Good Morning POU! Today’s post is the tragic story of the Muse twins.
Today’s post comes from the Oct 2016 edition of The Washingtonian
In the Early 1900s, Albino African-American Brothers Were Stolen From Their Virginia Home to Be Circus Performers. This Is Their Story.
Their music briefly became famous, but today their history is mostly forgotten. In an excerpt from her book Truevine, Beth Macy resurrects their mother’s fight to free her boys.
Talk to any person of color over age 60 in my part of Virginia and they know the story by heart: Black children reared during the postwar baby boom rarely left home without being admonished by their mothers, “Y’all stay together now or you might be kidnapped, just like Eko and Iko.”
Eko and Iko were the sideshow stage names of George and Willie Muse, the grandsons of former slaves. They were born at the turn of the century to parents who sharecropped tobacco, like everyone else in the rural enclave of Truevine, Virginia.
George and Willie were just six and nine, as the elders tell the story, when a circus promoter crept onto the tobacco field where they were working and enticed them with a rare piece of candy. In the time it took to fetch a hoe from the shed, the boys vanished.
They were kidnapped in a dusty corner of southern Virginia named for the only thing that gave these Reconstruction-era blacks any semblance of hope—the biblical promise of a better life in the hereafter. “I am the true vine, and My father is the vinedresser,” Jesus said in the Gospel of John. “Every branch in Me that does not bear fruit He takes away; every branch that bears fruit He prunes, that it may bear more fruit.”
For the next 13 years, their mother, Harriett, watched and worried. And she waited for signs of fruit.
They were easy pickings for a traveling circus. The brothers were African-American albinos with watery blue eyes and blond hair, and their vision was poor, the result of an oscillating eye condition routinely misinterpreted as a mental deficiency.
In the late 19th century, the height of circus popularity, bounty hunters scoured America’s backwoods—and the world—looking for people they could transform into sideshow attractions. Acts such as Chang and Eng, the world’s most famous conjoined twins, “discovered” by a British merchant in Siam (now Thailand) in 1829. Or the Wild Men of Borneo, as impresario P.T. Barnum pitched a pair of dwarf brothers to audiences in 1880 . . . though they actually hailed from a farm in Ohio.
Somehow Barnum had heard about the albino brothers—maybe from a shopkeeper in nearby Rocky Mount, the county seat. Maybe a neighbor had seen the ads that showmen took out in newspapers and trade publications for “freak hunters,” as they were called.
Wanted — to hear from the man that grows three feet in front of your eyes . . . Call DAN RICE, Sioux City, Iowa.
Maybe even a member of their own family had given the boys up.
Although the timeline of the brothers’ earliest years is fuzzy, owing to illiteracy and uneven documentation, this much is certain: From 1914 to 1927, circus managers transformed the Muse brothers from scared little boys into world-famous sideshow freaks. George and Willie weren’t permitted to go to school or learn to read. They weren’t paid for their work. To stop them from begging to return home, they were told their mother was dead.
One day, a circus photographer handed them a banjo and guitar, telling them to pose with the instruments as photo props. It had to be a joke, their manager reasoned, that the strange-seeming brothers could ever learn the simplest of tunes. Little did he know that George and Willie harbored the innate ability to teach themselves almost any tune.
Though he was only three years older, George became Willie’s protector and his voice. George did most of the talking for the two, while Willie communicated mainly through his music. During World War I, they both took solace in the popular anthem “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary,” a song about missing home.
Sideshow operators dressed them in outlandish costumes and sculpted their hair into dreadlocks, shaped like sparklers exploding at the crown of their heads. They erected elaborate banners, alternately heralding the boys as “Barnum’s Original Monkey Men,” “the Ambassadors from Mars,” and “the Sheep-headed Men,” all the while spinning wild yarns about how the brothers had come to join the circus: They’d been discovered floating on a raft off the coast of Madagascar. Found in the Mojave Desert outside the remains of a Martian spaceship.
SIDESHOW OPERATORS CALLED THEM ‘BARNUM’S ORIGINAL MONKEY MEN,’ ‘AMBASSADORS FROM MARS,’ AND ‘THE SHEPHERDED MEN.’
As showman Al G. Barnes recalled in his 1936 memoir: “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 escapes, and that they were the only specimens in captivity. The boys had a very low grade of intelligence, and the press-agent story fitted them well.”
But one after another, circus managers underestimated George and Willie Muse, who could hear a song just once and replicate it, by ear, on any instrument they were handed. Not just the guitar and banjo but the harmonica, saxophone, and xylophone, too.
More important, the showmen underestimated their mother, Harriett Muse, who’d moved to Roanoke not long after her sons’ disappearance. Destitute, illiterate, and soon to be widowed, she had relocated there seeking better-paying work as a maid, like so many sharecropping migrants—all the while never giving up hope that she would one day find her sons.
The answer finally came to Harriett in a dream, she told her family, in a story that’s been handed down from relative to relative until it’s all but fused into the family’s DNA.
The Greatest Show on Earth was making its way to Roanoke, and Harriett vowed: They could lynch her if they wanted, but one way or another, she was going to confront Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus, find her sons, and do everything she could to bring them home. (continue to Page 2)