by Beth Macy
Their costumes are bolder and sharper than before, and they’re certainly better-fitting, with wide-lapel jackets, short pants, and above-the-knee socks. The first time I saw the photo—found during a late-night search online—I glimpsed a white horizontal stripe above their knees and instinctively thought I was seeing straps designed to tether them to their chairs.
The next day, I realized, I’d mistaken the narrow space between their socks and knickers for shackles, when in fact what I was seeing were stripes of bare, white skin. It was a powerful reminder to look beyond the story I expected to find as I set out to untangle a century of whispers from truth.
I’ve spent hours trying to suss out that photo, my favorite from the stack, seeking the opinions of historical-costume, circus, and music experts alike. George’s chin is raised, almost defiantly, while Willie looks straight into the camera, this time with confidence. His right hand is held in the playing style known as clawhammer, thumb out from the body of the banjo and fingers tucked.
Popular among old-time mountain musicians, clawhammer is a style of playing first popularized in minstrel shows of the 1820s and ’30s in which players thump their downstrokes on the strings. Plantation owners sometimes sent musically inclined slaves to New Orleans or New York to learn the violin for their cotillions. The earliest banjos, made of gourds, horsehair, and animal hides, were brought to the United States from Africa by slaves. But when slaves were alone in their quarters, African souls seeped into Irish fiddles, and a new style emerged.
Minstrelsy was originally performed by white banjo players who copied black music and performed in blackface applied using the singed bottom of a cork. As the scholar Eric Lott has argued, it grew out of the theatrical genre’s encapsulation of both white desire for and fear and loathing of African Americans. The caricature was a warped meshing of cultures that was as strange and unsettling as the sideshow itself. In the 1830s Barnum even got in on the act, naturally, promoting jig-dancing contests between an African-American New York City dockworker and anyone who would challenge him.
By the 1860s and ’70s, black musicians had reclaimed the co-opted music for their own use, and blacks and whites alike “blackened up” so they could get work. (The term “Jim Crow” came from a minstrel song of that period called “Jump Jim Crow” and was initially used pejoratively by whites to describe someone acting like a stage caricature of a black person.)
Minstrelsy began a slow decline with the advent of the twentieth century, but it held on for a few decades in the rural South. It was quite popular, in fact, among blacks and whites in the Piedmont area of Virginia, where George and Willie were born.
“Clawhammer-style playing is what you would have heard in rural, isolated places that didn’t have access to traveling medicine shows or vaudeville shows or that kind of thing,” said musicologist and historian Kinney Rorrer, who hosts a popular public-radio show called Back to the Blue Ridge.
“You look at that picture [of George and Willie] and those costumes, and you think of minstrel shows immediately,” Rorrer said. The music was popularized by Al Jolson, the white singer who claimed that performing behind a blackface mask “gave him a sense of freedom and spontaneity he had never known.” Comic entertainer Bert Williams, the last major black entertainer to perform in blackface, rose to play with the Ziegfeld Follies, where his humor was as critically acclaimed as it was complicated. Blackface minstrelsy reinforced horrific racial stereotypes, while it also elevated African-American music and made Williams one of the highest-paid black entertainers of his time. W. C. Fields called him “the funniest man I ever saw, and the saddest man I ever knew.”
Rorrer described minstrelsy as “a patronizing mentality, an attempt to see black people, slaves, and their descendants as ‘the happy darkie,’ as the expression went. They were supposed to be so happy because being enslaved wasn’t so bad if you were able to play the banjo and sing and dance.”
Rorrer came away from studying that picture with a question: Did circus people really teach the Muse brothers to play, or had they already learned how in Truevine? Though he was a few years younger than the Muses, a Franklin County musician named Lewis “Rabbit” Muse would go on to become a heralded country blues player, sought out for ethnography recordings and radio and festival performances, popular among black and white audiences alike.
