Truevine

by Beth Macy

  But to a nation straining against its Puritan rigidity—“We have yet to learn again the forgotten art of gayety,” as Nathaniel Hawthorne put it—a traveling show was a break in the dreary monotony of farm and factory life. As Ringling pitchman Dexter Fellows noted, “People flocked to tent shows as though drawn by some overmastering spell,” often wearing their Sunday finery.

  Barnum had been the first to go against midwestern ministers’ teachings that the circus was “Satan’s own show,” and he did it with clever subterfuge: he issued free passes to clergymen. Early in their careers, the Ringling brothers boosted their audience by taking advantage of the growing number of “drummers,” or traveling salesmen, who canvassed the country. They issued them special credentials that came with free admission privileges to any Ringling show.

  George and Willie hadn’t yet caught the attention of such sprawling circuses. The regional carnivals they traveled among were fly-by-night affairs that changed names often to give the appearance of offering patrons something new, to entice return patronage. “Quite often the carnivals would change their name, as you would change your underwear,” said the collector and author Warren Raymond.

  Stokes and Eastman had named the Muses the Ethiopian Monkey Men sometime during the 1914 season. They also exhibited them as Stokes’s Monkey Men and Eastman’s Monkey Men.

  But it was the brothers’ next manager who would make the biggest impact on—and the most money from—George and Willie Muse. Sometime between 1914 and 1917, Candy Shelton anointed himself their caretaker and their captor, their supervisor and their sponge.

  He changed their stage names regularly, and working with the tacit approval of subsequent show owners, he refused to pay them—or return them to their mother.

  In a nod to the ghost of Barnum, for a time Shelton named them Barnum’s Original Monkey Men. At other times they were pitched as Darwin’s Missing Links, thought to represent something between ape and human—just as Barnum had done with William Henry “Zip” Johnson and the Bronx Zoo with Ota Benga—except when they were heralded as the Sheep-Headed Men, in which case the ruse evoked a ram.

  Depending on the crowd, the brothers were said to have been discovered on a raft floating off Madagascar, or the Gulf of Mexico, or somewhere in the South African bush, cavorting with the springbok.

  The truth was considerably less colorful. And more cruel. Heralded as “nature’s greatest mistakes,” George and Willie were modern-day slaves, hidden in plain sight, at a time when naïve and eager audiences didn’t think to ask questions about contracts or working conditions, and civil rights didn’t much exist for children, women, or blacks. Circus- and carnival-goers simply smiled and took the sideshow lecturer at his word.

  For an itchy-footed farm boy from Powder Springs, Tennessee, trying to work his way up the carnival ranks—first in concessions and, now, as an act manager and lecturer/announcer—Candy Shelton waxed effusive in an ever-shifting spiel about the brothers’ geographic origins.

  His distinguishing feature, according to a nephew, was that he was missing four of the fingers on his left hand. He’d been grinding meat on his family farm as a teen when the stool he was sitting on slipped out from under him. When he instinctively reached to right himself, his hand went into the grinder.

  “He still had his thumb,” the nephew, Don Nicely, said.

  When his family migrated to Detroit in the mid-1910s so his father could work the lines at Ford Motor Company, Shelton, the eldest child, was in his mid-to late teens. Rather than accompany the family, he joined a little-known traveling carnival passing through and headed south with it. Before long he had ditched the middle name his family members always referred to him by—Herman—and was christened Candy by fellow concessionaires.

  According to Al Stencell, the sideshow expert and retired circus operator, the nickname stemmed from his first carnival job as a candy butcher. A pre–Civil War phrase that dates to the very first person to work selling candy in the carnival stands, it was initially used to describe the man who’d been the town’s meat butcher, and the name stuck.

  Back in Virginia, Prohibition was proving a boon to the Franklin County moonshiners, who’d formerly catered to just the local market. In Roanoke, a black pharmacist who lived near Jordan’s Alley was tried for practicing medicine without a license and received a six-month jail sentence, though it’s unclear if he actually served the time. Still, John Pinkard’s mostly black patients continued flocking to the “yarb doc,” or herb doctor.

