by Beth Macy
With one son in prison and two others missing, it must have been a relief for Harriett Muse to have her lone daughter, Annie Belle, living around the corner from her with her husband, Walter Herbert Saunders, who delivered coal and eventually worked his way into a coal-yard management job. Most of the extended family attended church at the tiny Mount Sinai Holiness, where Annie Belle sometimes preached as a lay minister. In the photo Nancy Saunders displays of them in her living room, her grandparents are dressed in Sunday finery. Herbert has his arm around Annie Belle, who wears a white dress with silver buttons down the front and a matching thick-brimmed hat.
No such family memento exists for Cabell Muse, who, early in the marriage, became known throughout the neighborhood as a philanderer, a gambler, and a bully—the kind of man Oscar Micheaux might have featured in one of his films.
When I asked Nancy and her cousin Louise whether Cabell abused Harriett’s children, Nancy gave a resolute no. She would not have tolerated it.
Louise agreed and made a reference to the woman whose fiancé (now husband), an NFL star, was arrested for assaulting her in an elevator in 2014: “She would’ve beat the bricks off him. Harriett would’ve shown Ray Rice’s wife what to do with him!”
“Don’t you know this by now, Scoop?” Nancy said to me, her eyebrows arched into an angle, like shark fins. “The women in our family have always been strong, backboned people.”
But what options did a black maid, even a strong, backboned person, in a racist southern city have for finding her missing sons beyond simply working and keeping her ear to the ground?
Harriett hustleth and she waiteth, and finally, in the fall of 1927, she heard some potentially promising news.
The circus was coming to town.
PART THREE
9
The Prodigal Sons
The idea, when it first came to her, was so bold it was practically suicidal. She could have been arrested. She could have been killed.
Harriett Muse could not have read the advance press Dexter Fellows had spoon-fed and finagled Roanoke Times reporters into writing in October 1927. THE WORLD’S LARGEST CIRCUS IS HERE, the newspaper trumpeted in a preview story about the upcoming spectacle of four locomotives, one hundred railcars, sixteen hundred people, five rings, six stages, and the circus’s most famous star of the moment, a special-guest albino elephant from Burma.
It was the first time the combined RB&BB shows had ever played Roanoke, and Ringling’s advance team had been busy placing newspaper ads in the weeks leading up to the performance. The billing crew plastered handbills for the two shows all over the city ahead of time, and the adjusters secured the usual permits. The Big One had just recently grown from a four-ring to a five-ring affair.
At the Roanoke Fairgrounds, there was no WHITES ONLY sign posted. But this was the same venue where the KKK rallied, and blacks across the South already knew they could not just wander the show grounds at will. In Louisiana, for instance, officials had gone to the trouble of mandating racially separate ticket booths and entrances and exits, down to the declaration that black and white accommodations had to be twenty-five feet apart.
While carnivals performing weeklong stays typically set aside a midweek day as Colored Day or Black Achievement Day, circuses that played just one day afforded no such access. Blacks arriving at a one-day event such as the 1927 Roanoke show would have had to view the big-top performance from a restricted area in the back of the tent—the back-end blues, as show people called it.
By the fall of 1927, the Ringling caravan was finishing up its late-season swing through the southern states, having already looped through Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee. Taylor Gordon, John Ringling’s longtime chauffeur, had described what it was like for black circus workers from the North to journey through the land of Jim Crow: the shock of seeing signs out his Pullman car window that read NIGGERS AND DOGS NOT ALLOWED and of learning to introduce himself to white southerners as “Mr. Ringling’s niggah” to stave off criticism and attacks.
Gordon was wisely defensive. In 1920, a lynch mob had gathered outside a circus tent in Duluth, Minnesota, declaring that three black workers for the John Robinson Circus had raped a white girl. Though the young woman’s doctors found no physical evidence of the rape, the mob hanged the men anyway in one of the most notorious events in American circus history.
And yet consider: even those heinous events had not been held in locales where the city’s chief prosecutor was the founder of the largest Klan organization in the state.
