Truevine

by Beth Macy

  Born in 1916 and originally exhibited by her mother, who died when she was thirteen, Jeanie had come under the abusive care of an adoptive mother who locked her up between performances. When she met Al Tomaini at a Cleveland fair in 1936, he vowed to protect her, and they became part of each other’s acts, marrying the following year.

  By the time the Tomainis retired, in 1949, they had built a combination trailer park, motel, restaurant, and bait shop in Gibsonton, Florida, about twelve miles southeast of Tampa, called the Giant’s Camp. It helped launch “Gibtown” and surrounding communities as a retirement mecca of sorts for all kinds of sideshow managers and performers, including Percilla Bejano, the Monkey Girl, and her husband, Emmett, the Alligator-Skinned Boy—who were also billed as the World’s Strangest Married Couple. (Percilla spent her retirement puttering in the garden outside her bungalow—at the end of a dead-end street in nearby Lutz, fenced in to keep curiosity seekers out and her menagerie of cats, dogs, and goats in, Al Stencell recalled.)

  But when strangers dropped in to the Giant’s Camp for a free freak show, Al Tomaini welcomed them. “I don’t mind,” he said, especially if they stayed to fish or buy lunch. “I’m peek-proof.”

  Al was revered in Gibtown, where he served as the World’s Tallest Fire Chief and the president of the local chamber of commerce. (He once gave every stick of furniture in his home to a family that had lost theirs in a fire he’d been called to fight.) After his death, in 1962, widowed Jeanie remained in Gibtown, getting around the trailer park on an electric tricycle, until her death, in 1999.

  Robert Bogdan, the sociologist, likened the Kortes gang’s career path to one that many workers face in their careers: as they grew older, “their value as exhibits declined,” he said. The shift mirrored both the downward pattern of sideshows generally and the upward pattern of technologically enhanced entertainment.

  The Muses were among the last of their kind, not unlike the production guys who set hot type at my first newspaper job—the backshop, we called them—the luckiest of them old enough to retire just as the first digital equipment was coming through the doors.

  When I interviewed Judy Rock in 2001, she was still running the Giant’s Camp, where diner regulars included Petie the Midget Terhune, who ate fire, handled snakes, and juggled; Melvin Burkhart, the Human Blockhead, another longtime Kortes performer, who hammered metal spikes into his nasal passage; and Bruce Snowdon, aka Falstaff the Fatman. They had all worked for the longtime sideshow operator Ward Hall, who bought the Pete Kortes Sideshow in 1973, a year before Kortes’s death.

  Some of them had direct knowledge—or at least opinions—about George and Willie Muse.

  Terhune, who died at age eighty-two in 2012, worked for Hall as a performer and rode shotgun to keep the manager from falling asleep at the wheel of his truck. Burkhart and Snowdon have also since died—Burkhart at ninety-four in 2001, and Snowdon at sixty-four in 2009. (“He literally ate himself to death,” Hall said of Snowdon.) Even the Giant’s Camp, sold to a local phosphate company after the last of the Tomaini family left town, closed in 2006.

  Hall had seen the Muse brothers perform several times in the 1950s. He noted that Willie had lost so much hair toward the end of his career that Kortes commissioned a dreadlocked wig for him to wear during shows. In a backstage photo of the brothers from that time, they sport flowery Hawaiian shirts, and George has his arm around Willie’s shoulder. Willie is bearded but bald while George has a short blond Afro and beard.

  It still pains Hall that he threw Willie’s old wig away after buying Kortes’s show and finding it inside an old storage crate.

  “It’d be worth a lot of money today!” he said.

  Not everyone cared so much about the Muse brothers’ legacy. Burkhart, also known as the Anatomical Wonder, was living in a Gibtown trailer with his wife and daughter when we met in 2001. He demonstrated his act with gusto. At age ninety-four, he was still happy to pound a spike up his nose for anyone who asked. (A source who introduced us did suggest we take him and his wife out to lunch for the interview; “they’re on a fixed income,” he said.)

  When Burkhart was a teen, his nose had been squashed in the boxing ring and twenty-two bone fragments removed, creating a cavity behind one nostril that was just big enough for a thick nail. He could also make the two sides of his face do different things—grimace and laugh—at the same time.

