The brothers’ albinism helped the Muses to become not just circus attractions but also unwitting case studies for the US eugenics movement. They were not seen again by their parents, Harriett and Cabell Muse, until autumn 1927. For years after their abduction, Shelton acted as the brothers’ manager as they toured the US in a series of circuses, using the money they earned to pay for their board, lodging and clothes, but never letting them have their wages. The story told in Truevine is that he offered them candy as they worked in the fields and then kidnapped them. In the Muse brothers’ not-unusual case, the mutation also made them incredibly sensitive to light and very nearly blind. The most common mutation disables enzymes used in the making of skin pigment and hair colour. Albinism is a congenital disorder more common among people of African descent than white Europeans – one in 10,000 of the former is born albino, compared with one in 36,000 of the latter. When Shelton came across the Muse brothers, he realised he had struck gold. Shelton was looking for sideshow attractions as lucrative as the conjoined twins from Thailand who became the act Chang and Eng, or the dwarf brothers from Ohio, whom circus showman PT Barnum called the Wild Men of Borneo. Until, that is, the day in 1899 when George, six, and Willie, nine, were spotted by a “freak hunter” called James Herman “Candy” Shelton who, in the new film adaptation of Macy’s book, is likely to be played by Leonardo DiCaprio. In reality, George and Willie were two men from Virginia who, even as small children, had toiled from dawn to dusk in tobacco fields near their home in Truevine, Franklin County, walking rows of plants looking for bugs and squashing them between their fingers. Their act was even given a racist, pseudo-scientific spin when they were presented as Darwin’s missing link between humans and apes. At one point newspapers gleefully reported the nonsense that John Ringling had found the two brothers floating off the coast of Madagascar. They were not only cannibals from Ecuador, but Monkey Men and Ministers from Dahomey. Circusgoers would pay the equivalent of $30 in today’s money to be photographed with Eko and Iko.īut throughout their circus careers, George and Willie were often billed as things they were not. Dreadlocks, still less the sprawling golden dreads of the Muse brothers, were in those days an unusual sight, at least in the US, and white people would tug at them to see if they were real. The Muse brothers had been encouraged to grow their hair into vast dreadlocks that they would tuck into enormous caps and then release before gawping punters. The brothers billed as Eko and Iko, sheepheaded cannibals from Ecuador. They were far more interesting than they were grotesque.” And they dressed in finery with red sashes and tuxedos – the outfit topped off by that explosive, anachronistic hair. Eko and Iko offered something different, if no less racist. Circusgoers were used to seeing black men posing as wild men in cages, where they would pretend to subsist on raw meat and bit the heads off chickens and snakes. The result was slavery by another name.Įko and Iko were, writes Roanoke-based journalist Beth Macy in her new book about the brothers’ extraordinary lives, perfect freakshow acts to captivate white punters jaded by the usual fare of bearded ladies, tattooed men, giants and dwarves. As a result, supposedly liberated African Americans were poor, in effect disenfranchised, often uneducated, and much more likely than white people to be in jail. That duty was fulfilled thanks to a racist criminal justice system (Roanoke’s chief prosecutor at the time, for instance, was founder of the city’s KKK chapter) and to a sharecropping system called Reconstruction that kept black tenant farmers, many former slaves, in debt and beholden to their landlords. “There was scarcely a white man in the south who did not honestly regard emancipation as a crime and its practical nullification as a duty,” wrote African American sociologist WEB Du Bois. The 13th amendment to the US constitution abolished slavery in 1865, but in the 1920s the south was at the height of Jim Crow segregation laws. Ringling Brothers circus pitched its tents on Roanoke fairgrounds where, a year before, thousands had attended a Ku Klux Klan rally, its leaders declaring then that “their organisation was simply to keep the states under control of white native Protestants”. But the Muse brothers weren’t from Ecuador: on that day, as their train pulled up, George and Willie were coming home. Among the attractions arriving in town were two albino African-American men called George and Willie Muse, famous across the United States as Eko and Iko, the sheepheaded cannibals from Ecuador. There were four locomotives, 100 railcars, 1,600 people, five rings, six stages, elephants and high-wire acts. I n October 1927, the circus came to Roanoke, Virginia.
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