by Beth Macy
The term “Jim Crow”: One African-American’s perspective on Jim Crow is the Reverend Walter H. Brooks’s poem “The ‘Jim Crow’ Car,” published in the black-owned Richmond Planet, Sept. 15, 1900: “This too is done to crush me, / But naught can keep us back; / ‘My place,’ forsooth, a section / ‘Twixt’ smoker, front and back, / While others ride in coaches / Full large and filled with light,/ And this our Southern Christians / Insist is just and right.”
Clawhammer-style banjo playing and analysis of second known Muse brothers photo: Author interview, Kinney Rorrer, Sept. 26, 2014.
“a sense of freedom and spontaneity”: John Kenrick, Al Jolson: A Biography, 2003 (Musicals101.com).
Bert Williams, one of the highest-paid black entertainers: Kevin Young, “Wearing the Mask,” New York Times, Nov. 16, 2012.
“the funniest man I ever saw”: Cary D. Wintz and Paul Finkelman, eds., Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Routledge, 2004), 1210.
Rabbit Muse’s attempt to leave home and join a traveling show: Ralph Berrier Jr., “Remembering Rabbit,” Roanoke Times, Feb. 27, 2007.
Rabbit Muse’s family band: “Darkness on the Delta,” from Blues (1976), recorded in Franklin County, VA, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8caDIplsAg.
Background on Rabbit Muse and blues of Virginia’s western Piedmont: Liner notes, “Virginia Traditions: Western Piedmont Blues,” produced by Blue Ridge Institute of Ferrum College, available for download here: http://www.folkways.si.edu/virginia-traditions-western-piedmont-blues/african-american-folk/music/album/smithsonian.
“a better offer from another circus”: Robeson, 277.
a dozen large railroad shows competed: Stencell, Seeing Is Believing, 58.
Ringling Brothers played to as many as two and a half million people: Dean Jensen, Queen of the Air: A True Story of Love and Tragedy at the Circus (New York: Crown, 2013).
Chapter Seven. He Who Hustleth While He Waiteth
Interviews: Rob Houston, Nancy Saunders, Louise Burrell, Robert Bogdan, Al Stencell
Silent film of circus: Film archives are searchable online at the Circus World Museum website at http://www.cwmdigitacollections.com/cwm-fm-326.html. The brothers are featured twice in Part One, at 1:04 and again at 1:59.
Black performers portrayed as white in banners: Author interview, Rob Houston, Jan. 14, 2015.
“dunk the nigger”: Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York: Random House, 1998), 205.
Anderson sisters optimized the exposure of their spots: Edward J. Kelty, Congress of Freaks with Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Combined Circus, 1926 promotional shot, on file at Circus World Museum, Baraboo, WI.
Kelty’s drinking: Described by his son, Ed Kelty Jr., in Ellen Warren, “The History of E. J. Kelty,” Chicago Tribune, Feb. 7, 2003.
Kelty pawned his negatives: Miles Barth, “Edward J. Kelty and Century Flashlight Photographers,” in Kelty et al., Step Right This Way: The Photographs of Edward J. Kelty (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2002).
Soaring KKK membership: C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955), 115.
“considered white when they traveled”: Author interview, Nancy Saunders and Louise Burrell, Sept. 14, 2014.
As whites: George and Willie were also listed as “white” on their World War II draft registration cards.
managers plied Clicko with beer: Robert Bogdan, Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 192, and A. W. Stencell, Circus and Carnival Ballyhoo: Sideshow Freaks, Jabbers and Blade Box Queens (Toronto: ECW Press, 2010).
Cook bailed him out of trouble: After Clicko had been arrested for drunken and disorderly conduct, Cook gave the jailers a big book of circus tickets and left with Clicko, according to Albert Tucker, “The Strangest People on Earth,” Sarasota (FL) Sentinel, July 7, 1973.
Doll family’s tiny furniture and Jack Earle’s extra-long bed: Dexter Fellows and Andrew A. Freeman, This Way to the Big Show: The Life of Dexter Fellows (New York: Viking, 1936), 225.
Ingalls kept 10 percent of the door: Ibid., 224.
Lewiston’s errors: A. W. Stencell, Seeing Is Believing: America’s Sideshows (Toronto: ECW Press, 2002), 6.
Ingalls’s verbal flair: Harry Lewiston, Freak Show Man: The Autobiography of Harry Lewiston as Told to Jerry Holtman (Los Angeles: Holloway House, 1968), 201–203. Ingalls ballyhoo as quoted in Dean Jensen, Queen of the Air: A True Story of Love and Tragedy at the Circus (New York: Crown, 2013), 145.
Lowery’s personal mantra: Clifford Edward Watkins, Showman: The Life and Music of Perry George Lowery (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003).
Sideshow band timing and setup: Ibid.
Sideshow revenues as estimated by Ingalls: “Circus Side Show Brought Up to Date,” New Bedford (MA) Sunday Standard, July 2, 1916.
“No secret can survive long”: Dean Jensen, Queen of the Air: A True Story of Love and Tragedy at the Circus (New York: Crown, 2013), 146–147.
Alfredo Codona: John Ringling signed the Flying Codonas to be the headliners for RB&BB in 1927, according to Jensen, Queen of the Air, 171.
James Bailey’s humble beginnings: “A Caesar Among Showmen,” New York Times, April 19, 1891.