  His memories of the Muse brothers underscored the caste system George and Willie operated under for so many decades. Burkhart had worked alongside them, both with Ringling in the 1930s and, later, with Pete Kortes. People didn’t come to see reality, he told me. “They came to be entertained.” Customers liked the spontaneity, never knowing what was going to happen onstage. Burkhart rolled his eyes, recalling the questions the public threw at them, especially regarding their sex lives. “The half-lady used to say she’d stand onstage and marvel at the freaks in the audience,” he said.

  He remembered George and Willie introducing themselves: “We’re Eko and Iko, and we come from Mars.” They were “backwards,” Burkhart said.

  Asked if black performers were generally looked down on, he said, “Nobody wanted to lose a good black act, so if you started picking on them, you’d hear about it.”

  But he never bothered getting to know them, he conceded, and wasn’t surprised by stories of exploitative managers. “Some of the bosses were good, and some weren’t.”

  He’d heard something about a kidnapping and, later, after their mother found them, that they still sometimes went unpaid.

  “But I also heard they were from Mars,” he quipped.

  Then he laughed dismissively and changed the subject.

  For the life of him, he couldn’t figure out why anyone would want to write about George and Willie Muse.

  The brothers came home every year or two. They usually stayed with their mother in Ballyhack or with their sister, Annie Belle, in Jordan’s Alley, where family friends and relatives treated them like celebrities, according to eighty-eight-year-old Madaline Daniels, who was born in the shotgun house across from Jerusalem Baptist Church and remembers the homecomings.

  An occasional lay preacher, Annie Belle tried to isolate her family from others in the neighborhood, maintaining a piousness that came across as snobbery to some. “The Pentecostals looked down on the rest of us,” Madaline and another neighbor told me. They wore tightly buttoned long dresses and eschewed makeup, and they spoke in tongues on a mourning bench positioned near the front of their church, for penitent sinners seeking salvation.

  “Don’t be unevenly yoked,” they preached, which meant: stay away from the Baptists and other ne’er-do-wells, or their sinning might rub off on you.

  Occasionally during visits home, George and Willie traveled with Harriett back to Truevine, where nonagenarian Mozell Witcher recalls them playing guitar and banjo at house parties in the countryside, held to celebrate the pulling of the season’s last tobacco-bud leaves. It was the early 1940s, and Mozell remembered being fascinated, and slightly scared, by the novel sight of dreadlocks. (Another elderly resident recalled George telling one of the children at the party, “Come sit on my big fat knee.”)

  “People said they’d been stolen off the street,” Witcher told me.

  That wasn’t a provable truth.

  Some evidence suggests that Harriett had temporarily let them go, presumably for pay, and then they’d been stolen and she’d had to fight to get them back.

  But Harriett did not correct the stories as they arose, nor did the brothers. “When I saw ’em, their mother was right proud of all they’d accomplished and all the places they’d been,” Witcher said.

  Harriett was especially proud of their musical talent, remembered Truevine native J. Harry Woody, ninety-four, who also recalled their attendance at house parties.

  “They played guitar and they played banjo, and it wasn’t like the music you hear today. This was real country blues, and they could make those instruments talk to
you like a man talks.”

  The parties were such spirited affairs that hosts often added extra nails and other reinforcements to the floorboards to keep the structures from sinking under the weight of the merriment.

  In his ongoing role as sideshow coordinator and subcontractor, Kortes coordinated as many as six wintertime sideshows for a Hawaiian-based carnival owner named E. K. Fernandez, known as the Barnum of the Pacific Rim. The Muses flew to Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, across the Hawaiian Islands, and into Venezuela, where the Kortes group also worked for carnivals operated by Charlie Cox, according to photographs and Billboard notices. Other show owners had tried, and failed, to make money operating in the Caribbean, and “some… lost all their equipment, even their elephants!” marveled Bob Blackmar. But Cox must have had “some kind of in with the Cuban government,” he said, because he handled the immigration transitions with ease.

