by Beth Macy
“And then from there, I suppose she walked,” about eight blocks.
Sweet Sue’s daddy—meaning her uncle, whose nickname was Big John—“hustled for a living.” By which she meant he hopped the passing N&W trains when the Baldwin-Felts policemen who provided private security for the railroad were sleeping on the job and rode in a boxcar to West Virginia, where he picked up corn liquor in ten-gallon cans. Big John sold that liquor for ten cents a shot glass out of an unmarked nip joint he ran from a rented house on Tenth Street, where Cabell Muse must have been familiar, judging from the proclivities that would later dominate family stories and news accounts. Once automobiles became popular, the men in the neighborhood stopped hopping the trains and simply drove to Franklin County, the unabashed moonshine capital of the world.
Another nip joint, across the street from the church, served food and liquor—and rented rooms by the hour. “You could get anything you wanted to in there, and you could dance and, if the wives didn’t catch them there, the men could have all their money spent before they ever made it home,” Sweet Sue said. “You’d be surprised at the people who’d buy whiskey when they wouldn’t have nothing to eat.”
Only whites lived on nearby Salem Avenue in those days, she told me. On her way home from school, she passed the home of an elderly white lady who kept trained parrots on her screened-in front porch.
When she was little and first started walking to school, she dreaded having to pass that Victorian house. But, seeking comfort in numbers, she talked some neighborhood kids into walking with her. Almost eight decades later, Sue still thinks about those parrots every time she passes the spot, though it’s now just a grassy lot.
She still remembers, word for ungrammatical word, the taunt of those parrots when they spotted her and her friends.
“See them little niggers coming,” they squawked.
Sweet Sue and Mother Ingram both grew up as regulars at the spiritual center of the neighborhood, Jerusalem Baptist Church, now 116 years old and still a neighborhood beacon. A few bungalows from the early 1900s still exist, many in states of disrepair, and Sweet Sue pointed them out to me as I drove her around the streets on a crisp autumn day in 2014, along with the long-gone churches and nip joints, and the home of the racist parrots.
Jordan’s Alley, now part of the West End, is still the poorest section of the city, still overwhelmingly black; the rate of neighborhood-school students qualifying for free and reduced lunch is by far the highest in the city, at 98.17 percent. But as Sweet Sue and Mother Ingram described the community the way it was when the Muse family migrated there, I realized I had to look beyond the peeling paint and the sagging porches. I sensed there were plenty of rich histories waiting to be unearthed on the tongues of octogenarians, in old scrapbooks, and in remote courthouse files. I just had to dig.
Mother Ingram had a memory of her own to share, along with a clue about the early lives of George and Willie Muse. She had seen them only once in her life.
She remembers it because they were just so different-looking. That woolly blond hair, for one thing. And their watery blue eyes. In her neat living room, decorated with Asian-inspired wall hangings and a plastic-covered couch, she demonstrated the way their eyelids fluttered constantly, like butterflies on a milkweed stalk. “I was only nine years old, but I remember it like it was yesterday.”
Their skin was milky white, and they reminded her of Burl Ives. “They were both real fat,” she said.
She understood that, years since they’d last seen their family, the circus had reluctantly sent them back to visit their mother, with a guard to keep watch over them. A white man stood next to them as they sat on their mother’s porch. “He hovered over ’em, like a person who was in charge,” she explained. “So they wouldn’t run off. The circus owned ’em, you see.”
But that was in the late 1930s, years after Harriett Muse first risked her life to bring her boys home, years after she begged the Lord to send her a sign about her firstborn sons.
Though she couldn’t read, Harriett looked everywhere for clues when she first landed in Roanoke—in the pictures of the newspapers she saw in the homes of the city’s well-to-do, on billboard signs, in the faces of people getting on and off the trains.
While Cabell blew too many paychecks in the neighborhood nip joints, Harriett kept her pennies close, sewing clothes by hand out of feed sacks for herself and the children, using patterns she made from the cast-off newspapers she took from her employers’ homes.
