The day it happens, it’s the fall of 1927, a time when the city’s top law-enforcement officer is the founder of the local Ku Klux Klan and when Ringling executives travel with their own cadre of lawyers.
The bustling young railroad town has finally grown big enough to host the circus known as the Big One. By now, it has been 13 years since Harriett last laid eyes on her sons.
George and Willie can’t read the WELCOME TO ROANOKE sign as their train rolls through the mountains east from Bristol, past the crimson fall foliage and into the booming city. They probably recognize the topography of their childhood, though, as the sun rises and the train chugs through the red-clay hills where the Alleghenies meet the Blue Ridge. Past Poor Mountain, past Twelve O’Clock Knob, then past Fort Lewis until, finally, the train comes to a creaky halt in Roanoke, where Mill Mountain stands sentinel over the town.
The four-engine, five-ring behemoth arrives at 9 am on October 14. The tents and banners are hoisted, the animals disembark. Walking into the fairgrounds late that morning, George and Willie are as surprised as anybody to run into a familiar face.
It’s Leslie Craft Crawford, a neighbor from childhood. They haven’t seen her since then, not since they played together in Craigs Creek. But they recognize her immediately, exclaiming “Miss Leslie!” and waving their arms.
Surely it occurs to them how close they are to home: If Miss Leslie’s here, then maybe their mother is also nearby—assuming she’s alive.
Outside the tent, Harriett probably spies her sons’ banner picture first, though it’s doubtful she recognizes them from it, because showmen took pains to make them look neither albino nor black in the image but rather a garden-variety vanilla—the idea being that they wanted to “ward off an unpleasant or unfavorable reaction from the potentially racist general public,” as one historian put it.
The banner takes up prominent real estate, just to the right of the sideshow entrance—with a giant sign announcing continuous performances and topped by waving American flags. ARE THEY AMBASSADORS FROM MARS?, it says at the top, just to the left of the banner for Jolly Irene (real name Amanda Siebert), who at 620 pounds likely suffers from an untreated thyroid disorder.
Harriett Muse enters and finds her place near the back of the crowd as the inside lecturer wanders from one performer to the next, giving his spiel. As the audience follows him, she nudges her way toward the front.
The brothers, meanwhile, have taken their place on the sideshow stage, and when it’s time to introduce themselves and play the mandolin and guitar, they squint hard, their eyes scanning the standing, milling crowd. (As is typical with Ringling and other large circuses, there are no chairs inside the sideshow tent, making it the rare place in the circus where segregation codes often break down.)
The albinism has caused their vision to dim considerably in recent years, but if they squint just right, they can make out the faces near the front.
They sing their favorite song as they strum:
It’s a long way to Tipperary,
It’s a long way to go. . . .
George and Willie are halfway through it when their mother’s face comes hazily into focus. There are worry lines on her forehead, a deep crease between her brown, piercing eyes. She’s wearing a hand-sewn black dress, its collar cinched by a safety pin, a belt loose around her waist. Her dress is so long that it almost touches the tops of her creased, laceless shoes.
George spots her first and stops playing. He elbows his brother, in a scene the family will recount often, with pride, over the years.
“There’s our dear old mother,” George says. “Look, Willie, she is not dead.”
The crowd is puzzled when the brothers drop their personas, along with their instruments, and rush from the stage. They greet their mother, folding themselves into her tall, sturdy frame.
The band starts playing, but all the Dixieland jazz on the planet can’t cloud this astonishing reunion, this almost surreal instant in time. Before it’s over, a man named Candy Shelton appears, demanding to know: Who is this woman and why is she disrupting my show?
Harriett stands firm, clutching her sons. It’s dawning on her that he’s the man in charge, the one responsible for the trafficking of her sons. For the 13 years of family holidays, birthdays, and weddings that have passed without word of their health or whereabouts.
She will not leave the fairgrounds, she insists, unless George and Willie accompany her home.
But they’re Shelton’s children, he has the nerve to insist. They’re his property. He even has documents, somewhere, paperwork proving they have the same last name as he does!
A scrum of Ringling executives arrives to try to shore up Shelton’s claim, men in dark suits and fedoras—the people George and Willie have nicknamed City Hall.
The police are on their way, too.
The Ringlings are powerful people, they remind the maid—multimillionaires who have the ear of Presidents, their own railway lines, and mansions in several states.
Still, standing amid the sawdust in her dusty oxfords, Harriett refuses to budge. In an act of extraordinary defiance, a stance that could have easily landed her in jail, she doesn’t move when eight Roanoke police officers converge on the lingering, growing crowd, everybody eagerly listening and watching for her next move.
“They are my children!” she says.
It works. She convinces police officers to let them leave, as the newspaper describes it, with their “old mammy who yo all aint seen for all dese years,” awkwardly attempting to convey Harriett’s dialect without directly attributing it.
Even more astonishing, two days later, the tattered maid from Truevine will put on her best clothes, walk downtown, and hire an ambitious white lawyer to take on the Greatest Show on Earth.
For four generations, that was the story that was whispered and handed down through black families in Roanoke. It was as steeped in folklore as it was sullied by racist news accounts that dominated the Jim Crow–era press. It was accurate, but also incomplete.
The truth about what happened to the brothers in the intervening years was so raw that their relatives refused to talk about it. It took more than two decades of research before I understood that it was even more tangled—and more troubling—than what the old people knew.
In 1928, the Muse brothers returned to the circus, initially on their own terms. From Buckingham Palace to the islands of Hawaii, they performed alongside sword swallowers and giants and some of the Munchkins later cast in The Wizard of Oz. By the late 1920s, they were headline sideshow acts and star freaks, featured prominently in opening-day dispatches written from Madison Square Garden for the New York Times.
But for many years, Candy Shelton, their longtime circus manager, still called the shots, I discovered in long-buried court documents and circus archives and by interviewing some of Roanoke’s oldest citizens. Even after their mother’s 1927 lawsuit resulted in a settlement for their back wages and a labor contract, Shelton still skimmed their pay and controlled their every move.
During off-season visits home to see their relatives, he lingered menacingly beside them as they sat on their mother’s porch. “He hovered over ’em, like a person who was in charge,” one neighbor recalled. “So they wouldn’t run off. The circus owned ’em, you see.”
For decades, Harriett waged legal battles against Shelton and other sideshow managers to get her sons paid. Despite several rulings in their favor, it was a constant struggle to make sure they were compensated and the stipulations of the judicial rulings adhered to.
Because of their mother’s efforts, and her tenacity to hold the show managers accountable, the money sent back to Roanoke enabled her to buy a small farmhouse in the country and set the family on a path to financial stability that gradually drew them out of poverty.
When Harriett died of a heart attack en route to pick up her wartime sugar rations in 1942, the family buried her in an unmarked grave in a segregated cemetery. They paid off her property instead and made plans to buy a bigger, much nicer house—in town—for Willie and George.
The brothers returned to Roanoke for their mother’s funeral, this time without Shelton watching over them. Neighbor kids gathered afterward, trying to get a peep at their peculiar hair, their milky skin, their fluttering blue eyes.
“Mama’s gone,” George said, shaking his head.
“Mama’s gone,” Willie repeated, shaking his head.
On a warm fall day in 2015, I walked that cemetery with a Muse family relative and a burial-park caretaker, who pointed to the probable site of Harriett’s unmarked grave.
If you look closely down the row, he showed us, you could make out the indentations where the ground sinks in just so, the outline of the graves as straight and rectangular as a set of xylophone keys.