  In a typical year, the performers’ route ranged from San Juan, Puerto Rico, to Maui to Mexico City to Montreal, then down through the southern United States, into Nashville and New Orleans. They played indoors and outdoors, and Kortes’s assistants often gave one-off lectures to local Kiwanis or chamber of commerce groups titled “The Home Life of Freaks.”

  “Sympathy is wasted on human oddities,” said a Kortes lecturer at a Cleveland stop. “Besides, I’ll bet they make more money than you do.”

  But whether the checks arrived on time—and didn’t bounce when Harriett tried to cash them—was another issue entirely.

  15

  Wilbur and John

  Though Pete Kortes followed the employment contract with more integrity than Candy Shelton ever had, Harriett’s move to draw Wilbur Austin into the process proved prescient and astute.

  Especially when the checks home from Kortes began to bounce, as happened on September 9, 1943.

  And again in 1952.

  And again in 1954, when Austin had to commission the Missing Persons Bureau to locate the brothers first in Vancouver and later in Montreal.

  Every time the checks bounced, Austin had to figure out where they were, then travel there to personally collect the back pay Kortes owed, sometimes as much as $1,500.

  How did he manage it? How did he track Kortes down across several states and into Canada? Those questions nagged at me, given what I’d heard about his mousy demeanor from relatives and fellow bar members.

  Then I met Sarah Woods Showalter, who grew up in Jordan’s Alley with a front-row seat to the backroom dealings of Wilbur Austin Jr.

  Austin’s secret weapon was John Houp. I’d seen Houp’s name in court documents and Muse financial accountings. He was the man—and the muscle—who accompanied Austin on his money-shaking journeys. I imagine he was also the man who’d told Shelton, in no uncertain terms, what might happen to him if he showed up in his neighborhood again.

  Houp, a black bail bondsman and well-known store owner throughout Roanoke’s West End, and his polio-stricken wife, Miss Irene, unofficially adopted three-year-old Sarah after her mother abandoned her. An unwed pregnant teenager, Sarah’s mother had walked and hitchhiked the fifty miles north from Martinsville to Roanoke in 1936 after her father kicked her out. Four years later, little Sarah wandered into Miss Irene’s store—a block away from the home of Annie Belle Muse Saunders.

  “I went to stay one night, and I stayed till I got grown and left for college,” recalled Showalter, who, at seventy-nine, still works part-time as a nurse in a drug-rehab facility. “Miss Irene instilled in me that you can do anything you want to do.”

  Young Sarah became Miss Irene’s legs, fetching items from shelves for customers and taking the money to her in the back room of the store, where they lived. Irene would count out the customers’ change, then Sarah delivered it to them at the checkout counter.

  Miss Irene became Sarah’s savior and personal hero, and Houp spoiled her with all the RC Colas her heart desired. One year, her biological grandparents in Henry County, near Martinsville, insisted she spend the summer on their farm. She was made to work from dawn to dusk, “can see to can’t see.” Her grandfather was employed by Bassett Furniture Company, where for many decades blacks earned much less than whites. To make ends meet, the family raised chickens and pigs and grew their own vegetables. Her cousins terrified her by throwing dead snakes in her path. If she shrieked, they teased her for being a city slicker.

  Houp visited her every Sunday. She would cry, then he would cry. “He wanted me to come back,” but her grandparents were enjoying the extra labor and insisted she stay.

  Finally, Miss Irene paid a visit and demanded, “Give her back now, or I’m not going to ever let her come back.” The ploy worked, but not exactly because of family sentiment, as there was no way the family could afford another mouth to feed during the winter.

  “Lawyer Austin,” as Sarah called him, was in and out of the Houps’ store and home constantly; she described him with equal parts respect and bemusement. He was disheveled, with wrinkled suits and poorly cinched neckties—which he fiddled with constantly. In terms of confidence, Houp had him beat by a mile.

  The two men called each other by first names, which was highly unusual between the races in the 1940s. In his brand-new gray Packard, Houp drove Austin to appointments, but he was definitely more colleague than chauffeur. (Besides, Houp owned the car.)

  “They were like brothers, Wilbur and John; they were crazy about each other,” Sarah recalled.

