Truevine

by Beth Macy

  Even though it often led to bad choices and explosive outcomes. Black laboring men were already so diminished in their daily life that Shareef grew up believing “if you committed adultery, you would be killed. I’d hear men say that at the barbershop on Henry Street,” he said.

  It was a pervasive part of the black-male psyche Shareef absorbed growing up, he said, one that persisted for decades. In the 1980s, his own barber (who also worked for the railroad) found his wife in bed with another man, and shot and killed them both.

  In Shareef’s world, black men were so routinely belittled, they believed that committing murder to avenge adultery was worth the risk of imprisonment—if it meant keeping their fragile dignity intact. The shame of everyone knowing another man had gotten away with sleeping with your wife outweighed the risk of going to jail for murdering the son of a bitch.

  “That was the cultural environment I grew up in: adultery and murder were Siamese twins,” Shareef said.

  After a year in prison, Wooden returned to Roanoke and started his own shoe-shine business in the lobby of the train station, as if nothing had happened.

  Even the Muse brothers shrugged. They were more concerned about their destitute widowed mother than the memory of her low-down cheating husband, who by now had frittered away all that money. The cash that was supposed to compensate them for all the years they’d been separated from their mother, lied to, and used. Their money.

  George and Willie might have taken Cabell’s last name. But they did not attend his burial.

  Later, when the economy tanked and even jobs for washerwomen became scarce, the brothers recalled Cabell with even greater disdain.

  “He just wasn’t no good,” Willie told his relatives.

  After the murder, the family instructed the funeral home to send his body away, and it was buried immediately—in an unmarked grave tucked into the tobacco-rich foothills of Truevine.

  As preparations began to put Cabell in the ground, the three Muse brothers prepared for the show in Madison. It’s impossible to know whether they wanted to go home to comfort their mother and were denied the right. Judging from their later conversations about Cabell, family members doubt they would have wanted to pay him the respect.

  “Remember, he was cheating on their mama, and then he was up in the bed with another man’s wife after he’d been warned,” Nancy says. “Plus, he’d spent all that money that wasn’t for him.

  “So that served him right.”

  A gravedigger in Truevine was hard at work, and the sideshow went on with the Martian ambassadors front and center.

  It would be eight more years before the circus train rolled through the Blue Ridge Mountains and hoisted its tents in Roanoke again.

  PART FOUR

  12

  Housekeeping!

  She was “the World’s Largest Ship.” Weighing 56,551 tons and holding more than twenty-one hundred passengers, the RMS Majestic steamed across the Atlantic from England’s Southampton to New York in five days, fourteen hours, and forty-five minutes. Run by the British shipping company White Star, the same group that operated the ill-fated Titanic, the Majestic displaced 64,000 tons of water. When she docked in New York, her stern projected into the Hudson River some forty-one feet past the pier.

  With a swimming pool flanked by granite columns, she was so popular among elite passengers from the two countries she traveled between, including King George V and Queen Mary, that she was affectionately nicknamed the Magic Stick (a near-homophone of majestic) for the fortune she made her owners. The luxury liner’s first-class section featured oak-paneled lounges with carved-wood ceilings and velvet draperies, and was peopled by such dignitaries as Wall Street bankers, Columbia University professors, and former president Wilson’s assistant secretary of the treasury, Martin Vogel, who was on a mission in 1928 to bring back a prize-winning Airedale, which he planned to offer up to the White House as first dog.

  The Muse brothers were not considered dignitaries when they crossed the Atlantic via the big ship in the middle of December 1928, but their accommodations nonetheless included dining rooms with linens and silverware, and cabins in which a steward could be summoned by a bell. They traveled third class, according to the manifest, which listed their occupations as showmen (George and Tom) and freak (Willie). The modest luxuries offered in steerage were designed to attract immigrants. Menu cards offered free postcards on the back so passengers could write to their relatives at home and talk them into traveling with White Star, too.