Loose-limbed, light-skinned, and long-jowled, Rabbit also played kazoo and danced a jig that blended tap with mountain flatfooting. He called it “the dance that don’t have no name; I just get into all kinds of shapes.”
Rabbit decided to take up the ukulele, his main instrument, after seeing a traveling minstrel show around 1920. When he left home to try show business for himself, his father intervened.
“My daddy had to come and get me off the train,” he told the Roanoke Times in 1977. “He sent a policeman in.” And though he would go on to record such tunes as “Darkness on the Delta,” Rabbit did not stray far from home again. He started a family band with a cousin on the washboard, his mother on accordion, and his father singing and playing guitar. When he wasn’t working as a sawmill laborer, Rabbit was often with his band, playing house parties and county fairs, jamming in tobacco warehouses and on the streets.
What difference did the gift of music create in the brothers’ lives? They still couldn’t move about freely, still signed their names with an X. They still were told that the person they loved most in the world—their mother—was dead. Their vision problems were growing by the year, providing future circus pressmen with an endless array of “night vision” jokes.
But from minstrelsy to American jazz, the mastery of music gave marginalized blacks a freedom and power that many white musicians of that era couldn’t fathom. African Americans bent rhythms and upended traditional white tonal patterns. They threw in swoops, growls, slides, and glissandos, infusing the music with a passion and spirituality that made it uniquely their own. “It’s why I’d much rather listen to old black jazz than old white jazz,” Rorrer said. “It was music played by people who couldn’t read or write their names, but they could play with more authority than anyone out there.”
And, whether they were pretending to be from Ecuador or from Ethiopia when they played it, Willie and George now had something that connected them, even obliquely, to their roots.
It also gave them something to do behind the scenes of the sideshow, and in the cookhouse, dressing tents, and stables where the show folks hung out.
Music seemed to lessen the brothers’ misery, and it made them special for something, finally, besides the strangeness of their skin.
It gave them a skill they would each carry with them, literally, to their graves.
For several seasons, Barnes recalled, the Ecuadorian Savages made for “a great feature in the sideshow, until the new owner [presumably Shelton] had a better offer from another circus and left my show,” likely in 1922 or 1923.
The name of that casually mentioned circus is curiously omitted from Barnes’s account. At the time, a dozen large railroad shows competed for the best fair dates in North America. But Barnes was talking about the circus that had boasted Jumbo, an elephant so huge and so famous that its name had long ago slipped into the American vernacular.
The circus that was the home, for decades now, of the zany and inimitable Zip.
It was the circus that employed Lillian Leitzel, the so-called Queen of the Air. So famous was the looping aerialist during the Roaring Twenties that she was known the world over by just her last name.
Not long after the two largest circus entities on the planet had merged their traveling tents into one mega-show, this circus played to as many as two and a half million people in some 125 cities and towns.
Pick your superlative. It was either the Big One or Big Bertha, or the Greatest Show on Earth.
It was the golden age of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Combined Shows.
And the Muse brothers were now among the most elite of freaks.
7
He Who Hustleth While He Waiteth
In a silent-film documentary from the early 1920s about Ringling’s behind-the-scenes staging, Willie and George Muse appear briefly. They are impeccably dressed in matching tan sport coats, bow ties, and newsboy hats. In the most dandylike touch of all, they carry matching wooden canes, which they use, carefully, to propel themselves into the back of a truck—and probably to feel their way among objects they can’t quite make out.
EVEN EKO AND IKO GET UP EARLY, the title board announces in ornate art deco font.
Dawn breaks just as the steam engine delivers the Big One and all its accoutrements to Chicago. The show travels in a caravan the size of a small city, more than a hundred railcars filled with sixteen hundred people, nine hundred horses, and nearly as many tigers, sea lions, zebras, and clowns. Showers are… what showers? Workers are allotted two metal buckets of water daily—one for sponging off, the other for washing out their clothes.
In the primitive movie technology of the day, the brothers’ movements come across as swift, jerky, and out of focus.
