Truevine

by Beth Macy

  The name Harriett Muse did not ring a bell with Holland. But as a longtime elementary schoolteacher at Roanoke’s segregated Harrison School, she recalled hearing her students whisper, gossip, and giggle about Harriett’s sons. “Oh, Eko and Iko, Lord yes, I knew about them,” she said. “Everybody would get out and try to get a peep at ’em when they came to town. They were famous boys, but it was sad, too. They had a hard time.”

  She remembered the time someone spotted them walking through Washington Park, up the street from her school, and called police to report that two wild men were on the loose.

  Back then, forty-five tons of trash got deposited every day right next to that park—in the heart of Roanoke’s black community. The city’s landfill was also within smelling range of three black schools and the black hospital.

  In the 1960s, when black Roanokers protested the fact that their children had to walk past the steaming, reeking, and rat-infested dump to get to school, the black PTA president A. Byron Smith appealed to the white city council’s own sense of safety. He reasoned: the black maids hired to cook and care for the councilmen’s kids might infect them with sickness picked up from the Washington Park landfill. (For decades after, the newspaper ran an angry-looking picture of Smith from that meeting with every story that quoted him. “Mr. Smith, you aren’t as ugly as the paper’s making you look,” a woman from across town told him years later, astonished. “You’re nice-looking.”)

  But only the threat of a mass protest spurred the council to move. No matter how much agency the black community began to have in its affairs, it could not overcome the mind-set of most white decision makers that their children and their homes should be far from view. On the eve of a sit-in organized by Smith, officials finally announced they would close the dump and move it way out to southeastern Roanoke County—to the one black neighborhood in that part of the countryside.

  To Ballyhack.

  But capped landfills and venture-capitalist golfers were still decades away in 1939. Back then, Ballyhack was the kind of remote piece of heaven that Harriett’s young grandchildren loathed, relatives recalled. It was a half-hour drive from the city on winding bumpy roads, and there was no electricity. The roads were so bad that, a year earlier, the “Parent-Teacher Association of the Ballyhack school (colored) appeared before the Roanoke County School Board… to request adequate roads over which the school’s pupils can travel to and from school,” the Roanoke Times reported.

  “Mama never did like to go out there,” Nancy recalled of her mother, Dot, who preferred the Henry Street nightlife in the city. (Dot was gorgeous, one Jordan’s Alley native said, recalling a teenager who wore beautiful clothes, stylish haircuts, and bright-red lipstick—very much against the wishes of her ultra-religious Pentecostal mother, whose salt-and-pepper hair was “so long she could sit on it.”)

  Dot “didn’t like that it was so dark in the country, not like in the city with all the lights,” Nancy said. “She never wanted to spend the night out there.”

  Nancy had never been there herself and had no idea where Harriett had lived beyond “somewhere in Ballyhack.” But Betsy had spent three hours piecing together exactly where her long-gone property lines were by comparing and superimposing old maps and surveys, and tracking down titles to adjoining properties.

  A visitor making the trek from Jordan’s Alley would have arrived on Harriett’s property only to realize that the journey to her actual home was far from over. To get to her house on the hill (at an elevation of eleven hundred feet), you had to traverse a long and rutted dirt lane. After a hard rain it was impassable. The soil was too rocky to be of adequate fertility. It was typical, Betsy said, “of the kind of property white landowners would sell to blacks.”

  But Harriett loved her hilltop house, especially the view. She kept her own chickens and pigs, and neighbors sold her buttermilk and meats. A church friend from the city brought her other groceries, and Annie Belle and Herbert looked after her, too.

  She was never alone. In 1940, her son Tom, divorced now and working in a coal yard (probably for his brother-in-law), lived with her, as did a nephew and niece from West Virginia, who rented rooms from her and worked nearby as a miner and a maid.

  On breezy summer nights, Harriett liked to sit on her front stoop and sing her favorite gospel tune, “Hallelujah, It’s Already Done”:

  Faith is the substance

  Of things hoped for

  The evidence of things I’ve seen

  So even before you get it

  Go praise God for it

  Tell the world it’s already done.…

  She could not have imagined owning such land during all those years she’d spent picking worms off tobacco plants and washing other people’s clothes.

  She was sixty-six years old and, for the first time in her life, at peace.

  I imagine her sitting on the stoop, clasping the letters Marie Kortes wrote to her, maybe asking her niece or nephew to reread them to her at night, though no one in the family today remembers ever seeing the letters. She now knew where George and Willie were and where they were heading—in a typical month, from Denver to San Antonio to New Orleans.

  During the regular season, the show traveled across America and Canada attached to larger affairs, usually the Clyde Beatty Circus but sometimes Beckmann and Gerety or the Conklin Shows. During the off-season, Kortes rented storefronts for his sideshow, erecting a kind of small indoor circus.

  No longer traveling by rail during World War II, Beatty’s circus moved in forty-two trucks and vehicles, working around gasoline and tire rationing as well as worker shortages prompted by the war. Candy butchers had to put up the menagerie tent in 1944, and clowns had to build their own dressing facilities, which made them so mad they went on strike, or tried to—until the boss “gave us a hard look and said it didn’t make any difference whether we were on the show or not,” Beatty clown Walt Matthie recalled. “So we went back to hauling the trunks and putting up the tent and tearing it down.”

