Truevine

by Beth Macy

  “Yes, but in this film, the freaks are the good people!” Dillard said. The bad guys are the able-bodied circus workers who conspire to murder the sideshow-starring dwarf, so they can steal his fortune—until the freaks see to the bad guys’ comeuppance. “The freaks are leading their regular lives, and they’re functioning, but they’re never frightening or upsetting.”

  Dillard went to his first sideshow in Florida, where his father was stationed during part of World War II. More fascinated than repulsed, he stands firmly in the camp of sideshow enthusiasts, who argue that most freaks were willing subjects, grateful for the work, and happily in on the sham.

  “Most sideshow freaks took pride in being a burden to nobody,” author Al Stencell wrote in Seeing Is Believing. “The sideshow allowed them to escape being institutionalized or stuck inside a home… and gave them independence, self-worth, friends, and a support system to help them achieve as normal a life as possible.”

  As the sideshow star Zip, born William Henry Johnson, was said to have told his sister on his 1926 deathbed: “Well, we fooled ’em for a long time, didn’t we?”

  No one knows whether Johnson, who was arguably the world’s most famous freak, actually uttered that line. It could have been like 99 percent of all sideshow accounts: written by a reporter with a knowing wink-wink to the press agent who choreographed all the stunts, backstories, and jokey quotes. With brown skin, a diminutive stature, and a balding tapered head that P. T. Barnum accentuated with a tuft of hair at the crown, Johnson was said to be a pinhead, or someone with “microcephalous idiocy,” as the disability-rights expert and sociologist Robert Bogdan has put it.

  Here’s how showman Barnum juiced up Johnson’s narrative after a freak hunter “discovered” him in New Jersey in 1860 at the age of four: gorilla explorers had found him naked and walking on all fours along the river Gambia. Zip-the-What-Is-It? (as he was originally named, reportedly by Charles Dickens) ate only raw meat and spoke gibberish, and was therefore “a most singular animal,” as Barnum said, “something between man and monkey, without a language.”

  When Barnum handed Zip a cigar, he ate it, as instructed. “He has been examined by some of the most scientific men we have, and pronounced by them to be a connecting link between the wild native African and the brute creation.”

  From an early age, Zip was smart enough to participate in the ruse, a relative later told reporters. After all, Barnum had paid him a dollar a day not to talk.

  But which freaks were in on the joke, and what of those whose abilities didn’t rise to the level of informed consent?

  And which category fit children like George and Willie Muse?

  Tibbals doubted he had anything on the Muse brothers in his archives, but he did send me to a friendly Ringling Museum archivist who was midway through sorting the collection Tibbals had donated, including piles of yellowed scrapbooks compiled by other circus buffs. A few days later, she e-mailed a photo of the young Muse brothers that Tibbals had acquired decades earlier (and had either never seen or forgotten).

  It was my first physical evidence of the Muse brothers as child performers.

  Dated 1905 (probably in error, I would later learn), the portrait had been printed as a souvenir postcard sold by circus performers as a way to enhance their managers’ earnings. In post–Civil War America, visitors entering the parlor of a well-appointed home would often be shown lavish photo-album collections—posed family portraits capitalizing on the brand-new photography craze but also pictures of famous people, from Abraham Lincoln to General Ulysses Grant to, even, “human oddities, who were not only fascinating but quite acceptable as Victorian houseguests—as long as they stayed in their albums,” as Bogdan wrote in his 1988 book, Freak Show.

  If the date on the card was correct, the brothers would have been twelve and fifteen years old. In the picture, they stand stick straight, their arms pressed against each other from their shoulders to their hands. An inch or two taller than Willie, George is devoid of expression. Like a junior-high choirboy following instructions to stand stiffly, he gives nothing away. His arms are perfectly taut at his side, his fingers outstretched and dainty-looking, the calluses presumably gone.

  Willie leans forward slightly, his posture more tentative. His bow tie is crooked, and his expression befuddled, possibly afraid. His fingers are clasped and his mouth agape, as if awaiting inspection—or maybe a whack on the head.