  The ship made a big impression on the brothers, family members recall. Willie “told us as kids that he would have steak and caviar when they traveled,” said the brothers’ great-niece Louise Burrell. “He told us he was treated just exactly like he was white.” When they reached London they stayed at the Strand Palace Hotel, where Willie would acquire the lifelong habit of announcing “Housekeeping!” in a joking, faux-British accent every time the doorbell rang.

  According to Louise and Nancy, after the settlement, sideshow managers began to treat the brothers better—to a point. “Once their mama located them, it was their choice to go back,” Nancy said. A 1929 picture of the brothers underscores their newfound confidence. They’re both wearing gold rings and impeccably shined shoes. Willie flashes a wry half-smile. He is no longer looking off gloomily or clenching his fists in every photograph, and his personality is beginning to emerge in the official record now.

  Sideshow manager Clyde Ingalls had arranged everything for the transatlantic trip. He’d been taking his favorite performers to London in the off-season since 1921. They performed as part of the Bertram Mills Circus “Fun Fair” at Olympia, an exhibition hall in west London. The Fun Fair drew throngs of spectators during the Christmas season, including, frequently, members of the royal family, the lord mayor of London, and Winston Churchill.

  Bertram Mills had cultivated a relationship with the royals by naming the earl of Lonsdale honorary president of his circus in 1922 and throwing lavish opening-day luncheons that attracted hundreds of baronets, knights, and bishops to the table. In 1926, learning that the prince of Wales (the future duke of Windsor) had quietly attended one of the performances, Mills had a private viewing box installed—to help shield the duke and Wallis Simpson, his lover and future wife, from the indignity of having to spectate among the masses.

  Mills’s show was the British equivalent of the Big One, though the British circus patron was beginning to grow offended by certain sideshow acts, even those affiliated with Ringling. Writing that same year, Kenneth Grahame, the British author best known for The Wind in the Willows, said the biggest change in show life in his generation was “the disappearance of freaks and monstrousities… a change entirely for good.”

  The Times of London offered a more nuanced view: “We are tired of gaping at those of our fellow creatures who occupy sideshows; we are anxious to understand them instead.”

  According to the historian Nadja Durbach, who has written about freak shows in Britain, the British were more sensitive to the treatment of people with disabilities than Americans in the wake of World War I, probably because far more veterans living in England suffered from war wounds and what would become known as post-traumatic stress disorder.

  Exhibits popular before the Great War became “suddenly distasteful,” Durbach told me. “Some characters were able to survive it, but only because they inspired a kind of comic gentleness”—Clicko, for instance.

  While Tod Browning’s film Freaks caused an uproar in the United States in 1932—it was pulled from circulation after its New York run—British film censors banned it outright for thirty years. (The British found the showcasing of so-called pinheads the film’s most disturbing aspect.)

  With migration rules tightening throughout Europe, England’s war-weary populace was bent on securing its borders and protecting its own workforce, so anti-immigration sentiments probably also contributed to British skepticism of Ingalls’s sideshow imports, Durbach said.

 
In 1927, Mills’s annual request to import Ingalls with his freaks hit a political snag: the Ministry of Labor denied the application, citing the 1920 Aliens Order. “We might be challenged for interfering with the legitimate activities of showmen; but it would be difficult for the Showmen’s Guild or any other body to convince us that alien abnormalities are essential for their productions,” one immigration official wrote. “They are curious, but not in my mind wholesome,” he said of Ingalls’s acts.

  Mills was not shy about using his contacts and calling in favors, though. You could tell that from a behind-the-scenes letter he wrote to Sir William Haldane Porter, begging for the senior civil servant’s personal intervention (“You were good enough to say on that occasion that at any time I was in difficulty about any aliens whom I wished to employ, I might see you on the subject”). Without the imported American freaks, Mills argued, his Fun Fair would be left to operate with “only about a half-dozen of them in this Country, the greater number always finding their way abroad, as they can earn so much more money in America and on the Continent than they could normally earn in England.”

  Mills drew on both humanitarian and labor arguments. Without employment, his British performers would have become a “serious handicap to their families,” he wrote.