Indeed, the biggest threat of danger on this day was not to any circus employee. And it had nothing to do with the usual unpredictability of Circus Day, that rare moment when country and city life converged; when preachers got to see the wonders of God’s animal creations but also rubbed elbows with some of the drunkest, meanest people in town; when middle-class farmers and townsfolk were put within eyeshot of “educational” but naughty “hoochie coochie” strip shows—aka the cooch show.
No, the gravest danger that day was to Harriett Muse, who’d made her way from her clapboard shack on Ten-and-a-Half Street through the downtown and to the fairgrounds in suburban south Roanoke late that afternoon, probably by streetcar.
For decades, Roanokers would speculate about how she learned her long-lost sons were playing that day in that circus. Maybe a neighbor had seen them performing earlier in the day and sent word. Maybe one of the families Harriett did laundry for casually mentioned noticing one of the posters plastered all over town. Maybe one of her other children, now grown, heard it through the Jordan’s Alley grapevine.
Her granddaughter Dorothy (Nancy’s mother, Dot) had been born to Annie Belle and Herbert Saunders on October 4, just ten days before. That little girl would grow up hearing a lot about Harriett’s brave actions that day. Discussed at every family reunion and every Sunday potluck, the story would become the Muses’ single most vivid piece of lore, passed down like tales of a grandfather’s war heroics, or a cousin’s brief brush with notoriety, or the meeting of the immigrant great-grandparents when the man saves the pretty lady from stepping on a snake.
After all those years of searching and worrying, Harriett woke up the morning of October 14 with an absolute certainty of where she should go.
Her husband would be of no help to her; that was nothing new. The last thing he thought they needed now was more mouths to feed.
Harriett was entirely alone.
But she was convinced. And she was unflinching.
“It came to her as she was sleeping,” Dot told me in a 2001 interview.
“She saw it all in a dream: ‘Go to the circus.’”
The New York Yankees had just won the World Series, slaughtering Pittsburgh in four straight games. Babe Ruth had just come off his record-setting season of sixty homers, and Lou Gehrig had led the charge. Aviator Charles Lindbergh was touring the nation in the Spirit of St. Louis, the single-seat monoplane he’d flown from New York to Paris a few months before. The first nonstop transatlantic flight, his feat was another in a long string of firsts for Americans in the 1920s. From modernized plumbing and electricity to movie theaters, cosmetics, bobbed haircuts, and radio—so much about the Roaring Twenties was brand-new. “You Need Never Change Your Oil If You Own a Buick,” boasted an ad for the Watson Motor Company, a Roanoke dealership that offered coupes for $1,195.
The city had just celebrated the opening of its first bowling alley to welcome women bowlers—as long as they were white. The local police court was full of the usual drunk-in-public arrests and Prohibition still busts. In the past fourteen months alone, two policemen and two Prohibition agents had been shot and killed during liquor raids.
Ben-Hur, “the mightiest of all epic spectacular romances,” was playing at the Jefferson Theatre downtown for fifty cents. Street photographer and Roanoke studio owner George Davis had been busy documenting the installation of new underground water lines and taking other snapshots of life in the growing city, stopping
only to shoot breaking news for the newspaper—such as when a downtown furniture store caught fire, or the local Klan gathered.
A thin man with penetrating eyes, Davis had long had his antennae dialed in to local happenings. When news broke, he sped off toward it after hoisting his massive, 111-pound Eastman camera, with eight-by-ten-inch glass-plate negatives, in the rumble seat of a friend’s borrowed car. He preferred photographing places to photographing people, though he wasn’t opposed to marrying the two when something visually interesting occurred.
Among the images that particularly fascinated him were portraits of African Americans he’d either collected or shot himself: a domestic worker sitting atop her back-porch stoop, eyes sorrowful and hands wrinkled and worn; four men hanging lifeless by their necks from a tree somewhere in southwest Virginia, a group of white men sneering at them below—in the middle of the day.
Though I found no photos of the 1926 Klan parade, Davis did use large-format film to document the 1931 statewide KKK convention in Roanoke in similarly exquisite detail. CHARTER NO. 6 WOMEN OF KKK, ROANOKE, VA. read banners held by rows of young white women, clad in cheerful white uniform-style dresses, with white stockings and black Mary Janes. The one deemed prettiest got to stand at the front of the picture.
SECURITY GUARDS ON HAND—BRING YOUR PASTOR AND THE ENTIRE FAMILY one poster for the event read, and another said ABSOLUTELY NO PROFANE LANGUAGE OR DRINKING BY ANYONE ON OR OFF STAGE.
The KKK queen, with her pious half-smile, sports a black satin sash with a single word splashed across the front of her white tea-length dress: JUSTICE. Confidence-exuding smiles are on every face. “More than likely those are daughters of some of the most prominent families in Roanoke,” Buster Carico had described it, remembering the Klan events.
Their body language conveys triumph and a wholesome righteousness that is hard to fathom some eighty years removed. But here it is, another glimpse of stop-time morality, preserved in crisp black-and-white.
When the circus came to town that bright fall day, George Davis had no idea that his 111-pound camera would soon turn its lens on Harriett Muse.
Roanokers had already been treated to the Dexter Fellows full-court press. The October 14 show would spotlight Ringling’s “biggest, newest, and most amazing features of all time gathered from every country in the world,” the newspaper boasted. Aside from Pawah, the Burmese elephant, the headliners were the soon-to-marry aerialist couple Lillian Leitzel and Alfredo Codona, dangling from wires, rings, and swinging trapezes. The sideshow wasn’t mentioned in the ads, as was custom, but an advance story in the Roanoke Times did herald the collection of “all strange oddities combined in one sideshow, continuous from morning till night.”
Among the lot lice, buzz had been building all week for the Friday shows. The paper advised readers to borrow alarm clocks so they could join the throngs at dawn, when the trains would steam into the rail yard. The night before, rousties had folded the tents up in Bristol, Tennessee. After Roanoke, the performers had just one more week of stops in Virginia and North Carolina; then the troupe would call it quits for the season, having traversed 13,618 miles of train track that year.
Thirteen years. That’s how long it had been since Harriett had last laid eyes on her sons. As far as she knew, they were still being billed as the “missing link” between man and monkey, with references to African jungles and simian features in their names and banner drawings. Things had changed a lot, though, since George and Willie left home in 1914 and especially since they joined Ringling in 1922.
Their hair, for one thing. Their show names, for another. Not to mention their hometowns, home states, home countries—and even their planets.
A page-one publicity stunt trumped up by Fellows in 1925 had made them the stars of a hairdressers’ convention. Seated in the front row of a Hotel Astor ballroom in New York, they were no longer from Ethiopia or Ecuador. This time, the story went, they were found floating off Madagascar by John Ringling himself!
They’d gone incognito to the hairdressers’ convention, their dreadlocks tucked into roomy, newsboy-style caps. “As the convention president rapped his gavel to start the day’s proceedings, Eko and Iko removed their hats and allowed their monstrous hair to be photographed against a background of groomed stylists,” Ringling stage manager Fred Bradna recalled.
One hairdresser complained about the circus interrupting his convention with a practical joke, but he was soon placated when Fellows later pointed out that some fifty newspapers not only printed pictures from the event, they also named the hairstylists’ association.
The brothers fit announcer Lew Graham’s qualifications for a successful freak act to a tee: They were unique. They were good musicians. And, dressed in finery with red sashes and tuxedos—the outfit topped off by that explosive, anachronistic hair—they were far more interesting than they were grotesque.
It’s hard to imagine people today being shocked by the sight of dreads, so common today on Bob Marley T-shirts, hipster bohemians, and even the occasional middle-aged white lady.
But during a time when it was rebellious for women, black or white, to bob their hair, few people had adopted, or even witnessed, a hairstyle born in ancient Egypt and popular among pre-Columbian Aztec priests, Islamic Sufis, and Masai warriors.
In later years, Whoopi Goldberg would have no problem finding a New York salon to care for her do, but Clyde Ingalls and Candy Shelton surely had to scramble to find a dreads-savvy hairdresser. (While I spotted pictures of “colored barbershop” tents in the Ringling archives at the Circus World Museum, I found no record of anyone styling the Muse brothers’ hair.) It’s possible they picked up some tips from Clicko, whose manager soaked his much-shorter dreadlocks in flat stout ale.
The strangeness of the brothers’ skin color was now surpassed by the strangeness of their hair. And Shelton took full advantage. During a stop in Cleveland around that period, a Plain Dealer writer described them wearing “an enormous cap filled with the long wooly hair which makes them different from the rest of us, hence objects of curiosity.”
A writer in Fairfield, Iowa, added: “The boys are as vain of it as a woman of her hair, and shampoo it every second day.”
And: “They let you pull it to see that it won’t come off.”
Patrons could have their picture made with the brothers, but it would set them back the equivalent of almost thirty dollars in today’s currency—payable to Shelton, of course.
Over the previous thirteen years, the press coverage of the brothers from Truevine featured a multitude of origin stories, but the planetary story was perhaps more fantastic than them all:
In 1923, they’d been spotted climbing out of a hole near the remains of their spaceship, wrecked in the Mojave Desert.
They were the first interplanetary freaks, now hailed as Eko and Iko, Ambassadors from Mars.
“Actually they were amiable lads, particularly Eko [usually George], who loved all animals, wanted to become an equestrian [like Bradna], and when he was not performing could be found behind a menagerie wagon gazing fondly at the lead stock,” Bradna wrote.
The New Yorker magazine agreed, noting in a “Talk of the Town” column that George seemed to be “a shade brighter” than Willie, who looked to his brother for “conversational guidance”: “If you said ‘Hello,’ the bright one would reply: ‘How do,’ and the other would immediately pipe up, ‘How do.’ If George said he was feeling fine, Willie would thereupon furnish the same report.”
The writer claimed that scientists had pronounced them both “subnormal.” But he also asserted that the brothers “shed their hair from time to time, as a chicken moults.”
Could they carry on an intelligent conversation? One elderly Roanoker who met them as a child remembered that Willie had the habit of parroting whatever his older brother said.
When I asked Nancy that same question, she bristled. “Don’t make my uncle Willie out like he was some kinda damn fool!”
As you
ng men around the age of thirty in 1927, the brothers could have been hampered in terms of sentence construction—because they’d been denied education and cloistered in the sideshow, a distant relative explained. More likely, they were just playing a role.
It’s clear the capacity for learning was there, as the brothers were later described as more vocal and more articulate. In late life, doctors said they conversed easily and possessed a quick wit.
Attorneys who interviewed an elderly Willie Muse told me he was “in no way incapacitated mentally or in any way incompetent in his thinking.” One of the lawyers, John Molumphy, had happened to interview Willie in mid-December, “and I remember thinking, ‘He’s got a better handle on his Christmas shopping list than I do at this point.’”
As their humanity began to be recognized, in the circus back lot as well as in the press, their personalities began, slowly, to emerge.
For now, though, as far as their media representation, they were cartoon characters, and always the butt of the joke.
Fellows was so adept at corralling the media, feeding the New York Times such headlines as EKO AND IKO PLAY VIOLA AND GUITAR AND THE ANIMALS JUST CURL UP, that another New Yorker writer predicted it would be impossible, looking back, to know the truth of what really went on under the sideshow tent and in the circus backyard, the behind-the-scenes zone that was a walled-off city unto itself: “Mr. Fellows’s stories are taken for granted and treated by the rewrite men with almost unfailing good humor, but what are historians a hundred years hence going to think of us when, along about the end of March in each year’s carefully preserved files, these startling sidelights on metropolitan life in the early thirties begin to show up? We hope that Mr. Fellows is still alive at that time to explain proudly.”
Amid all the trumped-up press accounts, all the racist faux dialect, and all the “comma, coloreds” that made up the media coverage of the Muse family saga, that observation is one of the very few thoughtful, and accurate, statements I’ve encountered.