  Maybe they’re just uncomfortable, stuffed as they are into woolen suits that look two sizes too small. The suits are respectable garments designed in the trendy-for-the-time Edwardian style, commonly manufactured by Brooks Brothers and similar brands. But there’s more to see in the too-short sleeves and wrinkly stress lines running from the back of their necks to their armpits: “They’ve already been wearing those suits for a couple of years,” pointed out Joshua Bond, a costume historian at the College of Charleston.

  With knickerbockers for pants and hair pulled into short, white-blond dreads, the look evokes a pair of innocent young kids. And yet it doesn’t.

  “To me, it looks manipulative, like they’re trying to say two things at once,” Bond said.

  Between the tight suits and the off-center bow ties, “they were dressed with some care for the ruse but not really that much attention to detail.”

  As if a showman, for instance, had kept them from their family and had no intention of truly caring for them himself—or taking them home.

  The showman gave the boys stage names right off the bat. For the next half-century, the monikers would morph, with added appositives, occasionally disappearing for a year or two at a time but always returning to the singsong names that forever bound them together: Eko and Iko (pronounced “EE-ko” and “AYE-ko”).

  Spellings changed occasionally, such as when they appeared in The New Yorker magazine as Ecko and Iko. Their ethnic origins shifted in the media narrative, too, from one circus season to the next.

  The boys had been discovered floating on a barge in the Gulf of Mexico. Along the Amazon. In the wilds of Ecuador. Off the coast of Madagascar.

  Their albinism was the main draw, of course, the only thing that really set George and Willie Muse apart from ordinary African-American children—before the circus got hold of them.

  Black albinos were considered important finds for a sideshow operator, something the average person didn’t run across—a blurred boundary between black and white. One in 36,000 Europeans is born albino; for people of African descent that figure is higher, one in 10,000, with particularly high incidences among the Zulu and the Ibo of Nigeria. Usually caused by a deletion in the P gene, the most common mutation disables one of the enzymes (around day twenty-eight after conception) used in the making of skin pigment. The absence of pigment makes albinos sensitive to light; the red in their eyes’ whites are actually the retina’s blood vessels showing through.

  Many are legally blind at birth, from a condition that cannot be corrected with glasses and has sometimes historically resulted in them being stereotyped as cognitively impaired when in fact they’re not; they suffer from horizontal nystagmus, which makes their eyes rotate back and forth. “The eyes are trying to focus, but they can’t,” said Bonnie LeRoy, a genetic counselor at the University of Minnesota. And when they walk into the bright sun, “they squint because it hurts. They can’t block out the sun with the iris because they have no color in their iris. Even indoors, many wear sunglasses because the light still hurts.” (The Dutch dismissively called albinos kakerlaks, or cockroaches—things that scurried around in the night.) During the rise of Nazism in Germany, people with albinism were despised as being “effeminate.”

  The biblical Noah was thought by some scholars to be the first albino, evidenced by text in the Dead Sea Scrolls that described him as having “the flesh of which was white as snow, and red as a rose; the hair of whose head was white like wool, and long; and whose eyes were beautiful. When he opened them, he illuminated all the house, like the sun.”


  Many modern-day pop-culture depictions of the condition are sensational and dark, portraying albinos as villains and henchmen. In films like The Da Vinci Code and The Matrix Reloaded, albino villains drive around cities at night, shooting people—which would be impossible, of course, given that often they are legally blind.

  International advocacy and research groups to support people with albinism have surged in recent years, particularly in response to disturbing news accounts in Malawi and Tanzania, where modern-day witch doctors have murdered and kidnapped albinos, claiming that potions made from their harvested body parts have magical powers. With his antibullying platform Positive Exposure, fashion photographer Rick Guidotti has launched a campaign to show the beauty of people with albinism and to include positive messages about children with all kinds of genetic differences, including cleft palates and mobility issues.