  The next day, the committee reversed its decision. The Aliens Order would not be used to deny “exhibits who, though not to everybody’s taste, are not indecent, repulsive or likely to bring in some disease with them,” an officer ruled.

  The ruling closed with the words “I think Bertram Mills must have his freaks.”

  But some of Ingalls’s imports proved more popular than others, and between 1929 and 1935, the number of traveling fairground sideshows in Britain diminished from 298 to 43. “Nobody wanted to see those suffering from physical deformities which made them objects of pity,” recalled Mills’s son, Cyril, an MI5 agent who worked in the circus in his early years and wrote his father’s 1967 biography. Mills once became so desperate for novelty acts and the publicity they generated that he offered £20,000 to anyone who could find the Loch Ness Monster for him to exhibit.

  Back in 1921, Ingalls had been chosen for the Fun Fair because Mills was no dummy: nabbing Ingalls meant access to the popular giant Jack Earle and the little people who were his coworkers.

  Mills was especially fond of a Fun Fair section he dubbed Tiny Town, and he spent a fortune on it, adorning it with miniature houses; miniature churches, hotels, and shops; tiny battery-driven motorcars; and even a diminutive pool hall.

  Most important, hiring Ingalls to manage the Fun Fair initially meant scoring the biggest circus star on the planet—Ingalls’s wife, Lillian Leitzel, even though early in their marriage it became clear the two were spiraling toward divorce.

  During one heated argument, Leitzel had chopped off one of Ingalls’s fingers—with a butcher knife.

  By 1928, the couple had already been divorced four years, and Leitzel was remarried to Alfredo Codona, the trapeze artist. Still, Mills kept Ingalls on as his sideshow impresario.

  The British didn’t care much for bearded ladies or microcephalics, judging from a set of highlight reels from Mills’s shows, and he encouraged Ingalls to bring along his best-looking acts—Jack Earle and the little people, especially the twenty-seven-inch-tall Lya Graf, a beautiful brunette and a Ringling favorite.

  “Well, looky here,” drawls the eight-foot-six-inch Earle in one of the films. He displays the diminutive Graf in his arms while several other Russian Lilliputians, as the producers call them, run circles between his legs.

  “Where’d you come from, I wonder?” Earle says, grinning and blowing Graf a kiss.

  And “Isn’t she sweet?” he asks kindly, as the lot lice stare at them, mesmerized, from behind.

  Ringling performers tended to scatter in the winter off-season, some to charity Masonic or Shrine circuses in the United States, others to Mills’s show in London or to warmer climes, in Honolulu and Havana. With the exception of the 1924 trip to Hawaii and the winter 1928–29 journey to England, Shelton usually exhibited the Muse brothers in American carnivals and dime museums during the off-season. He hadn’t accompanied the Muses to London.

  Today it’s unclear whether the brothers made that trip because they decided they needed to work more—so they could send money home to their newly widowed (and reimpoverished) mother—or whether Ingalls intervened and found them winter work before they had a chance to return to Roanoke at the end of the 1928 season.

  “Once in a while somebody gets dissatisfied and quits to go into vaudeville or into a museum,” Ingalls said a few years before the trip, explaining the constant challenges of staffing the sideshow. “It’s part of my job to keep track of them while the show is in winter quarters. In the spring I have to round them up if any have dropped out; it’s up to me to get busy and fill their places.”

  Ingalls’s winter pilgrimages to London were his busman’s holidays—but they were also a way for him to keep tabs on his best-earning acts.

  Ingalls struck Mills’s equestrian director, Frank Foster, as quintessentially American. He was loud—“a huge dominating man with a stentorian voice,” Foster called him—and he was boastful.

  As were his charges, according to Foster, who spent mornings hanging out with the Fun Fair freaks. “I have never met a freak who suffered from what is known as an inferiority complex,” he wrote. “On the contrary, they had the highest opinion of themselves and were proud that they were not as other people.… Deformity gave them good jobs and saved them the anxiety and low standard of life which, to people of the class whence they derived, was the common lot.”

