This time Harriett had a better plan for the money being sent home for her benefit. On a balmy late-winter day in 2015, I set out to explore exactly what she bought with the remittances from her sons, seventy-six years after the fact, and to track the rippling impact of first-time property ownership on a woman whose parents and children had been themselves considered property. My guide was Betsy Biesenbach, a Roanoke court researcher, title examiner, and map collector.
We drove southeast from Roanoke toward an unpopulated knoll near the Blue Ridge Parkway to find Harriett Muse’s first and only piece of land. Cars cruising the parkway hummed in the distance. A warm breeze skirted thickets of denuded trees. Wrinkled horse-nettle fruit clustered in tiny orange bunches, and dried milkweed pods spiked from fields of overgrown, butter-colored grass.
Even though our chances of discovering Harriett’s motivations were slim, here Betsy and I were, standing outside my car, each of us pivoting in a circle, as if on cue. Bookended by Fort Lewis Mountain to the west and Peaks of Otter to the east, the panorama demands that kind of attention.
It’s as if God reached his hand down four hundred million years ago and crimped a hundred miles of piecrust into sedimentary rock.
The only evidence of human habitation here, on what was once Harriett’s 16.8 acres, was the occasional pocket of daffodils marking long-gone property lines and a few stretches of rusted wire-mesh fencing. And lots of trash, in the form of more recently discarded tires, a toilet, and bottles of Yoohoo and Mad Dog 20/20.
People once lived here, first the Sioux and Powhatan and Iroquois, then the English and their African slaves, and the German and Scots-Irish settlers after them. In the late 1930s, whites owned most of the land, but several black subsistence farmers lived amid them, too, descendants of the slaves, most of them in an enclave called Ballyhack.
From 1939 to 1942, they were Harriett Muse’s neighbors.
For the first time in her life, the widowed maid owned something of her own—with a view so vast and so spectacular that, decades later, developers eyeing it for the first time would dream of one day building vineyards and exclusive golf resorts.
We were there to explore Ballyhack, a community that took its name from a bloody election-day brouhaha in the mid-1800s between rival political factions. If oral history is true, the fight took place at a voting precinct, where brawlers struck one another with boots, clubs, and knives (hence Ballyhack).
A milder-sounding name was later suggested, which is why most people now refer to the area as Mount Pleasant, for the views and high-elevation breezes. The black history of Ballyhack seems to have evaporated among all but the very old and the George Davis archives: his photograph The Dentist Visits Ballyhack features the outdoor pulling of a tooth by a neighborhood healer, with the entire family looking on, and its details offer a stop-time moment of rural daily living, from pigs at the feeding trough, to a collapsed porch roof cobbled from sticks, to bedsheets hanging from tree-limb fence rails.
The Ballyhack name did recently reenter the local lexicon, though, attached to an ultra-exclusive golf club a few miles down the road. Virginia Tech football icon Frank Beamer and NFL great Archie Manning are members, and many in the club travel to the region by private jet and chauffeur.
There were neither golfers nor brawlers in sight the day Betsy and I set out to locate the plot of land Wilbur Austin bought in George’s and Willie’s names for $790 in early 1939. He paid $400 cash down, accrued from the money he’d been setting aside for the brothers’ savings and retirement, followed by $10 monthly payments by Harriett. The house on the plot had been built sometime around 1905, Betsy surmised from the deeds, by a farmer named General Grant Maxey. It was a bit unusual, having the same name as the Union commander General Ulysses Grant in the midst of Rebel territory. But Maxey was born in 1862 in nearby Bedford County, and though he had many black families as neighbors, he was actually white, census records show.
Technically, we were trespassing as we walked atop the knoll where Harriett’s house had been located, long before her plot was sold and resold. We were trespassing on what had become, long after Harriett’s tenure there, the final resting spot for more than two million tons of the region’s garbage between 1977 and 1994. Two years later, Roanoke Regional Landfill officials had it capped off and covered with dirt and grass, moving operations to a newer and more environmentally sound facility elsewhere in the county.
On auspicious days, it’s possible to stand at a nearby parkway overlook and catch sight of a bald eagle or a red-tailed hawk swooping in and out of the undulating blue haze.
Within fifteen minutes of our arrival on this day, a worker monitoring leachate seepage spotted us walking on the old landfill and told us to move along, and we did.