She worried about Willie, the younger boy, especially, and the more tender one of the two. Whenever she spotted a rainbow hovering over the mountain-ringed valley, she thought of God’s promise, and she prayed that his big brother, George, was looking out for him, wherever they were.
PART TWO
4
Your Momma Is Dead
Picture a life about as far away from rural Virginia as you can get. A life lived constantly on the move, spanning locales as disparate as Park Avenue and Paris, Texas.
Picture a life far removed from the Franklin County tobacco fields, one where people actually rode, ate, and slept in the railroad cars that passed by Jordan’s Alley at all hours of the day and night. Sweat-stained and stinky, traveling-show performers and roustabouts traversed the country by train, boasting a pride of calling that bordered on arrogance. They developed their own rhythms, their own hierarchy, and even their own language: people they worked with and who understood what they did were “with it.” Everyone else was a “mark.”
Now picture a single car, usually somewhere near the front of the train, full of human misfits—a bearded lady, a skeleton man, a conjoined twin complaining that she hadn’t slept because her sister was tossing and turning all night. The freaks, people called them, in politically incorrect language that fit right in with other offensive circus lingo. Which was fine by most of the freaks because, well, they had their own pride of calling, too. As the art photographer Diane Arbus once said of sideshow performers: “Most people go through life dreading they’ll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They’ve passed their test in life. They’re aristocrats.”
They would capture the imaginations not only of marks across America but also of America’s finest artists, starring in the short stories of Eudora Welty and Carson McCullers, the films of Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch, and the journalistic dispatches of E. B. White.
Modern sensibilities and medical advances would ultimately change, if not erase, the spectacle of the circus sideshow. Plain old decency would ultimately relegate the phenomenon to kitschy camp, mythology, and a curious set of resurgences evident in today’s cable-TV shows, Broadway-musical revivals, and reality television.
But a century ago, when the Muse brothers were young, they and other people who didn’t match physical norms were exhibited for profit and titillation in ways that today would be considered demeaning at best. They were gathered and displayed as a consortium of dwarves, giants, microcephalics, and fat ladies who (compared with today’s heavier body norms) don’t look all that fat.
Some freaks weren’t so different-looking physically, but they could perform special tricks—swallow swords or stuff dozens of balls into their mouth, or blow smoke out of their eyeballs. Women draped themselves in pythons and became knife-throwing targets, and men contorted their tattooed bodies into pretzel shapes.
All were exhibited onstage, arranged in a kind of off-kilter school-yearbook assembly. The dwarf usually stood next to the giant (who splayed his arms out like wings), the fat lady adjacent to the thin man.
The Congress of Freaks, they were called. Or the World’s Strangest People.
Money-hungry managers pitched them in ways that alternately humiliated them and enhanced their prestige and, above all, made money for the predominant form of American entertainment between 1840 and 1940: the circus.
The sideshow was so named because it was placed to the side of the main circus show or big top, under a separate te
nt and with a separate admission fee. More commonly known as the freak show, it was also called the pit show, odditorium, kid show, and ten-in-one—for the number of typical acts you could see with a single ticket.
Presented on a platform, under a tent and behind a thick canvas wall (to keep the nonpaying out), the sideshow was meant to instill fear and wonder in its audience. Capitalizing on the scientific naïveté of the day, it was also supposed to inspire educational curiosity. Once customers were inside the tent, a “lecturer” (oftentimes a magician who also performed tricks) would lead them on a walking tour from one attraction’s section of the stage to the next, describing each act. Then, one at a time, the freak demonstrated his or her special skill.
Limbless people, for instance, would roll a cigarette or write with a pen between their toes. Johnny Eck, aka the Only Living Half-Boy and the World’s Greatest Mistake, did acrobatics, sang show tunes, and told jokes. He was happy not to have legs, Eck told the audience, because he didn’t have to press his pants.
