by Beth Macy
Circus archivist and collector Dick Flint found this mid-1920s-era photograph of George and Willie Muse being clutched by Ringling Brothers & Barnum-Bailey Circus minders in the circus backyard, likely owing to their poor eyesight. (Courtesy of Richard Flint)
Sideshow banners, hung from the exterior of sideshow tents, often exaggerated the features of the acts inside the tent. George and Willie Muse were cast as whiter than they were, all traces of their African-American heritage erased. “The thinking was, you wanted to ward off an unpleasant or unfavorable reaction from the potentially racist general public,” said Rob Houston, who researches black sideshow history. (Photograph by Sverre O. Braathen, courtesy of the Milner Library Special Collections, Illinois State University)
Longtime manager and captor Candy Shelton (far left) with George and Willie Muse in the water in Margate, Florida, on Christmas Day 1926. According to Candy’s wife, who wrote a dismissive description of the photograph on the back, the Muse brothers were “taking their annual bath.” (Courtesy of The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Circus Museum Collection)
Edward J. Kelty took this picture of the brothers for Ringling Brothers & Barnum-Bailey Circus in 1926 with the handwritten caption “Are They Ambassadors from Mars.” The brothers hadn’t seen their mother in at least twelve years at that point. (Courtesy of Circus World Museum)
This 1929 sideshow photo is essentially the same makeup of the RB&BB sideshow the year The Greatest Show on Earth made its first—and most dramatic—stop in Roanoke, Virginia, in 1927. (Edward J. Kelty photograph courtesy of the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Tibbals Collection)
Franz Taibosh—aka Clicko the Dancing African Bushman—shared the sideshow stage with the Muse brothers for much of his time touring with the Ringling Brothers & Barnum-Bailey Circus sideshow. “He was rather snooty” about the brothers, his biographer said, despite sharing the experience of having been long exploited by showmen. (Photograph by Sverre O. Braathen, courtesy of the Milner Library Special Collections, Illinois State University)
Harriett Muse’s act of confronting circus lawyers and Roanoke police officers to reclaim her sons was particularly bold in light of the fact that the chief prosecutor in Roanoke in 1927 was Col. Kent Spiller, the founder of the local KKK. (Courtesy of Donald Caldwell, Commonwealth’s Attorney, city of Roanoke, 2015)
The Roanoke chapter of the KKK, named for General Robert E. Lee, was the largest in the state under Spiller’s direction. Shortly after Spiller’s election, the KKK held a parade through the streets of downtown Roanoke, headed by a huge fiery cross and an oversized U.S. flag held up by fifty people. (Photograph by George Davis courtesy of the Virginia Room, Roanoke Public Library)
Virginia reporting legend Melville “Buster” Carico, shown here at age ninety-nine, recalled that when he first started working at the Roanoke Times in the 1930s, “If a black was in the news, you had to put ‘comma, colored’ after his name.” His mother admired the local KKK for its protection of women, and Buster remembered an open-air Ford passing down his hilly blue-collar Roanoke street chock-full of Klansmen who had donned white robes and hoods. (Photograph by Beth Macy)
A Roanoke street photographer took this family portrait behind the family home at 19 Ten-and-a-Half Street shortly after Harriett Muse (far right) claimed her sons and brought them back to the tiny shotgun house she shared with her husband, Cabell (left), and other relatives. (Photograph by George Davis, courtesy of Frank Ewald)