In 1939, Harriett Muse was one of fifty-six black homesteaders living in Roanoke County. Her dwelling was a five-room frame house, including a ceiling, as the real estate assessor noted. She also owned a barn built of oak with a roof that badly needed repair. Among the amenities of Ballyhack—a smattering of black homes spread out along a single meandering road, not unlike the tiny crossroads of Truevine—were a segregated “colored school,” two black churches, a black cemetery, and a black-owned store. As the crow flies, Ballyhack was just four miles southeast of the Roanoke city line, but the road there from Roanoke was winding and ill maintained, making the journey rugged and long.
Ballyhack was a tight-knit community, recalled ninety-three-year-old Veron Holland, who grew up spending weekends at her grandparents’ farm next door to Harriett’s. Veron pulled weeds in the garden, helped care for the chickens and cows, and went to church at the Ballyhack African Methodist Episcopal church. When she was lucky she got to shop in a little store run by Ardelia Jones, “a very, very pretty woman who would sell us a penny’s worth of candy,” the retired teacher told me.
Veron described the forty homes clustered around Ballyhack as “shanty and shackly,” small country houses built of wood-frame construction, some of them lopsided, but for the stick-straight house built by hand by her grandfather Jordan Holland, the son of former slaves.
“I tell you the truth, black folks had a hard time trying to live back then. Money was a very scarce thing,” Veron said. Her father, Garrett Holland, worked as a Norfolk and Western railroad laborer, the family grew its own food, and her parents squirreled away money to send Veron and her sister by train to Bluefield State, in West Virginia. “Hollins College was right here in Roanoke County, but blacks couldn’t go,” she said. (Another retired black educator told me the same story, remembering that students had to sit in the back of the train car until the moment it crossed the state line into West Virginia, at which point they all rose and moved forward.)
The name Harriett Muse did not ring a bell with Holland. But as a longtime elementary schoolteacher at Roanoke’s segregated Harrison School, she recalled hearing her students whisper, gossip, and giggle about Harriett’s sons. “Oh, Eko and Iko, Lord yes, I knew about them,” she said. “Everybody would get out and try to get a peep at ’em when they came to town. They were famous boys, but it was sad, too. They had a hard time.”
She remembered the time someone spotted them walking through Washington Park, up the street from her school, and called police to report that two wild men were on the loose.
Back then, forty-five tons of trash got deposited every day right next to that park—in the heart of Roanoke’s black community. The city’s landfill was also within smelling range of three black schools and the black hospital.
In the 1960s, when black Roanokers protested the fact that their children had to walk past the steaming, reeking, and rat-infested dump to get to school, the black PTA president A. Byron Smith appealed to the white city council’s own sense of safety. He reasoned: the black maids hired to cook and care for the councilmen’s kids might infect them with sickness picked up from the Washington Park landfill. (For decades after, the newspaper ran an angry-looking picture of Smith from that meeting with every story that quoted him. “Mr. Smith, you aren’t as ugly as the paper’s making you look,” a woman from across town told him years later, astonished. “You’re nice-looking.”)
But only the threat of a mass protest spurred the council to move. No matter how much agency the black community began to have in its affairs, it could not overcome the mind-set of most white decision makers that their children and their homes should be far from view. On the eve of a sit-in organized by Smith, officials finally announced they would close the dump and move it way out to southeastern Roanoke County—to the one black neighborhood in that part of the countryside.
To Ballyhack.
But capped landfills and venture-capitalist golfers were still decades away in 1939. Back then, Ballyhack was the kind of remote piece of heaven that Harriett’s young grandchildren loathed, relatives recalled. It was a half-hour drive from the city on winding bumpy roads, and there was no electricity. The roads were so bad that, a year earlier, the “Parent-Teacher Association of the Ballyhack school (colored) appeared before the Roanoke County School Board… to request adequate roads over which the school’s pupils can travel to and from school,” the Roanoke Times reported.
“Mama never did like to go out there,” Nancy recalled of her mother, Dot, who preferred the Henry Street nightlife in the city. (Dot was gorgeous, one Jordan’s Alley native said, recalling a teenager who wore beautiful clothes, stylish haircuts, and bright-red lipstick—very much against the wishes of her ultra-religious Pentecostal mother, whose salt-and-pepper hair was “so long she could sit on it.”)