  George and Willie helped with grunt work, too, according to relatives’ accounts. But they often did more than their share, and not necessarily of their own will, according to a letter written in the summer of 1936 by a Walnut Grove, Illinois, grocer to the Chicago division of the FBI. Harry E. Friend said he traveled with the show for several summers and believed the Muse brothers were seriously mistreated.

  “For giving this information it would cost me my life if it were known,” the letter began.

  Friend wrote to complain about the “almost impossible conditions” that George and Willie were forced to live under in 1946: “There [sic] sleeping quarters while on location is or was a lousy show wagon, thousands of bed bugs in their beds possibly body lice, to have money they were forced to carry water and do other show peoples [sic] flunky work, including doing showmens’ washing.”

  Unless there is a trust fund being set aside for them, Friend wrote—which there was, unbeknownst to him—“it seems to me there [sic] present owner is as guilty of kidnapping as the criminal ones that kidnapped these 2 colored Boys” years ago.

  Circus collectors I interviewed roundly dismissed the letter after it entered online circulation a few years back thanks to a peonage researcher who found it in Department of Justice records on file at the National Archives. They believe Friend had an ax to grind with Clyde Beatty. Sideshow historian Bob Blackmar even suggested that Kortes and Beatty must have fled the Walnut Grove region without settling their grocery bill—not so uncommon among show people operating with slim profits and sometimes in the red—and Friend was seeking payback.

  Scanning personnel lists in Beatty’s souvenir programs, I found no mention of Harry Friend working for Clyde Beatty, which made me wonder if the letter was written by a person using a Friend-ly alias.

  The letter was forwarded to FBI assistant attorney general Theron L. Caudle in August 1946. Thirteen days later, Caudle sent a memo to Director J. Edgar Hoover, advising him that “from the informa
tion presently available it appears that the institution of criminal proceedings is not warranted. No further investigation is warranted.”

  As Douglas Blackmon recounted in Slavery by Another Name, peonage cases were not a priority of the FBI’s in the 1930s or ’40s. Only the most egregious cases were investigated, and punishment was rare for those convicted. A man who pleaded guilty in federal court in Mobile, Alabama, for holding a black man named Martin Thompson against his will received a $100 fine and six months of probation. “The futility of combating [peonage] was clear,” Blackmon wrote.

  It wasn’t until 1951, following the return of black and white World War II soldiers who’d witnessed the violent horrors of the Nazis’ racial ideology, that Congress passed explicit statutes deeming any form of slavery indisputably a crime. Then, three years later, came Brown v. Board of Education.

  “It was a strange irony that after seventy-four years of hollow emancipation, the final delivery of African Americans from overt slavery and from the quiet complicity of the federal government in their servitude was precipitated only in response to the horrors perpetrated by an enemy country against its own despised minorities,” Blackmon wrote.

  Mississippi-based Antoinette Harrell, who first published Friend’s letter online and in her book about peonage, doubts that Friend’s complaint was investigated at all. An activist and author, she’s researched and lectured about scores of peonage claims, past and present, in six southern states, including in twenty-seven Mississippi counties. In secluded parts of rural Mississippi, there are some families, entrapped for generations and predating emancipation, who still farm in exchange for the privilege of living in a shanty on someone else’s land, she said.

  Harrell doesn’t doubt that Harriett Muse loved her sons, but she doesn’t believe George and Willie were able to give informed consent when they decided to rejoin the circus in 1928 and continue performing. “If you had spent twenty years, and this was the way you supported yourself, and this is all that you know, then you may not be able to make a wise decision for yourself, especially if you’ve been brainwashed to believe that no one would hire you because you’re a misfit.”

  Without proper training and education, victims of involuntary servitude generally gravitate back to what they know, she said.

  Harrell’s insistence that George and Willie weren’t capable of deciding to rejoin the circus represents another parting of the story streams: it seemed there would always be people suggesting that the brothers weren’t mentally capable, just as there would always be a family and supporters who vehemently believe they were.

  Jordan’s Alley native Myrtle Phanelson, ninety-seven, recalls them visiting Roanoke in the 1940s. “They’d visit their mama out in Ballyhack, and they’d bring ’em to church down here at Mount Sinai,” the Pentecostal Holiness church where Annie Belle sometimes preached. Myrtle’s mother-in-law, Esther, was the minister of the tiny white church with wooden pews, where Wednesday-night services sometimes went till 1:00 in the morning. (At Mount Sinai, they banged tambourines to floor-stomping hymns, and “they felt like you wasn’t saved unless you spoke in tongues.”)

  “I knew Iko and Eko, yes,” Myrtle said. “One did all the talking, and the other one would just sit and listen. The one who talked [George], he seemed very smart, he really did. They’d been gone a long time with the circus, but, finally, they’d gotten ’em back,” she said.

  As with the other African Americans I interviewed in Roanoke, it didn’t occur to Myrtle to think that George and Willie were victims of a family that stood to benefit from their work. While Harriett was literally living off their salaries during the last years of her life, she was also enforcing their work contracts and building a substantial retirement nest egg for them—something Harrell and Friend knew nothing about.