Harriett Muse hired soon-to-be-famous Roanoke litigator Warren “Squeak” Messick (center) to file a lawsuit against the Greatest Show on Earth in October 1927, claiming the circus owed her $100,000 in damages and back pay. (Courtesy of Harvey Lutins)
The original petition for damages and back pay filed for Harriett Muse by her attorney, Warren Messick, on file at the Library of Virginia. Such loose court papers, called “shucks” and tied together with red cord, gave birth to the bureaucratic form “red tape.” (Photograph by Beth Macy)
Ringling lawyer J. M. Kelley fired back immediately in response to Messick’s lawsuit. (Photograph by Sverre O. Braathen, courtesy of the Milner Library Special Collections, Illinois State University)
By the time the Muse brothers decided to rejoin the circus, they took their younger brother, Tom, along to work as a circus roustabout. This photograph, from 1926, shows a typical Ringling Brothers & Barnum-Bailey Circus tent-erecting scene, with the “lot lice” looking on in wonder. (Courtesy of Circus World Museum)
Once the Muse brothers were being paid regularly for their work, their act took on comic undertones. “Black ‘wildmen’ were sometimes exhibited in cages as uncivilized brutes who subsisted on raw meat and bit the heads off chicken or snakes. But these two, in comparison, look like Boy Scouts,” said the scholar Bernth Lindfors, referring to this 1928 picture. Perhaps that’s because they were now performers who were being paid—for a while, anyway. (Courtesy of Bernth Lindfors)
The Muse brothers were widely considered “good examples of contented freaks,” wrote The New Yorker magazine, which snidely reported that the brothers returned to the circus because “the fried chicken had soon given out at Roanoke.” (Collection of Robert Stauffer)
During the off-season, the Muse brothers often played in dime museums, at Coney Island and also at the Dreamland Circus Side Show, shown here in the early 1930s, as a headliner act. (Courtesy of Bob Blackmar)
Candy Shelton promised the Muse brothers the chance to sail to England to play before the queen, alongside two of the most famous Ringling Brothers & Barnum-Bailey Circus performers ever, aerialist Lillian Leitzel (right) and her husband, Alfredo Codona, shown here in a candid circus backyard photo. (Courtesy of the Milner Library Special Collections, Illinois State University)
Circus publicity photographs often juxtaposed sideshow performers, such as in this 1920s-era photo of Harry Doll standing in between the legs of his friend the Texas giant Jack Earle. (Courtesy of Dr. Andy Erlich)
Manager Candy Shelton, shown here working as a sideshow talker for Ringling Brothers & Barnum-Bailey Circus in 1938, skimmed the Muse brothers’ wages whenever he could, forcing Harriett Muse and her lawyers into a protracted legal battle. (Courtesy of Al Stencell)
A rare photograph of George and Willie together on the bally platform, during the tumultuous 1938 season on a late-season stop in Green Bay, Wisconsin, for the Ringling-owned Al G. Barnes Circus. It was one of their last performances under the management of Candy Shelton. (Courtesy of the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Tibbals Collection)
Wilbur Austin Jr. (standing on right) was frugal, detail-oriented, and eccentric. His young family, shown here on the porch of his father-in-law’s grand Roanoke, Virginia, house, in the 1930s, boarded with his in-laws (seated) for free until the Depression hit and a conflict arose over meal payments. (Courtesy of Robert Brown Jr.)
Wilbur Austin Jr. was the attorney who most influenced the Muse family’s lives, fashioning a legal scheme that was very unusual but court-approved and court-ordered—and thus ensured that the brothers’ employers finally paid them their wages. (Courtesy of Robert Brown Jr.)
