by Beth Macy
As the popularity of movies, radio, and professional baseball surged, the circus was now past its peak. There was increasing talk from some corners that the sideshow would soon be banished. “Nothing now makes anyone wonder or exhibit interest in freaks; the public is merely disgusted,” the Elmira (New York) Advertiser claimed. The prediction was premature, though, as both the circus and its sideshow stepchild were still capturing the imaginations of rural and small-town Americans. In the 1920s, first-generation factory workers were seeking out paid leisure for the first time in their lives, and few thought to question the exploitation of people with disabilities.
In an era before Social Security disability or workers’ compensation, most agreed with managers like Clyde Ingalls, who patted quarter-paying customers on the back as do-gooders for supporting people who might have otherwise had to rely on charity. What other jobs, they argued, could the limbless man or half-lady hold?
“Put yourself in the shoes of some of these poor folks back in time,” Al Stencell told me. “Having some show guy come along and take two odd kids off your hands would seem like the right thing to do, for you and for them.”
The circus’s wave may have crested by the 1920s, but the brothers Ringling were still regarded as captains of industry, pointed out historian Greg Renoff, who has researched traveling amusements in the Jim Crow South. “The Ringlings had this aura of achievement and success; they were men of enterprise, on a par with the Carnegies. They employed thousands of people.”
That a black domestic worker had challenged such a formidable white-owned company at the height of Jim Crow was exceptionally unusual. “Blacks could not count on law-enforcement support at the time,” Renoff said. “The Klan was now a pseudo-respectable middle-class organization. Blacks couldn’t testify in court in some cases.
“There was no reason for [Harriett] to think that anybody in a position of power was going to help her.” The possibility of being lynched for confronting Ringling’s lawyers and Roanoke’s police probably crossed her mind, he said. (Of the 3,959 lynchings that took place in twelve southern states between 1877 and 1950, 83 of the victims were women.)
Why wasn’t Harriett arrested inside the sideshow tent? Renoff recalled the bravery of the black women who challenged Jim Crow voting laws in North Carolina’s small towns by storming their way into election offices in the 1920s, without being arrested or abused. The cult of motherhood in the South—where black maids helped raise most well-off whites—probably shielded Harriett Muse.
She hoped she’d be treated with deference because, back at home, the police chief probably had someone who looked just like Harriett washing his clothes and babysitting his kids.
She might not have held a lot of power, but what she did have she wielded as only a mother could.
Next came the battle with the bureaucrats. City officials turned up at Ten-and-a-Half Street to deliver the news that Harriett and Cabell had no right to convert their house into a theater without the proper permits. They stopped short of pressing charges but told them in no uncertain terms that George and Willie had to stop playing on the porch and drawing crowds.
“It all reverts to one simple question: Who will in the end collect the returns from the viewers of Eko and Iko—the mother or the showmen?” the Roanoke Times mused. The brothers had been “purchased” long ago by Barnum and Bailey showmen operating in California who had “keen business acumen,” the paper explained, incorrectly citing the name of the circus and omitting the source of that information entirely. They’d been made to work without pay and without their mother’s knowledge of their whereabouts—that much, it appeared, was fact.
The reporter fashioned a ballyhoo of his own as he described the scene on the Muse family’s front lawn: “Right this way, ladies and gents, we have the original albinos! Seeing is believing. Step up and don’t crowd the passageway. We know you want to see them but don’t let’s crowd!… They’ve appeared before the crowned heads of Irup, Europe, and Syrup. Ten cents, one dime, see the two albinos!”
Before the crowds quieted, before Harriett sent Candy Shelton packing, before the brothers had made up their minds about their own next steps, George Davis turned up with his gigantic camera.
Davis left no notes about his visit to the Muse family’s abode, just a single photograph that went out over the wires, appearing in dozens of cities where Ringling had performed, from Troy, New York, to Pittsburgh to Winnipeg. Taken in the harsh late-afternoon sun, the portrait appears posed behind the house—away from the crowds.