Dot “didn’t like that it was so dark in the country, not like in the city with all the lights,” Nancy said. “She never wanted to spend the night out there.”
Nancy had never been there herself and had no idea where Harriett had lived beyond “somewhere in Ballyhack.” But Betsy had spent three hours piecing together exactly where her long-gone property lines were by comparing and superimposing old maps and surveys, and tracking down titles to adjoining properties.
A visitor making the trek from Jordan’s Alley would have arrived on Harriett’s property only to realize that the journey to her actual home was far from over. To get to her house on the hill (at an elevation of eleven hundred feet), you had to traverse a long and rutted dirt lane. After a hard rain it was impassable. The soil was too rocky to be of adequate fertility. It was typical, Betsy said, “of the kind of property white landowners would sell to blacks.”
But Harriett loved her hilltop house, especially the view. She kept her own chickens and pigs, and neighbors sold her buttermilk and meats. A church friend from the city brought her other groceries, and Annie Belle and Herbert looked after her, too.
She was never alone. In 1940, her son Tom, divorced now and working in a coal yard (probably for his brother-in-law), lived with her, as did a nephew and niece from West Virginia, who rented rooms from her and worked nearby as a miner and a maid.
On breezy summer nights, Harriett liked to sit on her front stoop and sing her favorite gospel tune, “Hallelujah, It’s Already Done”:
Faith is the substance
Of things hoped for
The evidence of things I’ve seen
So even before you get it
Go praise God for it
Tell the world it’s already done.…
She could not have imagined owning such land during all those years she’d spent picking worms off tobacco plants and washing other people’s clothes.
She was sixty-six years old and, for the first time in her life, at peace.
I imagine her sitting on the stoop, clasping the letters Marie Kortes wrote to her, maybe asking her niece or nephew to reread them to her at night, though no one in the family today remembers ever seeing the letters. She now knew where George and Willie were and where they were heading—in a typical month, from Denver to San Antonio to New Orleans.
During the regular season, the show traveled across America and Canada attached to larger affairs, usually the Clyde Beatty Circus but sometimes Beckmann and Gerety or the Conklin Shows. During the off-season, Kortes rented storefronts for his sideshow, erecting a kind of small indoor circus.
No longer traveling by rail during World War II, Beatty’s circus moved in forty-two trucks and vehicles, working around gasoline and tire rationing as well as worker shortages prompted by the war. Candy butchers had to put up the menagerie tent in 1944, and clowns had to build their own dressing facilities, which made them so mad they went on strike, or tried to—until the boss “gave us a hard look and said it didn’t make any difference whether we were on the show or not,” Beatty clown Walt Matthie recalled. “So we went back to hauling the trunks and putting up the tent and tearing it down.”
George and Willie helped with grunt work, too, according to relatives’ accounts. But they often did more than their share, and not necessarily of their own will, according to a letter written in the summer of 1936 by a Walnut Grove, Illinois, grocer to the Chicago division of the FBI. Harry E. Friend said he traveled with the show for several summers and believed the Muse brothers were seriously mistreated.
“For giving this information it would cost me my life if it were known,” the letter began.
Friend wrote to complain about the “almost impossible conditions” that George and Willie were forced to live under in 1946: “There [sic] sleeping quarters while on location is or was a lousy show wagon, thousands of bed bugs in their beds possibly body lice, to have money they were forced to carry water and do other show peoples [sic] flunky work, including doing showmens’ washing.”
Unless there is a trust fund being set aside for them, Friend wrote—which there was, unbeknownst to him—“it seems to me there [sic] present owner is as guilty of kidnapping as the criminal ones that kidnapped these 2 colored Boys” years ago.
Circus collectors I interviewed roundly dismissed the letter after it entered online circulation a few years back thanks to a peonage researcher who found it in Department of Justice records on file at the National Archives. They believe Friend had an ax to grind with Clyde Beatty. Sideshow historian Bob Blackmar even suggested that Kortes and Beatty must have fled the Walnut Grove region without settling their grocery bill—not so uncommon among show people operating with slim profits and sometimes in the red—and Friend was seeking payback.
Scanning personnel lists in Beatty’s souvenir programs, I found no mention of Harry Friend working for Clyde Beatty, which made me wonder if the letter was written by a person using a Friend-ly alias.