  Willie Muse may have developed his lifelong affinity for the London lifestyle—especially housekeeping!—but the city’s residents did not return his warm feelings.

  In a 1984 letter written to the University of Texas scholar Bernth Lindfors, Cyril Mills recalled of George and Willie’s act that “the London public had no taste for that sort of thing.” Mills’s longtime ringmaster described the brothers as having “a peculiar sponge-like growth instead of hair, pink eyes, and a weird expression and mentality; they really did look like visitors from a strange planet.”

  The British found the Eko and Iko act “extremely distasteful,” according to the letter. Mills equated them with Ingalls’s Ubangi Duck-Billed Savages, the eight Congolese women who were an instant sensation in the Ringling sideshow in 1930 and ’31. The Ringling press agent Roland Butler had come up with the word Ubangi after scouring a map and deeming it the most exotic-sounding locale, though the Ubangi district was far from their actual home.

  The Ubangis’ distinguishing feature was their lips, marks of beauty common among female tribe members. Wooden disks had been inserted into their lips in childhood, then gradually increased in diameter up to eight or ten inches, giving the lips a duckbill effect. Or so their manager spieled, saying that the lip-stretching practice initially developed as a way to make the women unattractive to kidnapping pirates and marauders. Over time, the elongated lips came to be considered beautiful, “and only the comeliest little girls were chosen for this adornment,” Ringling’s press agent Dexter Fellows recalled.

  An anthropologist later traced the practice to a nuptial rite; it indicated that a girl was engaged to marry—until Ringling got hold of her, anyway.

  The Ubangis had been discovered by the master freak hunter Samuel W. Gumpertz, a close friend of John Ringling’s whose biggest coup had been the importation of 212 tribal headhunters from the Philippine Islands to his Dreamland amusement park in Coney Island, New York, another popular locale for sideshow performers in the off-season. Dubbed the freak czar, Gumpertz was a self-taught linguist who could bargain for acts in several languages and was particularly fluent in “a patois spoken in a section of the Pyrenees that had many midgets.”

  Circus agents had to pay bribes in Washington just to get the Ubangis, including their tribal chief and the chief’s brother, past Ellis Island immigrati
on authorities. The transition became awkward for everyone—including the stevedores working the docks—when the Ubangis disembarked and almost immediately… took off their tops.

  Voilà! It was instant marketing: dockworkers quickly spread the word about Ringling’s hottest new act.

  Then the bill posters got busy putting up notices heralding the NEW TO CIVILIZATION attraction, FROM AFRICA’S DARKEST CONTINENT and WITH MOUTHS AND LIPS AS LARGE AS THOSE OF FULL GROWN CROCODILES. To highlight the range of acts, Ringling arranged for a photograph to be taken of two of the largest-lipped women seated between two beautifully adorned American dancing girls, clad in rhinestones and with picture-perfect smiles.

  Attendance soared.

  Sideshow managers pretended to be shocked every time the women took their tops off, knowing that sly male customers could now attend a peep show but tell their wives they were actually viewing an educational exhibit.

  By 1930, their second season in America, the Ubangis had become terribly homesick, worried they would never see their children again. Two of the women attempted suicide together by throwing themselves in front of a car, which fortunately stopped before any damage was done.

  Compared with George and Willie, whom longtime managers described as cheerful and compliant, the Ubangis were obstinate. They cried, complained, and cursed.

  “Nothing that might be written about them could possibly be bad enough to describe them,” Fred Bradna wrote. He was especially offended by their hygiene practices: they had cut four neat holes into a wooden train car—to use in place of a toilet—and hauled down blankets from the beds to sleep on the floor. During their stint with the Mills circus in London, the brother of one Ubangi had tried to wash his face in the toilet bowl.

  Hotels refused to admit them, and the women were constantly feuding with their French manager, Eugene Bergonier. They had discovered that Bergonier was siphoning off most of their $1,500-a-week salary.