  “As an artist, it’s our responsibility to steady that gaze a little bit longer.… To start seeing beauty in difference,” he said in a popular TED Talk.

  But it was centuries before the stigma surrounding albinism would lift enough to create a space for Guidotti’s stunning albino supermodels. (Sunglasses weren’t even mass-produced until 1929.) The negative stereotypes were embedded in the mind-set of America’s most heralded founding father, the author of the Declaration of Independence.

  A little more than a century before Willie Muse’s birth and a hundred miles north of Truevine, a future president named Thomas Jefferson had become fascinated with black albinos. And perplexed. In 1783, he surveyed his fellow plantation owners in Virginia, asking them about the presence of slaves with unusually white skin. Henry Skipwith wrote back to tell him about three sisters whose skin is “a disagreeable chalky white” while their parents are “the ordinary color of blacks (not jet).”

  Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was still decades away (1859). The word scientist hadn’t been coined (1833). And the mysterious gorilla of Africa was not yet known to the scientific world (1847).

  Jefferson compiled his findings into a catalog of the state’s flora, fauna, and mineral deposits, placing albinos squarely between his accounts of fish and insect varieties in his taxonomic tome, Notes on the State of Virginia. A major book, it also put forth Jefferson’s suggestion that Africans had sex with apes.

  Governor of Virginia at the time, Jefferson was grappling with the genetic quirk of black albinism, nervous that it might dissolve the boundaries between the races. The skin of the albino was “a pallid cadaverous white, untinged with red,” he wrote.

  With life around him in chaos—his daughter had recently died, the Revolutionary War had just come to Virginia, and the approaching British troops had forced his government out of Richmond—Jefferson was desperate to bring order to the natural and social world, according to the literary critic Charles D. Martin, who explored the topic in his 2002 book, The White African American Body. For slave owners like Jefferson and his neighbors, black albinos raised an ominous specter. “The image of the African American deprived of blackness—slaves transforming, degenerating, possibly regenerating—fired the political imagination and insinuated its way into the debate on race,” Martin wrote.

  In 1791, the Philadelphia painter and museum entrepreneur Charles Willson Peale stumbled upon a mulatto slave named James whose skin had begun turning white over the course of many years, a rare condition called vitiligo. (It’s the same pigmentation disease that pop star Michael Jackson would struggle with near the end of his life.)

  Peale painted his enigmatic portrait, titled it James the White Negro, and hung it in his Philadelphia museum, later known as Peale’s American Museum, part of the nascent nation’s efforts to sanction gathering spots that weren’t taverns but salonlike places where citizens could meet and mingle to discuss taxonomical displays and other educational and cultural pursuits. Peale also exhibited people with missing limbs and albinism and other “human curiosities,” as he called them, but he thought such attractions got too much frivolous attention, insisting that it was more scientific to study regularly occurring specimens, not the unusual. But the paying public disagreed.

  Such museums were designed to have a civilizing impact on nineteenth-century Americans, who were fascinated by physical abnormalities—and to underscore notions about white superiority. An influential physician of the time speculated that black skin was the result of leprosy, arguing that lightening skin or vitiligo spots were actually a kind of early-stage cure for blackness.

  One well-known case was that of Henry Moss, a black Virginian whose skin began to lighten radically in his midthirties. While Moss began exhibiting himself for money in Philadelphia taverns in the late 1790s with great success, museums soon became the dominant place to learn about oddities, especially in New York City’s Bowery District.

  Though Peale had been the first to exhibit albinos, it was Phineas Taylor Barnum who added the bling. He brought together dramatic and musical acts with freaks (he preferred the term “oddities”) in his American Museum, located at the intersection of Broadway and Ann Street, in the heart of bustling New York. He transformed the stuffy, scientifically focused museums into amusement centers where families brought picnic lunches and spent the entire day.