At seven feet seven and a half inches, the Texas giant Jack Earle was pretty much just tall. Circus publicity photographs featured him playing cards with his buddy Harry Earles, the dwarf who would become the lead character of Tod Browning’s cult classic film, Freaks.
As outlined by Lew Graham, Ringling’s longtime announcer and freak-show impresario, a freak act in the 1910s had to adhere to three basic rules: “The abnormality must be remarkable, if possible unique; it must be exploitable by an accompanying talent or dexterity; and it must be inoffensive to public taste.”
For example, he offered: “The fat lady may not be a repulsive mass of blubber; she must be delightfully curvaceous.” The midget had to be perfectly symmetrical and, above all, fabulously cute.
Before movies, radio, and TV, people saved their pennies for the one time of year when the circus came to town. The upper-middle classes and those aspiring to be like them wore their best clothes to the circus, then brought home photographs and other souvenirs to show off later to visitors. Giants sold oversized “giant rings,” so a person could have the tactile experience of seeing how small their own fingers were compared with the giant’s. Dwarves sold miniature Bibles.
“Siamese twins were at the top of the pecking order because there were so few of them. Below that were the one-of-a-kinds, someone like Johnny Eck,” said sideshow researcher and collector Warren Raymond. “Giants were fairly common, and the good ones among them brought good money.”
Harriett Muse might have had no idea where her sons were. But they were actually becoming famous from Butte, Montana, to Binghamton, New York, where their pictures could be seen on cartoonish banners designed to mock their milky-white skin and African features—and draw more quarters and dimes.
As albinos, they were among the rarer finds, somewhere between a giant and a limbless man in the freak-show pecking order. Inside the tent, lecturers introduced George and Willie to ticket holders—or rubes, as the showmen referred, dismissively, to customers behind their backs—via a hyperbolic spiel, or lecture, which began like this:
The brothers were descended from monkeys in the dark continent.… With Neanderthal heads, caveman bodies, and tremendous shocks of hair that stand out on their heads like the wigs on Raggedy Ann dolls.…
Two Ecuador white savages… they are pure Albinos, with skins as white as cream, and with all of the facial characters of South African bushmen.…
All for the insignificant sum of one dime, two nickels, ten coppers, one-tenth of a dollar—the price of a shave or a hair ribbon—[you can witness] the greatest, most outstanding aggregation of marvels and monstrosities gathered together in one edifice. Looted from the ends of the earth.…
Sparing no expense, every town, every village, every hamlet, every nook and cranny of the globe has been searched with a fine-tooth comb to provide this feast for the eye and mind.… Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, and avoid the rush!
They were cast, in other words, as anything but what they actually were: a pair of black boys from Virginia with callused hands and alabaster skin. Boys who cried themselves to sleep at night.
They cried especially hard during their early days on the road, when their captors shushed them repeatedly. “Be quiet. Your momma is dead. There’s no use even asking about her,” Willie later recalled being told.
Tell that to a child long enough, and the repetition turns into story turns into truth. Tell that to a pair of boys dependent on you for food and shelter, for clothing and comfort, and as weeks turn into months and months into years, they’ll believe anything you say.
Especially if you hide them away from anyone who might tell them otherwise.
“Be quiet,” the men told them. “Your momma is dead.”
While their parents tried to carve out a life in the newly industrializing South, the Muse brothers traveled the country—and, eventually, the globe—by rail, by boat, and, later, even by airplane. I worked out a rough chronology of their early careers by scouring century-old issues of Billboard and Variety magazines, and newspapers ranging from the New York Times to the Big Spring (Texas) Daily Herald to the Baltimore Afro-American—archives that were not readily searchable online (or in some cases via microfilm) when a colleague and I wrote our initial newspaper series about Willie and George in 2001.