The letter was forwarded to FBI assistant attorney general Theron L. Caudle in August 1946. Thirteen days later, Caudle sent a memo to Director J. Edgar Hoover, advising him that “from the information presently available it appears that the institution of criminal proceedings is not warranted. No further investigation is warranted.”
As Douglas Blackmon recounted in Slavery by Another Name, peonage cases were not a priority of the FBI’s in the 1930s or ’40s. Only the most egregious cases were investigated, and punishment was rare for those convicted. A man who pleaded guilty in federal court in Mobile, Alabama, for holding a black man named Martin Thompson against his will received a $100 fine and six months of probation. “The futility of combating [peonage] was clear,” Blackmon wrote.
It wasn’t until 1951, following the return of black and white World War II soldiers who’d witnessed the violent horrors of the Nazis’ racial ideology, that Congress passed explicit statutes deeming any form of slavery indisputably a crime. Then, three years later, came Brown v. Board of Education.
“It was a strange irony that after seventy-four years of hollow emancipation, the final delivery of African Americans from overt slavery and from the quiet complicity of the federal government in their servitude was precipitated only in response to the horrors perpetrated by an enemy country against its own despised minorities,” Blackmon wrote.
Mississippi-based Antoinette Harrell, who first published Friend’s letter online and in her book about peonage, doubts that Friend’s complaint was investigated at all. An activist and author, she’s researched and lectured about scores of peonage claims, past and present, in six southern states, including in twenty-seven Mississippi counties. In secluded parts of rural Mississippi, there are some families, entrapped for generations and predating emancipation, who still farm in exchange for the privilege of living in a shanty on someone else’s land, she said.
Harrell doesn’t doubt that Harriett Muse loved her sons, but she doesn’t believe George and Willie were able to give informed consent when they decided to rejoin the circus in 1928 and continue performing. “If you had spent twenty years, and this was the way you supported yourself, and this is all that you know, then you may not be able to make a wise decision for yourself, especially if you’ve been brainwashed to believe that no one would hire you because you’re a misfit.”
Without proper training and education, victims of involuntary servitude generally gravitate back to what they know, she said.
Harrell’s insistence that George and Willie weren’t capable of deciding to rejoin the circus represents another parting of the story streams: it seemed there would always be people suggesting that the brothers weren’t mentally capable, just as there would always be a family and supporters who vehemently believe they were.
Jordan’s Alley native Myrtle Phanelson, ninety-seven, recalls them visiting Roanoke in the 1940s. “They’d visit their mama out in Ballyhack, and they’d bring ’em to church down here at Mount Sinai,” the Pentecostal Holiness church where Annie Belle sometimes preached. Myrtle’s mother-in-law, Esther, was the minister of the tiny white church with wooden pews, where Wednesday-night services sometimes went till 1:00 in the morning. (At Mount Sinai, they banged tambourines to floor-stomping hymns, and “they felt like you wasn’t saved unless you spoke in tongues.”)
“I knew Iko and Eko, yes,” Myrtle said. “One did all the talking, and the other one would just sit and listen. The one who talked [George], he seemed very smart, he really did. They’d been gone a long time with the circus, but, finally, they’d gotten ’em back,” she said.
As with the other African Americans I interviewed in Roanoke, it didn’t occur to Myrtle to think that George and Willie were victims of a family that stood to benefit from their work. While Harriett was literally living off their salaries during the last years of her life, she was also enforcing their work contracts and building a substantial retirement nest egg for them—something Harrell and Friend knew nothing about.
Within ten years, their savings had accrued to $10,635—worth about $106,000 in today’s money—and the Ballyhack property was fully paid off and accounted for, and in George’s and Willie’s names. At a time when black families struggled to get low-interest mortgages, when the Federal Housing Authority guaranteed very few loans in low-income and minority neighborhoods, Harriett was now a rarity. She was among just 20 percent of black Americans who owned their own homes.
Friend’s concern for the brothers did seem sincere (if poorly worded and spelled). His account of their musicianship and faith rang especially true, according to people I interviewed: “Even though they were not gave any schooling, they are good Christians and are able to play almost any musical instrument yet never had a lesson, and were you to ask how they account for this, their answer would be it was a gift from God, and truly it must have been. Now they can neither read nor write yet I think they are good enough to be in Vaudeville.”
