one knee, pointing stage right. They wear blousy shirts, comically oversized vests, and pantaloons tucked into tights.
George has one hand on Willie’s shoulder, and both sport long dreadlocks and beards. It was the height of the exhibition craze that sideshow managers tried to dignify with the euphonious word Zulu, a time when Clyde Ingalls not only featured Clicko and Eko and Iko, but had also begun to hire “foreign rarities scouts” to regularly recruit acts from genuinely far-off places like Burma and the Congo. During the time of Jim Crow restrictions, displaying such bloodthirsty warriors and Stone Age savages underscored the omnipresence of racial segregation. Besides, with circuses now struggling to compete with the marvels of radio and motion pictures, Ingalls hoped the imports would help him up his game.
As Ingalls told reporters, the Muse brothers “were taken from Ecuador to England when nine years of age by missionaries, and so have been brought up under English rules which forbid them eating each other—or the spectators!” But compared with the older pitch cards and circus publicity pictures, there’s now a marked change in the expressions of George and Willie that belies the ballyhoo about their cannibalistic Zulu shtick.
“Black ‘wildmen’ were sometimes exhibited in cages as uncivilized brutes who subsisted on raw meat and bit the heads off chicken or snakes. But these two, in comparison, look like Boy Scouts,” said Bernth Lindfors, the University of Texas scholar, of the photo.
Perhaps that’s because George and Willie are now in on the joke. They’re performers who are being paid—for a while, anyway.
“They may have been laughing at us, but backstage, we were laughing at them because they were paying to see us,” Willie told his relatives.
Their younger brother Tom was not so enthralled. He had not grown up in the circus backyard, as the brothers had, and didn’t understand the appeal. Besides, black rousties were paid two-thirds of what their lighter-skinned Euro-American immigrant coworkers earned, and unlike his brothers, they generally were segregated from whites in lodging and in the cookhouse.
They wielded giant sledgehammers in unison as the lot lice stood nearby, watching the feat of syncopation, a free show-before-the-show. It was grueling work, maybe even harder than the dawn-to-dusk sharecropping schedule of “can to can’t.” They were up early, up late, with long hours, and very little sleep.
Tom hated the work, but he did what he was told and dutifully sent most of his salary home to his mother. The brothers had seen enough of their stepfather’s behavior to be wary of what would come of it, though.
And since their departure for the circus in the spring of 1928, things had only gotten worse.