  Pinkard was taking advantage of Roanoke’s segregation laws by developing a black subdivision on the Roanoke County outskirts called Pinkard’s Court, not far from the Franklin County line, touted as “exclusively for colored people.” With a flair for fashion and chauffeurs to drive his new cars, he erected a cast-iron arch at the entrance to the development and built his own fence out of ceramic jugs emptied of the alcohol he mixed with wild cherry bark, tobacco, and sassafras roots for his treatments.

  Two generations removed from slavery, Pinkard’s Court represented black Roanoke’s aspirational suburban middle class, a neighborhood of matching two-story houses peopled by silk-mill and railroad workers. It would have made an impression on Harriett when she passed it en route to her shack on Ten-and-a-Half Street shortly after marrying Cabell Muse, in 1917.

  Her hope was to marry a railroad man, someone who could take care of her and her youngest three children, who were now teens; maybe even buy a house.

  The Great Migration was under way, the organic movement between World War I and the 1970s of six million African Americans from the rural South to urban centers in the northeastern, midwestern, and western states. Eager to escape the state-sanctioned violence encouraged by Jim Crow laws, former sharecroppers also migrated en masse to southern cities like Roanoke, an internal migration that was sometimes the first stop on their northward quest for freedom—for the vote, for the chance to make a living and acquire property, for the right to live without fear of being lynched.

  As the historian Benjamin Quarles has written: “Whatever the Southerner had surrendered at Appomattox, he had not surrendered his belief that colored people were inferior to white.”

  In Florida, a black person could be given thirty-nine lashes for “intruding himself into any religious or other assembly of white persons.” Mississippi blacks were allowed to vote only if they paid a poll tax, showed proof of residency, and read and interpreted a section of the state constitution.

  In Virginia, too, poll taxes had been cemented by the addition of the so-called understanding clause, part of the new Virginia Constitution of 1902. The tax was $1.50 per head, to be paid six months in advance of any election, and voters could register only if they could read and explain any provision of the newly written state constitution.

  The clause gave extraordinary powers to county and city registrars, who got to ask questions of prospective voters—and judge their replies. Answers from white Democrats were usually right; the replies of blacks and Republicans were often not.

  Fearing Virginians would not vote to disenfranchise themselves, delegates had opted not to submit their new constitution to a vote and simply proclaimed it law. After various court challenges, the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals backed the politicians, ruling in favor of the new constitution. Voter participation dropped significantly, especially among blacks.

  The segregationist-written constitution remained in effect until July 1, 1971.

  It had been more than two years since she’d last been in contact with her sons. Harriett knew nothing of Candy Shelton or their whereabouts when Billboard boasted in March 1917 that Barnum’s Original Monkey Men “will undoubtedly be among the big money getters of the season.” George and Willie were now performing with the Fort Worth, Texas–based J. George Loos Shows carnival, where the banner attraction was Booger Red’s Congress of Rough Riders. A droopy-eyed Texan who got his start in the business running a traveling burlesque show, Loos was known for mentoring a host of
carnival operators during his forty-year career.

  “Quality first seems to be the slogan of this company… the shows are all clean and meritorious,” a newspaper in Corsicana, Texas, gushed after the carnival’s first performance there, in 1916—though it changed its tune a few years later when Loos was convicted of running an illegal gambling operation.

  While it’s not clear how Shelton and Loos met—both listed Fort Worth as their home base in official documents over the next decade—they oddly shared a left-hand deformity: Loos’s second and third fingers were webbed.

  And they shared an affinity for African-American performers, judging from a 1916 classified ad taken out by Loos: “FREAKS WANTED FOR TEN-IN-ONE. Colored pianist, also singers and dancers with good wardrobe and ability for [minstrel] show. Talkers and man to handle show.”

  With a novel freak act now in his possession, Shelton used his salesman’s gift of gab to exploit their differences: he knew how to exaggerate their attributes to patrons inside the sideshow tent.