Fred Beckmann was one of the co-owners of Beckmann & Gerety Shows, one of the many carnivals the Muse brothers performed with in the 1930s and 1940s under the sideshow management of Pete and Marie Kortes. (Courtesy of Circus World Museum)
The Muse brothers seemed to have more agency during the last half of their careers, performing across North America with the Pete Kortes sideshow for much of the 1940s and 1950s—although Austin periodically had to take Kortes to court, too, when his checks failed to clear. (Courtesy of Bob Blackmar)
George Muse was frequently spotlighted on the bally toward the end of their careers, shown here with an unknown lecturer or talker, with the Clyde Beatty Russell Brothers Circus, in the mid-1940s. (Courtesy of Bob Blackmar)
George (left) and Willie Muse worked as “The Sheep-Headed Men” during the latter portion of their careers, the splendor of their p
re-Depression tuxedos now replaced by simpler white blouses and loose, looping ascots. The reduction in their finery seemed to mirror the decline of the circus and of the sideshow itself. (Courtesy of Bernth Lindfors)
Willie and George Muse (third and fourth from left, upper row) learned to play xylophones in the late 1940s, and were so popular in Texas and Mexico that radio stations in Juárez invited them to perform on air as “The Sheep-Headed Cannibals.” Al Tomaini is on the far right, upper row, while his wife, Jeanie, is fourth from left, bottom row. In retirement, the Tomainis ran the Giant’s Camp in Gibsonton, Florida, turning it into a mecca for sideshow performers and managers, including Candy Shelton. (The North American Carnival Museum & Archives)
Roanoke judge J. Lindsay Almond presided paternalistically over the Muse brothers’ case in the late 1930s and 1940s at the urging of their mother’s attorney, Wilbur Austin Jr. Later, as governor of Virginia from 1958 to 1962, he was the chief defender of massive resistance, the state’s official refusal to desegregate schools in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education. (Courtesy of The Library of Virginia)
Jordan’s Alley natives Madaline Daniels and Sarah Woods Showalter (right) recalled the neighborhood slumlords who bullied tenants. Showalter’s adopted father, John Houp, was a store owner, bail bondsman, and assistant to Roanoke lawyer Wilbur Austin Jr., and he helped Austin manage the Muses’ extended legal case. “The houses were ramshackle and facing all kindsa different ways,” Showalter said of Ten-and-a-Half Street, where the Muse family lived. “It was the ghetto.” (Photograph by Beth Macy)
Roanoke civic leader A. L. Holland, who died in late 2015, had a front-row seat to the Muse brothers’ story, witnessing their reunion with their family and its circuitous aftermath—and life in general for African Americans during segregation. He’s photographed here in front of a boarded-up storefront in Gainsboro, once a thriving African-American business-and-entertainment district in Roanoke. (Photograph by Kyle Green, courtesy of the Roanoke Times)
The author with court researcher, map collector, and title examiner Betsy Biesenbach (left), who figured out where Harriett Muse purchased her first piece of property in 1939, in the southeast Roanoke County settlement of Ballyhack—with this view—thanks to the money her sons were sending home. She bought a 16.8-acre mini-farm in a black enclave, a place with a view so vast and so spectacular that, decades later, developers eyeing it for the first time would one day dream of building vineyards and exclusive golf resorts. (Photograph by Jerry Trammell)
This photograph, titled A Dentist Visits Ballyhack, was a choreographed picture taken by an unknown photographer, near the turn of the twentieth century. It spotlights the scenic, quiet setting that must have attracted Harriett Muse to buy property in the rural, predominantly black community. (Courtesy of Frank Ewald, originally from the Collection of George Davis)
Annie Belle Saunders was the younger sister of George and Willie Muse. She and her husband, Walter, along with their daughter, Dorothy “Dot” Brown, and, later, Dot’s daughter, Nancy Saunders, helped look after the brothers in their retirement. As a child, when her great-uncles were home on vacation, Nancy once exclaimed, “Grandma, your brothers need a haircut!” (Courtesy of Nancy Saunders)
Dorothy “Dot” Brown was the niece who helped care for George and Willie Muse in their retirement. She raised her daughter, Nancy, in the northwest Roanoke home her uncles paid cash for with the savings accrued—painstakingly, and with not a little bit of legal action—from their circus earnings. (Courtesy of Nancy Saunders)
Throughout most of the 1940s, the Muse brothers performed for the Pete Kortes Sideshow, which traveled with various circuses, including the Clyde Beatty Russell Brothers Circus. (Courtesy of Bob Blackmar)
During the last half of their careers, the Muse brothers frequently traveled to Hawaii, Venezuela, and Mexico in the off-season, performing with the Pete Kortes Sideshow. Whenever Kortes’s checks failed to clear, lawyer Austin would have to go find them—and make the circus pay what it owed them. Pete Kortes is fourth from left, upper row, shown next to his brother, who has his arm around Athelia. (Courtesy of Bob Blackmar)
The brothers were often photographed wearing Hawaiian shirts during late-career tours with the Pete Kortes Sideshow and fondly remembered learning to swim with the dolphins in Hawaii. As one elderly black Roanoker recalled, “They were the first black folks I ever knew to ride a plane!” (Courtesy of Bob Blackmar)
This is a sketch of a proposed banner line for Eko and Iko, advertising their “first Canadian showing” with the Conklin carnival, sometime in the 1950s. (Courtesy of the North American Carnival Museum & Archives)
This is the block of Jordan’s Alley where the seventy-six-year-old domestic worker Madeline Tate froze to death on Tenth Street in 1985; the houses were shotgun shacks and very similar in appearance to the Muses’ home at 19 Ten-and-a-Half Street, just around the corner. All have since been demolished, most of them replaced by a Habitat for Humanity development. (Photograph by Wayne Deel; copyright Roanoke Times, reprinted by permission.)