There were more surprises tucked away behind paywalls in esoteric databases and faraway circus-museum archives, especially regarding their earliest years as performers. A former circus owner and Canadian author tipped me off to rare, out-of-print books and more people to talk to (“Call Philadelphia Eddie’s Tattoo and ask for a sideshow collector named Furry, and be sure to tell him I sent you”). I was also helped by a collector in Silver Spring, Maryland, a specialist in souvenir giant rings whose wife is on the hunt for anything pertaining to Siamese twins. The couple own more than sixty thousand pieces of memorabilia, including a souvenir cup purchased by the Muse brothers for their own use and engraved with their show names at the Iowa State Fair.
A Roanoke sandwich-shop operator gave me a dusty duffel bag full of circus memorabilia collected decades before by a relative who’d worked as a handbill poster for the John Robinson Circus and said, “Keep it—just bring back what you don’t use.”
A Baltimore archivist directed me to other people to call, advising me to pay special attention to “visual clues”—photographs and pictures of sideshow banners—since I couldn’t assume I knew all their stage names. The one thing I could be sure of: nowhere among the copious press clippings would they ever be referred to as George and Willie Muse.
A sideshow collector in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, who was writing a book on the sword swallower and Muse brothers’ sideshow colleague Mimi Garneau put together an especially helpful binder of clippings and photographs. Bob Blackmar invited me to tour the basement he calls his Nauseum, with sideshow memorabilia from floor to ceiling that feature old posters, random beer lights, and a photograph of tattooed man Jack “Dracula” Baker, photographed by Diane Arbus for a 1961 issue of Harper’s Bazaar. “Jack is tattooed simply because he wants to be,” Arbus told the magazine. In Blackmar’s basement, a fuzzy copy of Arbus’s picture sat framed and propped against a black marble box containing Jack’s ashes. “I was his last living friend,” he said.
By the time I wrapped up my research, I was tapped into a trove of freak authorities, from retired sideshow operators in Gibsonton, Florida (aka Gibtown, once home to Percilla the Monkey Girl and Grady the Lobster Boy), to act-specific memorabilia collectors (“My specialty is souvenir rings sold by Irish giants”), as well as to circus-interested sociology and theater professors across the country, one of whom spent hours analyzing my photographs, enthusing, “I find this very exciting!” And: “Historical menswear is my passion!”
The professor was speaking of a photograph of George and Willie labeled “1905” that had been unearthed from the massive archives of Howard Tibbals, a wealthy Florida benefactor and circus junkie who’d given $10.
5 million to the Ringling Museum in Sarasota to preserve his collection of circus memorabilia. For decades, Tibbals had collected materials for his lifelong pursuit of building model circuses, which became the basis of the museum’s eleven-thousand-square-foot Howard Tibbals Learning Center.
“I hate sideshows,” Tibbals said when I reached him at his home in Longboat Key. Seeing people with disabilities displayed for profit made him uncomfortable, lending a dull and lowly cast, he thought, to his middlebrow hobby.
As the writer James Baldwin put it in his 1985 essay collection, “Freaks are called freaks and are treated as they are treated—in the main, abominably—because they are human beings who cause to echo, deep within us, our most profound terrors and desires.” The true grotesque, in Baldwin’s view, isn’t the monster or the freak but rather members of mainstream society who, clinging to safety, abhor differentness.
As they did Tibbals, sideshows made me uneasy. My tattooed twenty-one-year-old son raved about American Horror Story: Freak Show, insisting I watch it as research for this book. But forty minutes into the first episode, I had to turn it off. I couldn’t take any more of the murderous clown or the murderous Siamese twins (actually, only one of the twins was murderous). And the freak orgy, rendered as a kind of silent-film sex tape, was just way too dark. (“But Mom, freaks need love, too!” my son said.)
Watching Tod Browning’s Freaks, I bounced along a gaping spectrum of curiosity, pity, and guilt (for having pitied), as I conceded to my friend and former film professor Richard Dillard when he screened the movie for me in his theater classroom at Roanoke’s Hollins University.