  As their manager, Shelton would have negotiated the brothers’ contracts with the carnival or circus owner, outfitted them, and arranged for their photographs and banners. He made sure they got fed—but maybe not that well, judging from their skinny stature in the Tibbals photo.

  The arrangement was probably not unlike the contract written for Johnson (aka Zip), made between his manager, Captain O. K. White, and Ringling Brothers, which outlined monthly $40 payments to White, with proceeds from the photo souvenirs split evenly between Ringling and White.

  And like the Muse brothers, Johnson was paid only in food and board.

  “Zip was treated like a trained dog,” said Pfening.

  A similar contract was written for George Bell, “the colored giant” and minstrel, who stood seven feet eleven inches tall (and wore a size 23 shoe). But that agreement was issued directly between Ringling and Bell, with the latter signing an X. Bell was paid only $12 a month but appeared to have more agency in his circus dealings. As Pfening put it, “I am sure Bell was of at least average intelligence and just got screwed being black in a lousy time to be such.… He had no need for a representative to handle his financial affairs, as Zip did.”

  Freak-show hierarchy, then, paralleled the order of the day: a white giant working during that same period for the Ringling-owned Forepaugh-Sells Brothers Big United Shows earned $25 a month, which was paid to him directly—more than double what Bell earned.

  Traveling by rail in sixteen cars, the Loos carnival featured not only the Monkey Men but also a musical group called the Dixieland Minstrels, “an array of talent that will be hard to equal in the colored minstrel line.” (Carnival workers dismissively called the minstrel shows plant shows, short for plantation.)

  The Loos show also exhibited a fat girl named Jolly Vallera, “who has a neat frame-up… and is everything that the name of fat girl implies,” and Booger Red’s Wild West act, featuring twenty-five riders and ropers. Boasting that it was the only outdoor amusement enterprise that had been on tour more than four hundred consecutive weeks without closing, Loos took out ads in Billboard proclaiming, “You Can’t Lose with Loos,” and promising “SUCCESS” and “PROSPERITY” in an all-caps spiel.

  Shelton displayed his ambitions early on, working his way to bigger jobs and better shows. “Most people in management start out with smaller jobs and work their way up,” Al Stencell told me. Many workers who managed acts had secondary positions, their so-called cherry-pie jobs, and Shelton was frequently also listed as both a manager and ticket seller in circus programs.

  Ticket sellers often engaged in shortchanging customers—a common practice that shortchange, or shortcake, artists took pride in. They developed elaborate dialogues and faux-counting routines designed to distract or confuse the circus-goer while they were busy palming a quarter (or more) from the person’s change.

  Shelton could stretch the truth to match the arm span of a circus giant. In 1920, he told census takers in Belton, Texas, where he and his new wife, Cora, were wintering, that he was the manager of a traveling sideshow when he was really just overseeing one of its acts. In 1923, he bragged to a newspaper reporter in Hamilton, Ohio, that he owned his own circus when, again, he was only managing one of several entertainers.

  Shelton not only pocketed the Muse brothers’ earnings; he also kept the money he made by selling their photos, proceeds of which were split between him and the lecturer, who spoke inside the tent as the acts were being exhibited.

  Shelton is mentioned sparingly in press accounts and doesn’t even merit his own file in the country’s circus museums. But Harry Lewiston, a longtime contemporary of Shelton’s who was also a ticket seller and sideshow manager at many of the same circuses, described the lifestyle unblinkingly, down to the shortchanger’s code of honor: “That we would never short change a child, a woman, a cripple, a man with a child in his arms, an elderly person, or a man we didn’t think could afford the loss.” (Circus operators shortchanged more often than carnival operators because they were only in town for one night—and less likely to draw the ire of police.)

  “Ringling and all the big shows would go on and on about being clean ‘Sunday School shows,’ which was pure B.S.,” Stencell told me. “The only reason for anyone taking a job around a show as a ticket seller was to shortchange.”

