Truevine

by Beth Macy

  More recently, Nancy described the brothers’ complicated dependence on their manager as Stockholm syndrome. Though the term wasn’t coined until 1973, when hostages held in a Swedish bank developed an attachment to their captors, it has been used to describe scenarios ranging from Patricia Hearst’s helping her kidnappers rob a California bank in 1974 to, more recently, the nine-month kidnapping of teenager Elizabeth Smart, who was tortured and sexually abused.

  Candy Shelton was the “onliest person Uncle Willie ever said anything bad about,” Nancy recalled. But when they were young, Willie and George learned that he was also the key to their being fed, housed, and clothed.

  The captor is your abuser, but he’s also the only person who can keep you alive.

  Despite the inconsistencies in the story of their early circus careers, documents show the parallel narrative streams converging into a single moving current from the time Shelton took charge. And often the ripples turned into rapids.

  Shelton’s reputation wasn’t so stellar among his colleagues, judging from a 1920 Billboard ad taken out by managers of the Loos show, offering a twenty-five-dollar reward for information leading “to the whereabouts of J.H. (Candy) Shelton, Manager of Iko and Eko Monkey Men.”

  Shelton had absconded with George and Willie Muse, chasing a bigger show and more pay—and not for the last time.

  In an as-told-to biography that is as self-servingly promotional as Lewiston’s is blunt, showman Al G. Barnes recounts running into the unlikely trio in the mid-to late 1910s. A native Canadian, Barnes had started out as a wild-animal trainer, beginning with a pony and a “talking” dog: he spent months training his childhood pug, Rowser, to say the words I won’t, yes (which the dog emitted in a sort of sneeze) and the name Barney, then worked out a monologue routine featuring those words as a kind of punch line. The animal acts were a common feature among earlier, smaller circuses in the late 1800s, and the inspiration for another cliché that breached the circus-tent walls to become part of the American vernacular: the “dog and pony show.” Barnes owned one of the largest train shows in the West, based in Southern California. It had quickly grown into a thirty-car traveling spectacle of dancing horses topped by dancing girls, an “aerial” lion act (lions riding on the backs of horses), tiger and elephant attractions, and a sideshow run by Bobby Fountain.

  As Barnes tells it, an early manager—Stokes, perhaps—had been traveling with the Muse brothers in a small midwestern town, exhibiting them under timeworn names that didn’t adequately cash in on the public’s fascination with all things exotic and savage, from the Monkey Men to the Ministers from Dahomey, an African kingdom (now Benin) that had been an important location in the Atlantic slave trade.

  Cast as albinos from Africa, the Muses did nothing but stand there blankly while a lecturer made up wild stories about them, punctuated with a few kernels of geographic truth.

  When spoken to, they replied in gibberish, as instructed.

  Shelton “didn’t know how to exploit them,” Barnes declared. “In fact, he knew little or nothing of showmanship.”

  But with his decades of experience, the man known as Governor Barnes and the Prince of Showmen knew he would eventually figure out how to perfect their act.

  “I quickly realized their possibilities,” Barnes said in his memoir. “And when the manager asked me to permit him to join the show with the boys, I agreed, thinking I could buy them from him.”

  That season, the Muse brothers morphed from the Monkey Men to the Ministers from Dahomey to Darwin’s Missing Links to, finally, the name they used for the duration of their stint with Barnes: Eko and Iko, the Ecuadorian Savages.

  Showmanship, as Barnes viewed it, required a continental shift. And fiercer facial expressions.

  The brothers were now featured exhibits of the Barnes Big Circus Sideshow, located stage left of Barnes’s three-ringed big top. The sideshow had always taken a backseat to the big top, where Barnes’s menagerie reigned supreme. In his book, he imbues the animals he describes with more humanity than he does the Muses, for instance.

  The spectacle was a rich, two-hour stew of wild animal acts, dancing girls, music, and clowns—all billed as “The Show That’s Different.” The highlight was Mabel Stark (real name: Mary Haynie), pitched alternatively as the Greatest Woman Animal Trainer in the World and, later, when she worked for Ringling Brothers, the Intrepid Lady Trainer. Stark was hailed for her ability to tame lions, tigers, and even sea lions, though she was mauled several times throughout her fifty-seven-year career and carried lifelong scars. (She credited her cat-training prowess to strategically doling out meat rewards, as opposed to just beating the tigers into submission, as her predecessors had done.)

  A brunette with Barnes (she turned blond for Ringling), Stark took her work seriously, clad in a militaristic white suit and trousers—especially when she had her bare hands (or head) in the mouth of a lion. At the height of her Barnes act, she would sit astride a lion on a platform that slowly ascended inside the tent. With the lights dimmed, a shower of fireworks would emanate from her head as she reached the top.

  With the GIs returning from World War I in the spring of 1919, Barnes played on the patriotic fervor of the day and the increasing popularity of wild-animal shows by dedicating one of his lions to the returning 303rd Infantry. He introduced himself to each town he visited by leading a parade of circus acts from astride a six-ton elephant named Tusko as a prelude to each show.

  A few years later, during a stop in a Washington logging town, Tusko escaped, upsetting cars and knocking over trees, fences, and telephone poles. Barnes eventually unloaded him on a carnival operator, but the elephant continued to unleash “a trunkload of trouble” before his death, at the age of forty-two. Criminal poisoning was suspected.

  It was common practice for most of the larger rail circuses operating from Barnum’s day through the late 1920s to kick off every stop with a free parade to drum up customers for their shows—until the ubiquity of the automobile finally made the practice unwieldy. Newfangled traffic lights messed up the processions, and it was hard to turn corners in a sixteen-horse wagon without bumping into parked cars.

  In his sideshow, Barnes strived never to display anything that would “offend good taste.” Always on the lookout for new finds, he had once enlisted a freak hunter who had adventured to Africa, where he captured a “hideous-looking Negro” with a foot-long tail. Arriving in San Francisco, the man had been quarantined at Alcatraz Island, where Barnes inspected him and deemed him “too repulsive” for display. Later, when the Smithsonian Institution made an “exceptionally large offer for the specimen,” Barnes lamented—in the interest of science, of course—that he had already sent him back.

  Barnes’s favorite freak (and best moneymaker) had been a woman with two bodies, both perfectly formed from the shoulders down. “We found her in the backwoods of Texas where she was living on a ranch with her husband and three children,” two born from one side, and one from the other, he wrote. “She traveled with the show for several years… and the women especially were very taken with her,” asking to examine her after the show, which she permitted. Her husband became a ticket seller and didn’t get too mad when his coworkers ragged him with Mormon bigamy jokes.

  Despite his claim of being highbrow, Barnes had intuited what Stencell came to define as the three keys to sideshow success: “Displays of sex, horror, and strangeness consistently open the purses.” The best showmen adapted to the fact that two heads trumped one, and three breasts trumped two.

  Crowds strolled by as the lecturer Eddie Thorn (“The Innovator”) took turns exaggerating the qualities of the various performers, beginning with snake enchantress May Blasser, who demonstrated her python-charming prowess. Snake handling was a popular sideshow act of that time, judging from the myriad Billboard classifieds to buy and sell snakes.

  Next they watched the “peerless” Billy Pilgrim, born with no arms or legs, roll a cigarette with his mouth while Fountain’s w
ife, the sideshow’s “xylophone artist,” played a song. Mabel Gardner presented a show with talking cockatoos, while Carmelita the Lady with the Marvelous Hair and Nettie the Texas Fat Girl simply sat or stood as Thorn hyperbolized away. Eko and Iko were on the billing, though accounts from that time don’t mention exactly what more, if anything, they did beyond standing there and answering an occasional question or two.

  At an Ohio stop in the fall of 1919—Barnes’s farthest trip east in a while—the Cincinnati Times called the entourage “by far the oddest and most entertaining show ever seen in Cincinnati. The modern and smooth-faced Noah, which is Barnes himself, has Jack Londonized the circus, kicked out vaudeville and set up only that which is of red-bloodedness and highly satisfactory with a preface which is all beauty and muscle.”

  A few years later, another newspaper gushed, “The whole show proved to be as advertised, was fine from Eko and Iko in the sideshow, to the grand ensembles under the big tent. There was only one drawback. There was just too much for one pair of eyes to see.”

  In Scranton, Pennsylvania, Eko and Iko took top news billing out of a Barnes cast that included 1,080 circus performers and workers, with a picture of the brothers looking fiercely at each other, in profile and frowning, their hair jutting out every which way. BODIES OF ZANZIBAR YOUTHS ARE COVERED WITH FINE WOOL, the headline trumpeted.

  Three days later, the same paper described the brothers’ marching in the pre-show parade as “Eko and Iko, two wild and uncivilized men from the jungles of Equadore [sic], who are covered with wool from their heads to their feet.” Marching next to them were Mr. and Mrs. Tiny Mite, the Smallest Married Couple in the World, and John Aasen, the Norwegian boy-giant, said to be not just the largest but also the tallest man alive. Tusko, the paper noted, was sitting this parade out due to his bulk, which varied by several tons depending on which press agent was spinning the numbers. “He only weighs ten tons,” the Scranton reporter wrote, up four tons from an earlier account.

  George and Willie’s mother had been married to Cabell Muse since 1917, and around that time the couple relocated the family to Roanoke. But the brothers had no idea what was happening with their relatives back home—or even where that home was.

  They later said they’d believed all along that their mother was still alive, but it seemed possible they might never see her again.

  As Barnes recounted in his book, the circus returned later in fall 1919 to its winter quarters in Venice, California. That’s around the time Eko and Iko’s manager—who is unnamed in Barnes’s account but presumably was Stokes, working with Shelton—asked to borrow some money so he could travel east.

  Barnes boasted about the transaction in loan-shark terminology, underscoring that the “boys,” now grown men, meant nothing more than chattel to him. “I lent him the desired amount, taking the boys as security,” he wrote. “He stated that if he did not return, I might have the boys. He did not show up again, so we started out with the boys next season.”

  Around that time, Barnes anointed Shelton, then twenty years old, the Muses’ sole manager and caretaker. By this time Shelton was already working as a ticket taker for the sideshow and may have been co-managing them earlier with Stokes or another intermediary manager (Barnes doesn’t say, and I could find no other direct references to pre-Shelton managers in the trade publications between 1915 and 1918).

  Shelton immediately “realized the boys’ possibilities,” asking if he could pay off the debt contracted by the former manager and thereafter work with Barnes on a percentage basis. “I agreed to do this, and we made the boys a paying proposition,” Barnes wrote, candidly.

  In a photo from 1922, Al G. Barnes stands in front of a sideshow tent with his arms draped casually over George’s and Willie’s shoulders. Willie squints and leans to the side, clenching his fists, while George looks more relaxed (or at least open to the pose), his hands steepled elegantly in front of him. On Barnes’s left hand shines a gleaming wedding band, acquired from his second wife after an extended fifteen-year divorce battle, including five separate lawsuits filed to end his first marriage. The divorce was granted in 1921 on desertion charges; Barnes married a different woman the next day.

  But that didn’t go so well either. Barnes filed for divorce against his second wife in 1923, claiming she horsewhipped him, and six years of litigation followed.

  “The legal battles he engaged in, most of them due to domestic difficulties of one sort or another, never seemed to lessen his zest for life,” a reporter wrote in Barnes’s 1931 obituary. “As he rushed from tent to tent he would shout his answers to the reporters drawn there by a new lawsuit.”

  With the shift in management, the Muse brothers’ native lands changed, and a new anthropomorphic tale was honed: “There was a story to the effect that the boys were members of a colony of sheep-headed people inhabiting an island in the South Seas; that they had been captured after many hair-raising escapades, and that they were the only specimens in captivity,” Barnes had written.

  The captive-history narrative only added to the irony of their present lot.

  They were already captives, of course—just not in their native lands.

  But what Barnes claimed next would bedevil the brothers from Truevine for most of their lives: “The boys had a very low grade of intelligence, and the press-agent story fitted them well.”

  For the next several decades, that assertion would rear its head repeatedly, inspiring heated debate among their caretakers, lawyers, and relatives, and scholars, too. Were George and Willie born mentally incapacitated, or did the environment they were thrust into—kept away from their family and denied education—make them that way?

  Or were they in on the ruse and pretending to be dull-witted, per Candy’s orders, just as Zip followed the instructions of O. K. White?

  It’s also possible that, like their enslaved forebears, George and Willie feigned servitude to give the impression of being attached to their captors. A survival technique designed to make Shelton think they were more childlike than they were, the behavior could have become internalized, as the historian Stanley Elkins has described in his famous but controversial study of slavery’s effects.

  Maybe George and Willie hid their opinions and their wits because they were champion observers of life during Jim Crow. Maybe they instinctively understood that it was dangerous to know too much. As the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar wrote in his landmark 1896 poem, “We Wear the Mask,” about black Americans forced to hide their frustration behind a façade of happiness:

  We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries

  To thee from tortured souls arise.

  We sing, but oh the clay is vile

  Beneath our feet, and long the mile;

  But let the world dream otherwise,

  We wear the mask!

  One other plausible explanation, according to albinism expert Bonnie LeRoy: during the early twentieth century, the brothers’ rapid eye fluttering was routinely misinterpreted as a symptom of mental impairment. “It’s still not uncommon for people to misdiagnose albinism, or not to understand that the vision isn’t correctable, or that the patient is cognitively fine.

  “But back then, there would have been very minimal understanding” of horizontal nystagmus, she said, a condition also known as dancing eyes.

  Housed among the freaks, the brothers were already trapped in the “rigid caste system of the circus,” as Lewiston described it. Sideshow folks “didn’t mingle with the big top performers except in dice and poker games.” But big-top performers refused to acknowledge sideshow workers when they met them on the street.

  Freaks, then, were the most isolated of all, tucked away from nonpaying eyes lest they exhibit their wares for free. They were often moody, and most of them were illiterate, one prominent manager wrote, adding that “they succumbed quickly to professional jealousy.”

  A keen audience observer, Barnes was astute enough to understand that simply being albino was no longer freaky enough at
a time when the nascent movie and radio businesses were competing with the circus. As early as 1901, a Billboard writer had observed that albinos no longer brought in customers the way they once did. “They’re too common,” he wrote. If they could also sing and/or dance—or were married to women who did—the act was more valuable.

  Novelty—something the public had never before seen—was always the goal.

  To be a big draw in the 1920s, the brothers would have to up their game.

  Barnes credited himself for what happened next: “We taught them to play a mandolin and guitar so that they could strum the instruments passably well.” It’s likely they had picked music up earlier, either from their neighbors in Truevine or from the minstrel shows that traveled with Loos.

  But as Willie himself told the story, the first time Shelton gave them instruments, it was meant to be a joke. A photo prop, the instruments were placed in their hands for a pitch-card pose. Shelton assumed they had no marketable skills beyond their appearance. He had no idea they harbored the potential to hear a song one time—and re-create it on just about any instrument.

  By all accounts, music came naturally to George and Willie, especially playing stringed instruments. Relatives recall Willie insisting he was the better player—and singer—of the two.

  I’ll wear my high silk hat and frock tail coat

  You wear your Paris gown and your new silk shawl

  There ain’t no doubt about it, babe,

  We’ll be the best dressed in the hall.

  “Eko and Iko could play anything,” one of their coworkers told Stencell. “They could hear a tune just one time and play it perfectly.”

  Finally, the brothers had something they could take solace in, besides each other.

  In an undated photograph from their Barnes stint, George and Willie look to be in their late teens or early twenties. Posted under tent frames, they sit in chairs draped with striped ribbons. Willie holds a banjo while George clutches a saxophone, a ukulele balanced against his knee.