  As store owners and extenders of credit, the Houps occupied a place of prestige in the Jordan’s Alley pecking order, on a par with the minister of Jerusalem Baptist Church. White insurance men and postmen working in the neighborhood also stopped by regularly and ate the lunches Miss Irene cooked from her wheelchair.

  Sarah remembers delivering groceries by foot across the community, especially to Jordan’s Alley, which old-timers still refer to as Jerden’s Alley. She walked the red-dirt roadway next to Harriett’s old house, the one on Ten-and-a-Half Street, and around the corner to Annie Belle and Herbert Saunders’s house, on Jackson Avenue, which had a backyard that abutted the noisy rail yard.

  “It looked like West Virginia back then,” she recalled, pointing out where the Muse rental homes once stood. “The houses were ramshackle and facing all kindsa different ways. It was the ghetto.”

  When we drove around Jordan’s Alley together looking at it, I asked her to elaborate on what she meant by ghetto, and she said: “Ghetto is… you know, the kind of poverty that doesn’t ever quit.”

  The next day, she phoned me back; the word ghetto had been niggling at her. She wanted me to know about a now-defunct company, Boswell Realty, which owned the slummiest homes in Jordan’s Alley for many decades. The company had hundreds of units, in fact, in the wider West End and other low-income neighborhoods. Boswell hired imposing rent collectors who often cruised the neighborhood proudly in their long black Buicks. A few manipulated and sometimes forced teenaged girls in the neighborhood to have sex with them. “You know, give them a dollar or two,” longtime resident Madaline Daniels said.

  If Jordan’s Alley was the most impoverished section of town, the people living in Boswell housing were a micro-community representing the poorest of the poor. According to old city maps, Boswell crammed two to four dwellings on a single lot. Mention that company to anyone who grew up there during that time, and they all flinch, remembering the rent collectors in their Buicks and those Boswell Realty signs.

  “We had a Boswell house where the toilet was on the alley,” recalled Lawrence Mitchell, a retired city landscaper in his mid-seventies. “We had sewage but not water to it. So you had to take a bucket of water and pour it in there to get it to flush. The city eventually made my mother put the toilet on the back porch.”

  Mitchell said they referred to the ramshackle Boswell dwellings as a “half-a-house.” Until the late 1950s, he remembered, most people in Jordan’s Alley shared backyard water spigots with their neighbors.

  J. W. Bosw
ell had been an early Roanoke rental-property magnate, with strong ties to bank boards, city officials, and tax assessors. One of his earliest tenants recalled him collecting rent on horseback and, later, in a Reo automobile with a crank on the side. His son, John Boswell Jr., inherited the company and was a city councilman in the 1960s, when two of Roanoke’s black neighborhoods, Old Northeast and Gainsboro, were torn down. It was part of the nation’s postwar “urban renewal” efforts to clear out the so-called slums, often by the power of eminent domain.

  It was happening in cities across the country. In New York, urban renewal director Robert Moses oversaw the evictions of a half-million residents, most of them poor and black, to make way for expressways, luxury apartments, parks, cultural centers, and the United Nations, among other developments. Moses’s FDR Drive shares some traits with a four-lane expressway that would cut through Roanoke; for the purpose of clearing land for such amenities as the Roanoke Civic Center, a postal headquarters, and a sprawling white-owned Ford dealership, the city used federal dollars to demolish (and burn; it was faster) some sixteen hundred black homes, two hundred businesses, and twenty-four churches. “People look at urban renewal, but it was Negro removal. That’s all it was,” a black civic leader remembered.

  Officials forced the migration of thousands into the brand-new housing projects they were building on the outskirts of the old neighborhoods, as well as to the edge of Jordan’s Alley in Southwest, where they were aptly named Hurt Park. Other, smaller portions of Southwest were demolished—including Annie Belle’s church—so the city could erect a four-lane bridge across the railroad, replacing the two-lane trestle bridge that smelled of creosote.

  But most of the Boswell properties survived urban renewal, as did many of the original shotgun homes in Jordan’s Alley. A few of them—including Madaline Daniels’s century-old house, weathered and worn but with huge boxwoods that border her cozy, glassed-in front porch—are still intact, still bearing witness the way old places do.