  The circus was a grift-filled enterprise that attracted adventurers and others drawn to society’s fringe, especially those eager to ditch sad histories and societal restrictions. Some circuses even hired professional pickpockets to circulate throughout the carefree crowds—as long as they split their take with management.

  Shortchangers were aided and abetted by “fixers,” or “patches”—circus employees who arrived at new venues and immediately headed out to grease the palms of public officials, policemen, and fire marshals, persuading them to bend the rules.

  Lewiston, for instance, employed his show’s patch every time he exhibited the naked hermaphrodite Mona Harris, against a town’s decency laws, as his show’s “blow-off,” or special-admission attraction offered at the end of the regular sideshow.

  A red-haired, buxom woman who had both a penis and a vagina, Mona also “had a split personality as far as sex was concerned,” Lewiston wrote. “She seemed to be equally attracted to both men and women, and would carry on a romance with either sex if she got the chance.” State sodomy laws criminalizing homosexual acts might have been the law of the day, but a culture of sexual openness permeated the live-and-let-live circus culture.

  “There were a lot of gays in show business because back then it was about the only career open to them,” Stencell said. “Those shows were full of interesting and ethnic people, and people running away, and criminals and everything else.

  “But for gay people especially, the circus was a place you could escape to and make money, and not worry too much about being accepted.” Though no one was much coddled.

  One beloved gay colleague of Stencell’s was a cook who would counter slurs from his straight coworkers by slipping the cellophane from individually wrapped slices of American cheese into their grilled cheese sandwiches.

  The fact that, from the earliest years of Barnum and Bailey Circus, James Bailey had deemed wives to be “time-wasters,” preferring to hire bachelors, may have also hastened the preponderance of gay men in the circus. (Single men were also easier to fit on train bunks than married couples, fitting in bunks stacked three high or two to a bunk in coaches.)

  High jinks were permitted behind the scenes, as long as the big top could still be broken down in an hour or so, then packed onto waiting railcars. And paid cherry-pie job or not, every employee was expected to earn his or her keep. In towns where officials refused to be paid off by fixers, Mona Harris made herself useful by babysitting the show’s microcephalics when they weren’t onstage.

  The sad backstories, of course, were never part of the ballyhoo. For “Darkest Africa,” a sideshow Lewiston ran in the late 1930s, he freely a
dmitted that he had “bought” four microcephalic teenagers from their parents, Beulah and Joe House, resurrecting an earlier act. Their heads were shaved, except for a bushy knot at the top, in the style of Zip. Cast as African pygmies, the House children had been taught years earlier to perform various “native” dances, “knowing full well that if they didn’t they would be beaten” by an earlier manager, a Mississippi showman who’d “owned” them for a spell before returning them to their impoverished parents.

  When Lewiston rediscovered the family living in a ramshackle Memphis shack, Joe House greeted him warmly with “We sho’ missed you, Mistah Lewiston. And we sho’ do miss that money,” according to Lewiston’s account.

  So Lewiston engaged with their parents to buy the children back at a rate of a hundred dollars a week, plus food and transportation, with the caveat being that African Americans were not permitted to ride in the sleeper cars with the other performers; they had to sleep sitting up in the coach cars, and they had to eat in a separate cook tent and dining car, Lewiston wrote.

  The Houses eagerly accepted that deal, and the children were happy on the road, Lewiston claimed, though “they were still retarded as ever” and often refused to use the toilets provided for them, openly urinating in front of audiences and “adding to the amusement of the crowd.”

  In such a lurid and unseemly environment, where children and disabled people were bartered like horses, it is not known exactly how or when George and Willie Muse crossed paths with Shelton, who in 1916 was working as a carnival announcer and usher for Paul’s United Shows, a competitor to the Loos shows.

  “Candy Shelton, that’s the man that took them, and that’s the man that told them their mama was dead,” insisted their niece, Dot Brown, Nancy’s mother, in a 2001 interview. “And when you keep telling a child for so long that ‘your mother is dead, and there’s no need to go back,’ the child believes it.”