  Within ten years, their savings had accrued to $10,635—worth about $106,000 in today’s money—and the Ballyhack property was fully paid off and accounted for, and in George’s and Willie’s names. At a time when black families struggled to get low-interest mortgages, when the Federal Housing Authority guaranteed very few loans in low-income and minority neighborhoods, Harriett was now a rarity. She was among just 20 percent of black Americans who owned their own homes.

  Friend’s concern for the brothers did seem sincere (if poorly worded and spelled). His account of their musicianship and faith rang especially true, according to people I interviewed: “Even though they were not gave any schooling, they are good Christians and are able to play almost any musical instrument yet never had a lesson, and were you to ask how they account for this, their answer would be it was a gift from God, and truly it must have been. Now they can neither read nor write yet I think they are good enough to be in Vaudeville.”

  Indeed, judging from photographs of that time, George in particular seems to enjoy a higher status among his peers. He has a ladies’-man reputation, relatives and circus chroniclers say. And he’s regularly highlighted on the bally for solo performances while the lecturer teases the crowd, trying to turn the tip. In one mid-1940s photograph, George peeks out from under a sheet, and it’s unclear whether he and the lecturer are working the crowd, or if George is just trying to prevent a sunburn.

  The Mars madness having run its course, the banner that year bills the brothers as the Sheep-Headed Men from Ecuador. They’ve taken up the xylophone too, now, and their playing is so popular along the Texas-Mexico border that radio stations in Juárez invite them to perform on air. By 1948, they are Eko and Iko, the Sheep-Headed Cannibals. (Kortes was a champ at name switching, aiming to give returning prospective audiences at least the promise of seeing something new.)

  Former circus-bill poster Dave Price remembers meeting the brothers as a boy at the Tennessee State Fair during that time. He walked up to the platform inside the tent and watched them play a spirited, flawless version of “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” with Willie on guitar and George on mandolin.

  Price, a certified member of the lot lice, introduced himself to George and Willie. They politely and easily conversed with him and others in the crowd. Price asked them about a family friend and sideshow artist whose trick was stuffing his mouth with dozens of golf balls. The brothers fondly remembered working with Paul McWilliams, the Big-Mouthed Man, on Ringling in 1937, they said.

  Press accounts from the 1940s do not describe them peering endlessly at the menagerie or grabbing fried chicken by the fistful. Since Kortes was a much smaller affair than Ringling, they are rarely mentioned at all, in fact, except in puff pieces Kortes himself provided to Billboard.

  Indeed, though they are still referred to as “boys,” at least one author looking back on that time bestowed George and Willie, finally, with manly attributes and appetites. “The boys had saved up enough money for either a woman or a new suit of clothes and couldn’t decide which they wanted more,” one wrote of the Muses’ time with Kortes. “They debated this important issue for three days.”

  They were already almost totally blind by late middle age, recalled another writer, Albert Tucker, a carnival cook during that period. It was hard for them to recognize objects or people unless they were brought within a few inches of their faces.

  As workers waited for the train to pull out for the next stop, show people would lounge around the backyard, listening to the Muses playing and singing, some of them joining in. “Everyone on the circus loved them and would gather around, laughing and singing until the train started to roll, and then what a scramble to get aboard,” Tucker wrote.

  For the first time in their careers, the Muse brothers were being treated with a modicum of respect. By the late 1940s and ’50s, their costumes shifted to floral Hawaiian shirts, as Kortes began producing winter shows around the Pacific, rotating acts in and out of various island resorts by boat and plane. “They were the first black folks I ever knew to ride a plane!” several elderly black Roanokers said, proudly.

  Though Willie never got used to riding in a car—especially on four-lane hi
ghways—he loved flying during the early days of commercial aviation, when an airplane trip was usually reserved for the upper-middle and upper classes. People dressed up, and in-flight service was elegant, often including champagne. “When I was on that airplane, God never did let that plane crash,” he told his relatives, marveling.

  Most of their coworkers were more collegial, more inclusive, than in decades past, when George and Willie are usually described as being off to themselves, with only the menagerie—and each other—for companionship. Kortes was never a household name like Ringling, but his operation was every bit as colorful, maybe even more so, with a legacy that spanned fifty years and several countries. Among the Muses’ longest-running coworkers were the Kortes fixtures who were pitched as the World’s Strangest Married Couple: the sideshow giant Al Tomaini and his “half-lady” acrobat wife, Jeanie, a pretty brunette born without legs or lower torso. In publicity pictures, eight-foot-tall Al holds the thirty-inch Jeanie on his lap. In some photos, she poses on the ground next to him, the crown of her head reaching just above the top of his cowboy boots (size 22).

  “My mother said the Muse brothers could play instruments very well, but they were kind of shy,” recalled the Tomainis’ adopted daughter, Judy Rock. “During the Depression when most people weren’t working, the sideshow people were still working, and it was decent money, especially for blacks. They got to travel the world. They got to meet people they’d never have otherwise met,” she enthused.