They step gingerly into the motorized open-air truck, or gilly, that carries them from the steam-driven railcar to the circus lot. They take a seat across from the sideshow fat lady, Ruth Smith—aka Ima Waddler and Baby Ruth. Unaccompanied by handlers or guards, George and Willie converse cheerfully with the others in the truck. They do not appear to be mentally encumbered, incapacitated, or slow.
Minutes later in the film, they are seen along the sideshow banner, a cartoonish painting of them clad in tuxedo pants and white shirts, to the right of the sideshow entrance. It’s an astonishingly bad likeness, lacking any hint of their African-American heritage. With reed-thin noses and blondish hair that’s wavy and long (with feathery bangs), they look like waiters in a fancy restaurant, or members of a 1980s heavy-metal band.
Their skin looks neither black nor albino but rather a garden-variety vanilla. “The thinking was, you wanted to ward off an unpleasant or unfavorable reaction from the potentially racist general public,” said Rob Houston, who has written about black performers in the sideshow.
After all, at Coney Island, carnies of that time were still selling white patrons on “three balls for five” to “dunk the nigger.”
Like the other Eko and Iko sideshow banners of the day, the racial skewing on this one reminded Houston of Sadie Anderson, a black woman with white spots (or vitiligo) whose career intersected with the Muse brothers’. Promoters had Anderson’s sideshow banners painted with her skin tones reversed so that she looked like a white woman with brown spots instead.
The truth comes through, though, in the beautifully choreographed Congress of Freaks large-format photographs Ringling allowed the Manhattan banquet photographer Edward J. Kelty to take every year. One season he placed the brothers front and center, flanking Sadie and her sister, Rosie. While the Muses wore tuxedos with sashes, in stark contrast to their wild and dreadlocked hair, the Anderson sisters wore halter tops and short skirts to bring optimum exposure to their pearl-colored patches.
An independent contractor, Kelty gave half his proceeds to circus management in exchange for its cooperation in the elaborate group portraits. He made most of his money from selling prints to circus employees and fans, and via publications like Billboard.
Kelty’s drinking binges were legend, prompted, people said, after he returned shell-shocked from World War I. When money grew tight, he was known to pawn his negatives to settle his bar bills at his favorite midtown saloon. This might have been bad business, but it ensured that there was, and continues to be, no shortage of his annual photographs in circulation.
Throughout the 1920s and ’30s, Kelty would photograph the Muse brothers in costume—encircled by hundreds of animals and big-top performers in the center ring, surrounded by wild bushmen and fat ladies and the diminutive Doll family. He shot them in front of the dime-store museums where they sometimes worked in the winter off-season.
In one of my favorites, from 1938, the Muses stand directly in the center of a thousand people—the Big One in all its glorious humanity. To their right is an elephant. On the other side, Texas giant Jack Earle is holding up Harry Doll, just before he broke into Hollywood by landing the role of a Munchkin in The Wizard of Oz.
It was the height of Jim Crow, when blacks and whites in southern states couldn’t attend the circus together or share a taxicab. In the wake of World War I, the huge migration of blacks to northern cities had increased tensions across the country, partly triggered by job competition. Returning black veterans who now expected common decency for their service were rebuffed at every turn, spurring race riots from Chicago to Longview, Texas. Klan membership soared, peaking at five million members in the mid-1920s.
And yet there are George and Willie in newsreels, easily chatting up the white circus workers on the gilly truck.
“Uncle Willie told us they were considered white when they traveled,” Nancy Saunders remembered. “They did not have to use the ‘colored’ bathrooms.”
That was hard to believe, initially, the concept of the Muse brothers actually “passing,” as the practice is known, for whites. From today’s lens, the Muse brothers’ facial features would easily identify them as very pale-skinned African Americans.
But halfway through the research for this book, I found a 1924 ship’s manifest with their names. They were sailing from Los Angeles to Hawaii aboard the SS Calawaii. The Ringling season had ended a few months earlier, and they were going to work a sideshow in Honolulu, with Candy Shelton and his wife, Cora, in tow.