Indeed, judging from photographs of that time, George in particular seems to enjoy a higher status among his peers. He has a ladies’-man reputation, relatives and circus chroniclers say. And he’s regularly highlighted on the bally for solo performances while the lecturer teases the crowd, trying to turn the tip. In one mid-1940s photograph, George peeks out from under a sheet, and it’s unclear whether he and the lecturer are working the crowd, or if George is just trying to prevent a sunburn.
The Mars madness having run its course, the banner that year bills the brothers as the Sheep-Headed Men from Ecuador. They’ve taken up the xylophone too, now, and their playing is so popular along the Texas-Mexico border that radio stations in Juárez invite them to perform on air. By 1948, they are Eko and Iko, the Sheep-Headed Cannibals. (Kortes was a champ at name switching, aiming to give returning prospective audiences at least the promise of seeing something new.)
Former circus-bill poster Dave Price remembers meeting the brothers as a boy at the Tennessee State Fair during that time. He walked up to the platform inside the tent and watched them play a spirited, flawless version of “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” with Willie on guitar and George on mandolin.
Price, a certified member of the lot lice, introduced himself to George and Willie. They politely and easily conversed with him and others in the crowd. Price asked them about a family friend and sideshow artist whose trick was stuffing his mouth with dozens of golf balls. The brothers fondly remembered working with Paul McWilliams, the Big-Mouthed Man, on Ringling in 1937, they said.
Press accounts from the 1940s do not describe them peering endlessly at the menagerie or grabbing fried chicken by the fistful. Since Kortes was a much smaller affair than Ringling, they are rarely mentioned at all, in fact, except in puff pieces Kortes himself provided to Billboard.
Indeed, though they are still referred to as “boys,” at least one author looking back on that time bestowed George and Willie, finally, with manly attributes and appetites. “The boys had saved up enough money for either a woman or a new suit of clothes and couldn’t decide which they wanted more,” one wrote of the Muses’ time with Kortes. “They debated this important issue for three days.”
They were already almost totally blind by late middle age, recalled another writer, Albert Tucker, a carnival cook during that period. It was hard for them to recognize objects or people unless they were brought within a few inches of their faces.
As workers waited for the train to pull out for the next stop, show people would lounge around the backyard, listening to the Muses playing and singing, some of them joining in. “Everyone on the circus loved them and would gather around, laughing and singing until the train started to roll, and then what a scramble to get aboard,” Tucker wrote.
For the first time in their careers, the Muse brothers were being treated with a modicum of respect. By the late 1940s and ’50s, their costumes shifted to floral Hawaiian shirts, as Kortes began producing winter shows around the Pacific, rotating acts in and out of various island resorts by boat and plane. “They were the first black folks I ever knew to ride a plane!” several elderly black Roanokers said, proudly.
Though Willie never got used to riding in a car—especially on four-lane highways—he loved flying during the early days of commercial aviation, when an airplane trip was usually reserved for the upper-middle and upper classes. People dressed up, and in-flight service was elegant, often including champagne. “When I was on that airplane, God never did let that plane crash,” he told his relatives, marveling.
Most of their coworkers were more collegial, more inclusive, than in decades past, when George and Willie are usually described as being off to themselves, with only the menagerie—and each other—for companionship. Kortes was never a household name like Ringling, but his operation was every bit as colorful, maybe even more so, with a legacy that spanned fifty years and several countries. Among the Muses’ longest-running coworkers were the Kortes fixtures who were pitched as the World’s Strangest Married Couple: the sideshow giant Al Tomaini and his “half-lady” acrobat wife, Jeanie, a pretty brunette born without legs or lower torso. In publicity pictures, eight-foot-tall Al holds the thirty-inch Jeanie on his lap. In some photos, she poses on the ground next to him, the crown of her head reaching just above the top of his cowboy boots (size 22).
“My mother said the Muse brothers could play instruments very well, but they were kind of shy,” recalled the Tomainis’ adopted daughter, Judy Rock. “During the Depression when most people weren’t working, the sideshow people were still working, and it was decent money, especially for blacks. They got to travel the world. They got to meet people they’d never have otherwise met,” she enthused.