  The so-called father of modern-day advertising—Barnum was, after all, credited with the phrase “There’s a sucker born every minute” (a slogan he believed, though never actually said)—he was the first businessman to advertise aggressively, hanging banners on the exterior of his museum and luring in passersby with lively storefront bands. He spun wild yarns about his human exhibits: albinos, fat people, bearded ladies, giants, dwarves, and gypsies. Barnum’s so-called dime museum, which hosted some forty-one million patrons, spawned a major new form of entertainment that endured from the 1870s to the turn of the century.

  Barnum initially displayed William Henry Johnson as Zip the Man-Monkey to capitalize on Americans’ fascination with all things Darwin, whose theory of natural selection argued that humans descended from an apelike ancestor.

  So Barnum dressed Johnson in a fur jumpsuit and had him carry a stick, then hired Civil War photographer Mathew Brady to take his publicity shots, art-directing Johnson to pose in positions mirroring early drawings found in natural-history taxonomies of apes.

  Off and on throughout his early career, Johnson was displayed inside a cage, with a “keeper” nearby who made up stories about him walking on all fours before his “discovery,” eating raw meat, and being a cross between a native African and an orangutan. He was an immediate favorite of Barnum’s—and a favorite target of press mockery.

  As the Bowery grew sleazier, city dwellers moved on to newer amusements like popular song-and-dance acts. But the freak show still prevailed in cities and towns across America’s heartland, in circuses, carnivals, and street fairs. By 1900, there were one hundred traveling circuses in America, and the sideshow was a highlight.

  Piggybacking on the craze for Darwin, a full-time occupation had been birthed: freak hunting. As one circus publication described it, “Scouts are sent abroad to outlandish places searching for that human being upon whom nature has played a trick. It is a hard job, and freaks are frequently found in places where you least expected to find them.”

  In New Jersey, for instance (Zip).

  Or in Mount Vernon, Ohio (the Wild Men of Borneo).

  If an act actually did hail from a foreign country, the details were exaggerated to portray the performers as cannibals, polygamists, or dog eaters. Facts changed with the season: a New Zealand albino named Unzie was said to have been found by a benevolent explorer who saved him from being sacrificed by his own tribe. A more realistic account went that Unzie was taken, by permission of his parents (and with remuneration to them), by an English colonist and first exhibited in Melbourne, Australia, before being brought west.

  Among the most celebrated albinos in the sideshow, Unzie was said to see in total darkness—a member of the Night People, as albino blacks were sometimes called. He
fixed his hair in curling papers when he went to bed at night, then brushed it out and into a six-foot-wide mushroom in the morning.

  “I never tip my hat to the ladies,” he used to say from his freak-show platform, wearing an elegant high hat and dress suit. “If I should, they’d think a bombshell exploded.” After which he promptly removed his hat, causing his enormous white hair to bounce out as if his head were submerged within a cloud.

  As dime museums gave way to circuses and movie theaters entered the public domain, many predicted the freak show as entertainment would spiral to a close. A Washington Post reporter wrote a premature obituary in 1911, using a morose midget named Mike as his expert source.

  Mike described sneaking into a movie theater to watch a silent film—“If people could see us passing along [out in public] they wouldn’t pay over their dime at the door”—only to have the popularity of moviegoing then threaten to put his kind out of work. “We didn’t imagine that we were going to our own funeral,” Mike said.

  The reporter bade a premature good riddance to the pastime of profiting off the misfortune of others (though he did sympathize with sad, unemployed Mike). “No good ever came of staring at the frog-boy, nor of questioning the ossified man,” who’d lived out his final years as a hermit, six feet tall and just eighty pounds. He’d been found dead in a hut on the outskirts of Providence, Rhode Island, a few months earlier.

  “Is it not a healthier sign of the public mind that it is no longer interested in the sad misfortunes of others?”

  And yet, as dime museums faded, circuses and carnivals did nothing of the sort. Factory jobs made entertainment affordable for ordinary people, many of whom now had a modicum of leisure time, with half-days off on Saturdays and modest vacations. The country’s booming railroad system carried traveling entertainments deeper into America’s heartland and kept the freak hunter busy, judging from frequent ads in Billboard, the weekly trade magazine: