by Beth Macy
WANTED—FREAKS… NOVELTIES… STRANGE PEOPLE.… Any act suitable for a real, live Pit Show. Send photo. State salary with full particulars.
WANTED—Fat Man, Midget, Glass Blower, Magician, anything suitable for high-class Pit Show.
In a special column called “Freaks to Order,” Billboard ran a weekly compendium of abnormal births, leaving no species unturned: twin lambs born on a Bluffton, Indiana, farm, one black and one white.
A cat in Cynthiana, Kentucky, birthed a kitten with the head of a fox terrier. A child was born in Kankakee, Illinois, with two heads.
A man in Binghamton, New York, couldn’t stop walking owing to a nervous disease. He paused only to take brief naps, standing up.
So you can see how a pair of albino brothers from rural Virginia might have made it into a show of this sort. But though modern-day relatives had always believed George and Willie were kidnapped around 1899 from Truevine, some of the facts I uncovered were casting doubts on the timeline that had been handed down through generations.
The brothers had definitely been exploited, made to work without pay, then traded between various showmen like chattel. They were without question sequestered from their family for many years, just as Mother Ingram had observed: The circus owned ’em, you see.
But an alternative narrative was taking shape around the genesis of their circus lives, a story stream that would parallel, and sometimes conflict with, the family’s long-standing, sacrosanct account.
And the water in that alternative stream wasn’t just murky; from the family’s point of view, it was fraught.
What is certain, though, is that sometime during the drought-ridden summer of 1914, the brothers from Truevine gave their first documented sideshow performance.
A few months earlier, the Great American Shows had been launched by Morris Miller and Ben Klein, veteran carnival operators who had assembled twelve train cars full of attractions, a carousel, concessions featuring everything from candy to handicrafts, a merry-go-round, and a Ferris wheel. Klein had gone south in search of “show property,” according to Billboard, and Miller to Buffalo, New York, to buy up tents and railcars from two carnivals that had gone belly up. The operation carried its own lighting plant and a cookhouse, the tent where all staffers were fed.
As usual, the carnival was an exciting draw for the lot lice—the nickname carnies and showmen gave townies who gathered to watch them unload and lingered on show grounds. Lot lice were an integral part of the show world’s free advertising; even those who couldn’t afford admission to the big show would often hang around and spend their scant dimes on sideshow admission, concessions, or souvenirs—then spread the word to their friends.
Moose Lodge No. 159 of Flint, Michigan, gave the show its banner week of the season, according to a Billboard write-up submitted by Klein late that summer. The lineup featured trick horse riding and high-diving dogs; Alex Thomas, a weight juggler and strong man; Colonel Fred, the horse with the human brain and musical education; a midget show; and Professor John Zenga’s Excelsior Concert Band.
It also featured two albinos performing under the name Eastman’s Monkey Men, part of the show’s seven-in-one freak show: aka Willie and George, exhibited probably as they were in their woolen suits in the Tibbals picture, as normal—and scared—teenaged boys. (The scrapbook photo dated 1905 was, thus, most likely taken around 1914 or 1915.)
All urban sideshow obits aside, there was no need—yet—to dress the Muse brothers up in costume: being black with white skin was still different enough. Especially in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where the newspaper described them, simply, as “monkey-face men.” As another freak-show historian described the spiel:
Let me tell you about these other two strange creatures you see before you! Very strange indeed! Not only are they… from the heart of deepest Africa.… They are “albinos”—weird creatures in whom normal pigmentation does not exist! In fact this is why we are able to bring them to you today. They were rejected by their fellow tribesmen because of this strange condition!
That summer the carnival traveled from Flint to Elkhart, Indiana. The only day it rested was Sunday, when blue laws forced businesses to close. That explained the long-standing tradition of the “Sunday boil-up,” when troupers bathed in makeshift bathhouses to delouse and boiled their clothes in buckets, creating a smoky haze visible for blocks around their campsite.
So they moved from Chicago Heights to DeKalb, Illinois, from Ligonier, Indiana, and on through Kentucky before ending the show in November with a weeklong engagement in Hot Springs, Arkansas, where they wintered and those with cash on hand took advantage of the nearby casinos, healing baths, and, if they could afford them, ladies of the night.
One of the show’s top draws was the Motordrome—or Wall of Death—a daredevil act in which motorcycles raced around a cylindrical track pitched at an angle of eighty-four degrees, daringly performing “feats that seem impossible.” The riders were German immigrants, and one of them would leave abruptly the next fall, called away by the German army to enlist as a lieutenant in the motor squad.
The Ford Motor Company had just announced its revolutionary eight-hour workday. Charlie Chaplin featured the incompetent Keystone Cops in his second silent-film release. England merged two African territories to form Nigeria. And the archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated, triggering the start of World War I.
How much George and Willie knew about any of that is unclear. During their earliest carnival seasons, their ears were probably more attuned to what was happening in the insular world behind the canvas: in Ottumwa, Iowa, an eighteen-year-old carnival barker named Clarence McCormick murdered the boss of his twenty-year-old snake-charmer girlfriend, Ruth McCullough, on account of the boss “getting too friendly” with her.
With their mother foremost in their thoughts, George and Willie might have noticed that black sharecroppers in the Deep South began turning out in greater numbers at their shows. In the fall of 1916, profits at southern carnivals boomed; for the first time in years, attendance was not marred by the dreaded boll weevil, and earnings were up.
“The Southern darky is in clover this fall,” noted a Billboard writer in racist language that was ubiquitous in most white-run newspapers of the day. “For years he has been in debt to the cotton merchant and storekeepers, who have held him up from year to year, but this fall cotton is king, with a capital K. The colored man is out of debt… and the colored girls are decked out in gaudy raiment and flashy boots and money is being literally thrown away.
“The showman was quick to take advantage of the changed conditions, and some sections of the South are fairly overrun” with one-night carnival stands, the magazine noted.
It was while researching George’s and Willie’s early days in the circus that I came across the thread of evidence that first made me doubt the Muse family’s long-held beliefs about how the boys came to be in the circus and led me to ask: Had they really been taken from a tobacco field without warning in 1899? Or was it possible that Harriett actually did, at least initially, know where they were?
The first written reference I found to Eko and Iko, from a 1914 Billboard story, did not dovetail with the stolen-from-Truevine narrative that Nancy and her relatives had long championed.
The account would call into question several basic facts: where exactly the Muse brothers had lived, when they were born, their real surnames, their paternity, and—most critically—the birth of their circus careers.
“Those sideshow people had complicated lives,” said author Al Stencell, a Canadian sideshow expert who left his hometown as a teenager to run the candy-wagon trailer for a traveling carnival and never looked back. (“My mom didn’t want me to go. My dad said, ‘Oh, he’ll be home in a few days; he’ll get tired of it.’” He was on the road full-time with a Toronto-based circus by the next year, 1963.)
“So much of [the narratives] are made up,” Stencell said. “But you can’t just say, ‘I found this three-armed kid
sitting on his porch so I scooped him out to save him.’ Somebody had left him on that porch alone!”
Dozens of sideshow operators he has interviewed over the years have told him about attractions ambling up to the ticket box and begging: take me in. Some were dropped off by relatives hoping to unburden their families—in exchange for cash.
Few freaks, Stencell maintains, were kidnapped outright.
Another historian, a former Circus World Museum curator, cautioned me not to be like most industry outsiders, writers who condemn sideshow employment without garnering a broader historical understanding. “A question that needs to be answered: What would the guys have done had they not been on tour, especially in the 1910s?” he wrote.
Where were the brothers, and what were they doing? Harriett Muse must have been wondering that in the fall of 1914, when somehow it came to her attention that George and Willie had gone missing from the Great American Shows carnival.
“How are the wonders ‘Eko’ and ‘Iko’ doing?” mused an anonymous reader of the New York Clipper, a trade publication, a few months later.
The day after Christmas, a friend apparently helped Harriett write to the Readers’ Column of Billboard, explaining that she was “anxious to learn the whereabouts of her two sons, known as Eko and Iko.” True to the marketing hype, the resulting notice in the magazine described them as being of Ethiopian blood, but with perfectly white skin and curly white hair: “They were exhibited by Charles Eastman and Robert Stokes with Morris Miller’s Great American Shows. Eastman separated from Stokes, leaving the boys in his charge, and it is thought that Stokes is exhibiting them in store shows” or dime museums.
Tips about their whereabouts, including “information direct from Stokes,” should be sent to Eastman’s address, on West Thirty-eighth Street in midtown Manhattan—today the site of a cellphone store.
Harriett wanted them back immediately, the story implied, though it’s possible that Eastman was the author of the notice. They were supposed to have been returned to her at the end of the season, in plenty of time for Christmas.
Lacking any mention of a kidnapping, the reader is left to assume that they had left her care temporarily not some fifteen years before but that summer, with the showmen and possibly with her permission—until one of the men decided the brothers belonged instead to him, and took off with them.
I’d heard of James Herman “Candy” Shelton, the brothers’ longtime manager. He’d put truth to the idea they’d been abducted, even if not initially. Until his dying day, Willie Muse would curse Shelton and call him a “dirty rotten scumbag,” saying it was Shelton who had “stolen” him and his brother as children, kept them from their mother, and exploited them for decades for his own personal gain.
But Stokes and Eastman were brand-new names to me.
And in a way so was Harriett, since in her introduction to Billboard readers she went by a different name entirely: Hattie Cooke.
Census records showed her living under that name (though this time spelled Cook) in 1910, with her five children, whose last names, including George’s and Willie’s, were also given as Cook. Though she was recorded as married, there was no father listed as living in the home.
A renamed and reconfigured family had turned up in a different locale entirely, and a very unlikely one at that. They were living in the secluded mountains of New Castle, Virginia—a resort town at the turn of the twentieth century better known today for its marked absence of black people, an active KKK chapter, and a tourism board that sponsors the Annual New Castle Open Carry Day, which actively promotes the wearing of handguns in public as an exercise of Second Amendment rights.
A branch in Truevine had sprouted a story tendril in a surprising place, and it was up to me to follow its fickle, creeping path.
5
Some Serious Secrets
I drove over Catawba Mountain, then higher into the Allegheny Mountains the following week, looking for signs of Harriett and her children in New Castle—a courthouse document, a marriage or birth record, anything. She had taken out the Billboard notice with the help of a friend named Anna Clark in Covington, Virginia, where records showed Harriett working as a maid for the Industrial School and Farm for Mountain Children and Homeless Boys, later renamed the Boys Home of Virginia. She and Anna had been neighbors in New Castle, a resort town the next county over, in the late aughts and early teens. And my hunch, guided by the 1910 census, was that Harriett (nicknamed Hattie) had followed the Clark family to Covington, a small city in the neighboring county, seeking a better job and a friendlier racial climate.
In 1910, around seven years before she moved to Roanoke and set up house in Jordan’s Alley, Harriett was working as a washerwoman in the company town of Fenwick, which had sprouted up on the outskirts of New Castle, with some three hundred residents. It had mushroomed to serve the flourishing Fenwick Mines, whose iron-ore deposits drew hundreds of workers to the lush highlands. Anna Clark’s husband, Porter, was a superintendent at the mines, and Harriett’s other neighbors were night watchmen, iron-company machinists, and miners.
Scores of Franklin County blacks and Italian immigrants—nearly all of them single men, or married men who’d left their wives and children back home—migrated to mountainous Craig County between 1900 and 1910 for work, part of iron-mining and furnace operations that extended through the Appalachian Mountains from New York to Alabama and beyond. The Italians’ goal, as one Craig County old-timer recalled it, was to save up a thousand dollars, then return to Italy, “where they would be considered rich.”
A smaller version of the Roanoke boomtown story playing out some forty miles to the south, Fenwick was an offshoot of the same post–Civil War story: the rural South was transforming from a self-sufficient, agrarian society to a capitalistic cash economy managed by absentee northern capitalists who were feasting on cheap southern labor, much of it minority. Timber, coal, and iron were the new economic drivers of the Appalachians.
The courthouse turned up no Muse/Cook documents, but some friendly court clerks told me about New Castle native Jerry Jones, the only one from the region who knew anything about the brothers’ connection to New Castle. A retired guidance counselor and an amateur historian, Jones had grown up at the knee of his great-aunt Leslie Craft (1896–1980). Jerry had spent many hours as a child listening to her and her sister discuss life during the resort town’s prime, back when it was a summertime playground for the wealthy (President Cleveland was a fan).
“My great-aunts would smoke cigarettes, serve candy laced with alcohol, and talk for hours,” Jones told me. They sometimes mused about the lives of George and Willie, having played with them as children and run into them once again, quite by chance, many years later—while visiting a circus. “Miss Leslie!” she remembered them exclaiming, in unison, as if they’d all been wading together in New Castle’s Craigs Creek the day before, their mother scrubbing clothes on a nearby rock.
The story had captured Jones’s imagination as a child, but that was as much as he knew.
“Who ever thought they would be the county’s most famous citizens?” he marveled. “It’s true: the last shall be first.”
On a wintry afternoon, I drove around the deserted mines, now part of the George Washington and Jefferson National Forests, with retiree Don Charlton. A seventy-nine-year-old Craig County native, Charlton made a career of selling land and other property, including several KKK robes he’d auctioned off four years before. “One of ’em brought sixty dollars,” he said, shaking his head.
In 1976, the Roanoke Times sent its first black reporter, twenty-five-year-old JoAnne Poindexter, up to the county to write a story headlined MINORITY OF 12 IN CRAIG; BLACKS LIVE THERE TOO. The county had just recently stopped paying to have the handful of black children bused across the state line to West Virginia schools. “There were times when the white people were lousy, and you wouldn’t have thought they had hearts,” one mother told Poindexter. “But I have no complaints… as long as my
children aren’t bothered in school.”
Now, four decades since the integration of Craig County schools, Confederate flags still hang from homes surrounding the abandoned mines, tied to trees and displayed from sagging front-porch railings. Charlton said it would be OK if I took pictures of the scant shacks and the trailers that still lined the dirt road, never mind the NO TRESPASSING signs posted by unseen occupants. A broken tricycle was tipped over on the front yard of one unpainted wooden shack, and I could picture Harriett scrubbing the workers’ clothes in the creek behind it, pinning them on clotheslines to dry.
There were few remnants of what had passed for Fenwick a century before: no signs of the commissary, a hospital, the separate black and white churches, the school, or mule stable, all of it infused with ethnic tensions as seventy Italians and thirty black workers lived on one side of the tracks and thirty-seven whites on the other, with some fifty children among them. To distinguish everybody, the homes of white families were painted gray, and the homes of blacks red. The non-English-speaking Italians lived in gray houses and were given the most dangerous jobs in the mines.
There was a school for children of white workers but none within walking distance for blacks—though blacks and whites were allowed to attend film screenings, in separate sections, at the playhouse. In January 1914, a five-year-old whose family lived near Harriett at Fenwick burned to death while playing “with fire which it had kindled in the yard when its clothing took fire.”
In my newly discovered scenario, the teenaged George and Willie would have worked dirty, menial, and dangerous jobs, especially given their visual impairment.
Geographer Lori LeMay, who researched Fenwick history for the U.S. Forest Service in the early 1990s, said the few black children living at Fenwick were put to work servicing the tipple, culling piles of rock near the spot where ore cars were emptied. The miners, she said, dropped their clothes off for Harriett to wash—outside, in an iron kettle over an open fire—next to her small company-owned house.