The family stands in front of an unpainted outhouse, with a hole for a window, broken trim boards, and a pile of coal slag strewn on the ground.
The portrait suggests questions more than answers, heartbreak more than joy. Flanked by Harriett and Cabell, George and Willie stand on homemade rag rugs that look to have been hauled out for the occasion. While Harriett and Cabell stare directly into the camera, the brothers avert their eyes, squinting as if in pain and looking at the ground.
George slumps his shoulders forward, frowning. Usually the confident one, this time he looks grumpy, like a child placed in time-out—though it’s possible the blazing sun is making him wince.
Maybe it has already dawned on George Muse what a fix the two of them are in: the life they’ve known for most of their time on earth has just left Roanoke for its next stop. Their stepdad is a brute who seems to have his own moneymaking schemes in mind.
Maybe someone else is standing off camera, coaching them to look miserable in the picture. A gloomy, hangdog expression would emphasize the mistreatment they’ve experienced at the hands of their circus captors. Maybe that someone else is an ambitious young lawyer hoping to shore up a lawsuit, down to the wrinkled handkerchief in George’s hand.
Or maybe they truly are sad, relegated to living in a ramshackle and wholly unfamiliar new place, and a very cramped one at that. The house at 19 Ten-and-a-Half Street is a one-and-a-half-room affair measuring just 517 square feet. Counting a sister-in-law residing there (presumably because their youngest sibling, Harrison, is still away in prison) plus Cabell and Harriett, George and Willie are now living in less space than they had on the circus train.
T. Warren Messick was not surprised when Harriett Muse soon showed up at his downtown Roanoke law office. He’d read about the dustup in the papers. He was a young defense lawyer, just twenty-seven, but already he’d made a splash. Members of the local bar association noted his ability to get charges dismissed or sentences lightened for defendants with little hope, particularly in the black community.
Squeak was his nickname. In the days before television, Roanokers used to leave their downtown offices to observe his oratorical courtroom antics. To confuse an eyewitness, Messick once had the identical twin brother of an accused client sit next to him at the defense table. He used him to underscore the fact that the witness could not positively pinpoint the accused—not when choosing between him and his twin, anyway.
Spectators were particularly enraptured by Messick’s closing arguments, delivered in the lilting accent of a central Virginia gentleman—he’d grown up in Virginia’s rolling Shenandoah Valley hills, the son of a farm manager—and punctuated by a rhythmic, repetitious flair. “Usually he would start his presentation with an appropriate story or joke that endeared him to his jury right away,” recalled his son, T. Roger Messick, who declared his delivery “smooth as silk.”
Messick was such a raconteur that he frequently moved himself to tears.
A military-school graduate, Messick spent his downtime grouse hunting in Montana or fishing at his riverside country home. He celebrated the end of every workday by drinking a Scotch at his desk, though not as many as the gossip-prone members of the local bar claimed, said his junior law partner, Harvey Lutins, whose nickname was Little Squeak.
While all the other lawyers in town showed up to court in austere black suits, Messick wore sport jackets. “He looked like he was going out for a party,” recalled Lutins, at the
time of our interview in his mideighties and still practicing law. (He died in late 2015 at the age of eighty-seven.) “Only Mr. Messick could do that and get away with it.”
Later in his career, Messick and his second wife, Jean, lived above his law office, located in a sprawling Victorian home not far from downtown. The office was adorned with plush Oriental rugs, leather chairs, and game animals he’d hunted and had stuffed. He kept an African-American manservant named John on call, along with a live-in maid, Pearl. She regularly fetched drinks for Jean, who favored thick furs, diamonds, and toy-sized dogs. “It was really a circus over there,” said Nancy Barbour, whose former husband, Stuart Barbour Jr., was another Messick protégé.
Messick’s cases, his attire, his office—he kept it all teetering, barely, on the edge. His entire life was played as if it were all just one squeaker of a game, down to his final breath. (In 1962, Messick mistakenly thought he was dying of stomach cancer. To relieve himself and his family of the expected agony, he committed suicide by shooting himself in the stomach on the banks of the Roanoke River in front of Gray Rocks, his second home.)