Their names were listed as Eko Shelton and Iko Shelton, and they were traveling, presumably, as the couple’s kids.
As whites.
In the Ringling film, sideshow manager Clyde Ingalls stands behind his ticket box, talking up the show and giving the audience a “bally,” or free tease, of what’s inside the tent. (The term comes from ballyhoo, the press-generated excitement that precedes the show.) Dapper in a wide-brimmed panama hat, Ingalls leans over a lectern, presenting two performers as bait. First up is the bushman Clicko, though Franz Taibosh just stands there; he does not perform his trademark bushman dance from his homeland of South Africa, reserving that for inside the tent.
Shoeless and wearing a leopard-skin robe, Taibosh was said to be a favorite among Ringling executives—Frank Cook, a Ringling legal fixer, or adjuster, was his legal guardian. Cook and other managers plied him with beer, his favorite drink, and Cuban cigars, and bailed him out of trouble when he disappeared in search of “a nice mama.”
The blond and beautiful Grace Earles is showcased next in the bally. A preteen and the youngest of the diminutive German performers known as the Doll family, she stands atop Ingalls’s ticket box, nervously tugging at her sundress. The sister of Harry Earles/Doll, the star of Tod Browning’s Freaks, she slept in a sleeper car with miniature furniture “that looked like something out of Gulliver’s Travels,” recalled one observer, while the giant Jack Earle (different spelling, no relation) had to have two berths knocked into one, with a ten-foot-long mattress.
Ingalls, whose loud velvety voice made him a bally master, was never happier than when the big top was already sold out, because that gave him an overflow group of disappointed fans who might be content to attend the sideshow instead. Besides, they had money in their pockets they were itching to spend.
Even better, the more they spent, the more Ingalls himself took home, since he kept 10 percent of the door. Lewiston described the front-end life on the sideshow, sharing bally duties with both Candy Shelton and Ingalls: Ingalls allowed them to shortchange, as long as they gave him a cut of the proceeds, and he took pleasure in correcting Lewiston’s errors when he referred to Clicko as a pigamy instead of a pygmy and pronounced the word Italian “EYE-talian.”
Gesturing emphatically, Ingalls himself spoke with grand, alliterative flair:
“They’re all real, they’re all alive, and they’re all anxious to meet yo
u, ladies and gentlemen, girls and boys,” he intoned. “You can talk to them, they will talk to you. The cost for entering our capacious, clean, and comfortable pavilion is a mere twenty-five cents for the gentlemen and gentle ladies, a thin dime for the young ones.”
Once enough people gave over their quarters and dimes, the freaks paraded into the tent and took their spots on the sideshow platform, at which point each act had five minutes to perform or otherwise interact with the audience.
When Ingalls wanted a breather, he would shout “Bally, P.G.!” and sideshow bandleader P. G. Lowery, a renowned cornet player, would cue his all-black band to play a few bars of Dixieland jazz. Though his group was not permitted to play with Merle Evans’s all-white band in Ringling’s big top, Lowery was a pioneer in circus minstrelsy and the first African American to have his own concert band in the sideshow. Heralded for his association with Scott Joplin, who wrote songs for him, Lowery gave employment to hundreds of black musicians over the decades, from Harlem to New Orleans.
His formula, as he shared it with members of his band, was perseverance plus pragmatism equals, eventually, success. “Good things come to he who waiteth as long as he hustleth while he waiteth,” he said.
Lowery’s band had its own space at the end of the platform, where musicians played everything from opera to popular minstrel tunes to the latest jazz. They played during the pre-show bally and at the end of the freak show, performing two or three numbers as a minstrel show, some of the black musicians in faux blackface, their lips exaggerated and painted white.
The standing audience, having wandered in a semicircle from the first freak to the sideshow band, would exit the tent. Then Ingalls went to work trying to drum up people for the next showing.