Even though he was blind in late life, Willie Muse always kept this framed photo of his mother, Harriett Muse, next to his bed. (Courtesy of Nancy Saunders)
Willie Muse played his guitar so often in retirement that he wore down its frets with his finger pads. (Photograph by Josh Meltzer; copyright Roanoke Times, reprinted by permission.)
Nancy Saunders sits on the bed of her recently departed great-uncle Willie Muse, whom she cared for over a period of decades. “It still smells like him in here,” she said, shortly after his 2001 death, referring to the lingering smell of the baby lotion and baby powder that she and other caregivers applied to his fragile skin. (Photograph by Josh Meltzer; copyright Roanoke Times, reprinted by permission.)
Nancy Saunders was her great-uncle Willie Muse’s staunchest caregiver, advocate, and supporter. She is seen here holding a family snapshot of her centenarian Uncle Willie. (Courtesy of Nancy Saunders)
Reggie Shareef, now a social science professor, grew up in segregated Roanoke near the Muse family. He remembers thinking it was bunk when his mother said to him, “Be careful, or someone will snatch you up” like Eko and Iko—until he learned the story was true. “That is one exceptionally guarded family,” he said. (Courtesy of Dr. Reginald Shareef)
Nancy Saunders, photographed in 2015, said she does not “and will not believe that Harriett let her children go off with no circus. As a mother, that’s all she had to cling to—her children and her Christ.” (Photograph by Josh Meltzer)
In a segregated cemetery in Roanoke, Virginia, Nancy Saunders walks near the newly discovered unmarked grave of her great-grandmother, Harriett Muse, whom she considers a hero. “I lost track of how many times she had to take those circus men to court,” she said. (Photograph by Beth Macy)
An ad from a 1918 edition of Billboard magazine promotes George and Willie Muse as the Ecuadorian Twins with Candy Sheldon [sic] as their manager.
(From the collection of the author)
This is a screenshot from a silent film produced by Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey in the early 1920s, with Willie Muse third from left, riding the gilly, or open-air from the railcar to the circus lot. George and Willie Muse are featured twice in Part One, at 1:04 and again at 1:59. The video is available online courtesy of Circus World Museum: http://www.cwmdigitacollections.com/cwm-fm-326.html.
This is a screenshot from a silent film produced by Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey in the early 1920s. George and Willie Muse are featured twice in Part One, at 1:04 and again at 1:59. The video is available online courtesy of Circus World Museum: http://www.cwmdigitacollections.com/cwm-fm-326.html.
This is a screenshot from a silent film produced by Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey in the early 1920s. George and Willie Muse are featured twice in Part One, at 1:04 and again at 1:59. The video is available online courtesy of Circus World Museum: http://www.cwmdigitacollections.com/cwm-fm-326.h
tml.
The Roanoke Times, along with many newspapers across the country, regularly ran cartoons that disparaged the intellect and contributions of black people, including “Hambone’s Meditations.”
(Courtesy of the Virginia Room, Roanoke Public Library)
An ad for the circus that ran in the Roanoke Times in early October 1927.
(Courtesy of Byron Penick)