Messick got so invested in his cases that he frequently let details he deemed unimportant slip. Lutins remembers showing up for work early in his career to find that the power to their offices had been turned off. His boss had forgotten to pay the bill.
Money didn’t motivate him, Lutins said, adding that when Messick learned that one of his own partners had stolen the firm’s funds, he testified at the trial—on the embezzler’s behalf.
“Blacks thought Mr. Messick could do magic with the law, getting them off a charge or getting them less of a sentence, and sometimes he did,” said Buster Carico, the longtime Roanoke Times reporter. He remembered a case in which an African-American man arrested for theft was convicted and sentenced to minor jail time. He’d been represented at trial by a court-appointed defense attorney.
“Next time I’m gonna steal enough to hire Lawyer Messick,” the man said as he was led away to jail.
Messick adored his maid, Pearl. He trusted her so much that he tasked her with delivering the annual Christmas bonus—cash—to the underlings in his practice. “My wife and I were paupers in the early days, and every Christmas Eve, we’d wait for the knock, and say to each other, ‘Is that Pearl at the door?’” recalled Lutins.
But Messick was more pragmatic than political when it came to race. “Mr. Messick was not a civil rights guy. He had no political party affiliation,” Lutins said.
Once when examining a black witness on the stand in a rural Bedford County case, Lutins referred to her, politely, as Mrs. Smith. It was the late 1950s, and the judge was so incensed that he called a recess to excoriate Lutins and Messick, who was providing legal backup, as second chair, on the case.
“Mr. Messick, you did not tell your young associate how we examine colored people here in my court,” the judge said firmly.
“You’re right, Judge,” Messick said, deferring to him. “Harvey, we don’t call the witness Mrs. Smith. We call her Mary”—meaning, without deference and using only her first name.
The trial reconvened, and Lutins continued, this time peppering Mary with questions.
“That’s the way it was, and nobody said nothing about it,” Lutins said. “Colored folk were not entitled to the dignity. Women weren’t permitted to sit on juries. It was a different world back then.”
Warren Messick went along and got along. He would try just about anything to get his clients a break.
“He didn’t mind the rough-and-tumble cases,” Buster Carico said, citing the 1949 murder of a beautiful high school coed and class leader in a prominent Episcopalian church. Messick represented the defendant, an Eagle Scout and choirboy who admitted to police that he’d killed the girl. Pieces of his flesh were found under her fingernails, indicating a fierce struggle, and when he was arrested at school the next day, his face was marred by scratches. The case made national and international headlines, and it was featured in popular detective magazines of the day.
Not only did Messick keep his client out of the electric chair, the murderer would end up serving only a small portion of his ninety-nine-year sentence. During his closing remarks, Messick exhibited his usual flair. He pulled a metal case from the pocket of his sport coat, unfolding it to reveal photographs of his own teenaged children.
Addressing the jury, Messick turned up his upper-crust drawl.
“You are not trying a gang-stah,” Messick said, arguing for leniency because the girl had, after all, not been raped. Because the choirboy had completed forty-eight merit badges, went to Sunday School faithfully, and taught swimming at the YMCA.
“You are not trying a mob-stah,” he continued.
“You are trying a boy.”
After a sixteen-year prison stint, the murderer started a new life in another state and went on to lead a remarkably unremarkable and upstanding life, with T. Warren Messick to thank for it all.
“I sued Ringling once,” Messick mentioned to Little Squeak occasionally over the years, in typical understatement.
But Lutins did not recall Messick elaborating on the lawsuit he filed against the circus a few days after it left town in October 1927.
Lutins said he probably accepted the Muse case to build what was then a fledgling practice. “That case had ‘sex appeal,’ as he would describe it. He took it because he could get a lot of mileage out of it—you know, as long as they spell your name right. That’s how you build a new practice: get the neighbors to know your name, and the newspapers to write it down.”