Born in 1916 and originally exhibited by her mother, who died when she was thirteen, Jeanie had come under the abusive care of an adoptive mother who locked her up between performances. When she met Al Tomaini at a Cleveland fair in 1936, he vowed to protect her, and they became part of each other’s acts, marrying the following year.
By the time the Tomainis retired, in 1949, they had built a combination trailer park, motel, restaurant, and bait shop in Gibsonton, Florida, about twelve miles southeast of Tampa, called the Giant’s Camp. It helped launch “Gibtown” and surrounding communities as a retirement mecca of sorts for all kinds of sideshow managers and performers, including Percilla Bejano, the Monkey Girl, and her husband, Emmett, the Alligator-Skinned Boy—who were also billed as the World’s Strangest Married Couple. (Percilla spent her retirement puttering in the garden outside her bungalow—at the end of a dead-end street in nearby Lutz, fenced in to keep curiosity seekers out and her menagerie of cats, dogs, and goats in, Al Stencell recalled.)
But when strangers dropped in to the Giant’s Camp for a free freak show, Al Tomaini welcomed them. “I don’t mind,” he said, especially if they stayed to fish or buy lunch. “I’m peek-proof.”
Al was revered in Gibtown, where he served as the World’s Tallest Fire Chief and the president of the local chamber of commerce. (He once gave every stick of furniture in his home to a family that had lost theirs in a fire he’d been called to fight.) After his death, in 1962, widowed Jeanie remained in Gibtown, getting around the trailer park on an electric tricycle, until her death, in 1999.
Robert Bogdan, the sociologist, likened the Kortes gang’s career path to one that many workers face in their careers: as they grew older, “their value as exhibits declined,” he said. The shift mirrored both the downward pattern of sideshows generally and the upward pattern of technologically enhanced entertainment.
The Muses were among the last of their kind, not unlike the production guys who set hot type at my first newspaper job—the backshop, we called them—the luckiest of them old enough to retire just as the first digital equipment was coming through the doors.
When I interviewed Judy Rock in 2001, she was still running the Giant’s Camp, where diner regulars included Petie the Midget Terhune, who ate fire, handled snakes, and juggled; Melvin Burkhart, the Human Blockhead, another longtime Kortes performer, who hammered metal spikes into his nasal passage; and Bruce Snowdon, aka Falstaff the Fatman. They had all worked for the longtime sideshow operator Ward Hall, who bought the Pete Kortes Sideshow in 1973, a year before Kortes’s death.
Some of them had direct knowledge—or at least opinions—about George and Willie Muse.
Terhune, who died at age eighty-two in 2012, worked for Hall as a performer and rode shotgun to keep the manager from falling asleep at the wheel of his truck. Burkhart and Snowdon have also since died—Burkhart at ninety-four in 2001, and Snowdon at sixty-four in 2009. (“He literally ate himself to death,” Hall said of Snowdon.) Even the Giant’s Camp, sold to a local phosphate company after the last of the Tomaini family left town, closed in 2006.
Hall had seen the Muse brothers perform several times in the 1950s. He noted that Willie had lost so much hair toward the end of his career that Kortes commissioned a dreadlocked wig for him to wear during shows. In a backstage photo of the brothers from that time, they sport flowery Hawaiian shirts, and George has his arm around Willie’s shoulder. Willie is bearded but bald while George has a short blond Afro and beard.
It still pains Hall that he threw Willie’s old wig away after buying Kortes’s show and finding it inside an old storage crate.
“It’d be worth a lot of money today!” he said.
Not everyone cared so much about the Muse brothers’ legacy. Burkhart, also known as the Anatomical Wonder, was living in a Gibtown trailer with his wife and daughter when we met in 2001. He demonstrated his act with gusto. At age ninety-four, he was still happy to pound a spike up his nose for anyone who asked. (A source who introduced us did suggest we take him and his wife out to lunch for the interview; “they’re on a fixed income,” he said.)
When Burkhart was a teen, his nose had been squashed in the boxing ring and twenty-two bone fragments removed, creating a cavity behind one nostril that was just big enough for a thick nail. He could also make the two sides of his face do different things—grimace and laugh—at the same time.