Roanokers would soon know the name of T. Warren Messick.
Just three days after Harriett reclaimed her sons, he filed two pleadings for $50,000 each, against both Ringling and Candy Shelton, on behalf of George and Willie Muse.
The legal complaint was pure Messick: furious and fiery, as finely rendered as a Clyde Ingalls ballyhoo. In florid prose, he traced their kidnapping back to Robert Stokes, alleging they’d been lured away from their mother and displayed as freaks in a traveling sideshow “against their will for a period of time, the exact period your petitioner does not know.” Though a Roanoke Times writer covering the reunion explained that Harriett had first “contracted to let her two tots go with a man by the name of Stokes” in 1914, it’s unclear whether Harriett ever used the word contract or the name Stokes, and Messick certainly didn’t mention her having a monetary agreement with Stokes in his legal brief, insisting only that the boys were “wrongfully taken… without the consent of their parents.” (The reporter cited Roanoke police officers, not Harriett, as the source of his information.)
If she or someone else in the family did initially let them leave with a carnival operator, maybe Messick chose to omit that uncomfortable detail. It’s also entirely plausible, given the media’s treatment of African Americans, that the two written sources for Harriett’s alleged culpability—the 1914 Billboard notice and the 1927 newspaper reunion stories—were one-sided affairs, entirely dictated by show managers and/or police.
Regardless, the brothers had indeed been wrongfully taken, if not initially by Stokes, then, a few months following their 1914 departure, certainly by Shelton.
The remainder of Messick’s timeline has been backed up by numerous written accounts: sometime in 1922, Candy Shelton had sold their services to Ringling Combined Shows, whereupon the brothers were displayed “against their will” and turned into “slaves” for four and a half more years, Messick wrote.
The brothers could not read or write and had not gone to school. “They were carried to all parts of the United States” and made to “exhibit themselves against their will.”
They would have “escaped from the said principal defendant, from its clutches, from the clutches of its agents, servants and employees,” Messick wrote. “But at all times your petitioner and his brother were carefully guarded and as a further means to prevent their escape and in furtherance of the business of [Ringling], in order to enrich itself,
[Ringling] has not paid them one single, solitary, red penny for their services… only board and very little clothing.”
The Associated Press carried the lawsuit story, and so Messick’s rhetoric was repeated—not one single, solitary, red penny—in dozens of cities and towns where the Ambassadors from Mars had played.
The Danville (Virginia) Bee headlined: LURED FROM HOME, KEPT IN SLAVERY.
The Syracuse Journal: MOTHER SUES CIRCUS TO GET BACK SONS.
In Harrisonburg, Virginia, where Messick’s parents still lived, the Daily News-Record added more color to the report, calling the brothers “youngsters” and describing how they’d “longed for their mother and searched the crowds which viewed them daily for her familiar face,” while she had enlisted the aid of humane societies and social agencies, to no avail: “They were tired of being considered wild men from the astral world, tired of shocking people by their queer forms and circus makeup, tired of the stares and the squeals of other children, tired of being exhibited without their consent and without the knowledge of their parents.”
To the Big One, Messick’s opening salvo was nothing more than a single bullet glancing off an elephant’s hide. The next day, Ringling’s own formidable lawyer fired back in the courts and in the press. The Muse “youngsters” were not at all tots, as Messick had led the public to believe, but “grown men of the age of 35 years.” Rather than being stolen, John M. Kelley argued, they were “engaged by us through their manager exactly as we engage all our attractions.”
The terms of the contract among Shelton, Ringling, and the Muses were not disclosed, nor could I find a copy of any 1920s-era contracts on file in the Circus World Museum archives or anywhere else, including in the Roanoke and Richmond courthouses. (As for the brothers’ ages, they appear to have been closer to thirty in 1927, though no one, including their mother, could pinpoint with certainty when they were born. Official documents created for them later in life, such as draft registration and Social Security cards, say George was born in 1890 and Willie in 1893—their birth years seemed to gravitate further back in time the older they got.)