His memories of the Muse brothers underscored the caste system George and Willie operated under for so many decades. Burkhart had worked alongside them, both with Ringling in the 1930s and, later, with Pete Kortes. People didn’t come to see reality, he told me. “They came to be entertained.” Customers liked the spontaneity, never knowing what was going to happen onstage. Burkhart rolled his eyes, recalling the questions the public threw at them, especially regarding their sex lives. “The half-lady used to say she’d stand onstage and marvel at the freaks in the audience,” he said.
He remembered George and Willie introducing themselves: “We’re Eko and Iko, and we come from Mars.” They were “backwards,” Burkhart said.
Asked if black performers were generally looked down on, he said, “Nobody wanted to lose a good black act, so if you started picking on them, you’d hear about it.”
But he never bothered getting to know them, he conceded, and wasn’t surprised by stories of exploitative managers. “Some of the bosses were good, and some weren’t.”
He’d heard something about a kidnapping and, later, after their mother found them, that they still sometimes went unpaid.
“But I also heard they were from Mars,” he quipped.
Then he laughed dismissively and changed the subject.
For the life of him, he couldn’t figure out why anyone would want to write about George and Willie Muse.
The brothers came home every year or two. They usually stayed with their mother in Ballyhack or with their sister, Annie Belle, in Jordan’s Alley, where family friends and relatives treated them like celebrities, according to eighty-eight-year-old Madaline Daniels, who was born in the shotgun house across from Jerusalem Baptist Church and remembers the homecomings.
An occasional lay preacher, Annie Belle tried to isolate her family from others in the neighborhood, maintaining a piousness that came across as snobbery to some. “The Pentecostals looked down on the rest of us,” Madaline and another neighbor told me. They wore tightly buttoned long dresses and eschewed makeup, and they spoke in tongues on a mourning bench positioned near the front of their church, for penitent sinners seeking salvation.
“Don’t be unevenly yoked,” they preached, which meant: stay away from the Baptists and other ne’er-do-wells, or their sinning might rub off on you.
Occasionally during visits home, George and Willie traveled with Harriett back to Truevine, where nonagenarian Mozell Witcher recalls them playing guitar and banjo at house parties in the countryside, held to celebrate the pulling of the season’s last tobacco-bud leaves. It was the early 1940s, and Mozell remembered being fascinated, and slightly scared, by the novel sight of dreadlocks. (Another elderly resident recalled George telling one of the children at the party, “Come sit on my big fat knee.”)
“People said they’d been stolen off the street,” Witcher told me.
That wasn’t a provable truth.
Some evidence suggests that Harriett had temporarily let them go, presumably for pay, and then they’d been stolen and she’d had to fight to get them back.
But Harriett did not correct the stories as they arose, nor did the brothers. “When I saw ’em, their mother was right proud of all they’d accomplished and all the places they’d been,” Witcher said.
Harriett was especially proud of their musical talent, remembered Truevine native J. Harry Woody, ninety-four, who also recalled their attendance at house parties.
“They played guitar and they played banjo, and it wasn’t like the music you hear today. This was real country blues, and they could make those instruments talk to you like a man talks.”
The parties were such spirited affairs that hosts often added extra nails and other reinforcements to the floorboards to keep the structures from sinking under the weight of the merriment.
In his ongoing role as sideshow coordinator and subcontractor, Kortes coordinated as many as six wintertime sideshows for a Hawaiian-based carnival owner named E. K. Fernandez, known as the Barnum of the Pacific Rim. The Muses flew to Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, across the Hawaiian Islands, and into Venezuela, where the Kortes group also worked for carnivals operated by Charlie Cox, according to photographs and Billboard notices. Other show owners had tried, and failed, to make money operating in the Caribbean, and “some… lost all their equipment, even their elephants!” marveled Bob Blackmar. But Cox must have had “some kind of in with the Cuban government,” he said, because he handled the immigration transitions with ease.
In a typical year, the performers’ route ranged from San Juan, Puerto Rico, to Maui to Mexico City to Montreal, then down through the southern United States, into Nashville and New Orleans. They played indoors and outdoors, and Kortes’s assistants often gave one-off lectures to local Kiwanis or chamber of commerce groups titled “The Home Life of Freaks.”
“Sympathy is wasted on human oddities,” said a Kortes lecturer at a Cleveland stop. “Besides, I’ll bet they make more money than you do.”
But whether the checks arrived on time—and didn’t bounce when Harriett tried to cash them—was another issue entirely.