German military studies Bailey’s methods: Ibid. Bailey’s wizardry in logistics is also described in Fred Bradna, The Big Top: My Forty Years with the Greatest Show on Earth (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952), Chapter 3.
The Bailey vs. Barnum battle over Columbia: Fellows’s account (Fellows and Freeman, This Way to the Big Show) says Barnum offered Bailey $10,000 for the elephant, the first born in captivity, while Bradna’s (Bradna, Big Top) says he offered him $50,000.
Bailey as silent but canny partner for Barnum: Bradna, Big Top, 33.
“an awful exhibition of faltering nerve”: Henry Ringling North and Alden Hatch, The Circus Kings: Our Ringling Family Story (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1960), 65.
The Ringling Brothers’ initial circus jobs: Fellows and Freeman, This Way to the Big Show, 175–176.
Lou Ringling’s double duty: Charles Philip Fox, A Ticket to the Circus: A Pictorial History of the Incredible Ringlings (New York: Bramhall House, 1958).
Al Ringling’s exaggeration of circus size: David C. Weeks, Ringling: The Florida Years, 1911–1936 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993), 9.
Al Ringling’s plow balancing: “Wisconsin Museum Dedicated to the Big Top,” New York Times, Aug. 2, 1959.
“almost impregnable”: North and Hatch, 116–117, 123–125.
Ringlings’ purchase of Barnum and Bailey: Fellows and Freeman, This Way to the Big Show, 184. Other accounts of the sales price differ, including that in John and Alice Durant, Pictorial History of the American Circus (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1957), which put the sale at $410,000 (186).
John Ringling’s appetite: Taylor Gordon, Born to Be (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1975), 113.
John Ringling’s looks and voice: Weeks, Ringling, 1.
Ringlings’ quest to absorb their competitors: Bradna, Big Top, 71–73.
“Kill Diamond in some humane way”: Durant, Pictorial History of the American Circus, 206–207.
Media’s love of and reliance on Fellows: “Dexter Fellows, Press Agent, Dies,” New York Times, Nov. 27, 1937.
“He could improvise the type”: Ibid.
“pride of calling”: Fellows and Freeman, This Way to the Big Show, 292–293.
“built-in incentive to keep the sideshow exhibits happy”: Author interview, Robert Bogdan, Sept. 2, 2014.
RB&BB’s announcement about Eko and Iko: “Lew Graham Made One of Finds of His Career,” Billboard, Aug. 5, 1922.
fifty-eight-pound Human Skeleton: Robinson was married to Baby Bunny Smith, the 467-pound fat lady; Robinson was best known for his role in the horror film Freaks (1932), according to http://www.imdb.com/name/nm07
32977/bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm.
A paper in Syracuse: “Bodies Covered With Wool,” Syracuse (NY) Journal, July 16, 1923.
one of the few photos I found of Shelton from that era: From Stencell, Circus and Carnival Ballyhoo.
Possibly hyped-up claim about sideshow workers’ pay: “Circus Freaks Are Well Paid,” Sun (NY), April 1, 1924. The article described Lionel as being the highest-paid freak on the Ringling sideshow at the time, at $250 a week, with Clio the snake charmer being the lowest-paid, at $75 a week. George and Willie, it said, “are drawing $400 a week between them.” The story noted that pitch cards typically brought in an additional $50 to $100 a week. Bradna wrote: “An outstanding freak is worth from $200 to $2,500 a week. Others with specialties that are easily duplicated are content with $42.50,” Big Top, 236.
Shelton’s friendships and associations: Noted from Billboard mentions on Nov. 9, 1922; Dec. 22, 1923; Jan. 19, 1924; and Oct. 17, 1925.
Christmas poem: Barry Gray, “A Side-Show Review,” Billboard, Dec. 25, 1926.
The Ringling brass hadn’t bothered: “I don’t know which is Eko and which is Iko,” wrote Ringling manager I. W. Robertson in an internal memo, Feb. 25, 1937, on file at Circus World Museum.
Description of 1924 backstage Halloween party: “R-B Halloween Party,” Billboard, Nov. 25, 1924.
they reprinted his every word: Scott M. Cutlip, Public Relations History: From the 17th to the 20th Century: The Antecedents (New York: Routledge, 1995), 178.
Chapter Eight. Comma, Colored
Interviews: Rand Dotson, Melville “Buster” Carico, Nancy Saunders, Dot Brown
Fellows mislabels Muse brothers’ home state: Dexter Fellows and Andrew A. Freeman, This Way to the Big Show: The Life of Dexter Fellows (New York: Viking, 1936), 309.
the lamentations of a poem: From Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “The Haunted Oak,” as recounted in ibid., 62. Written in 1900, Dunbar’s anti-lynching poem could have been based on one of 105 lynchings that occurred that year. Scholar Edward F. Arnold has theorized that Dunbar wrote it after hearing the story from an old ex-slave who lived near the grounds of Howard University.
Smith’s lynching was the city’s last: Author interview, Rand Dotson, Jan. 12, 2015.
one-twelfth of what it was planning: Beth Macy, “Community by the Book,” Roanoke Times, March 12, 2006.
“a little prayer that God”: Ibid.
the most prolific filmmaker of the silent period: Gerald R. Butters Jr., “From Homestead to Lynch Mob: Portrayals of Black Masculinity in Oscar Micheaux’s Within Our Gates,” Journal for MultiMedia History 3 (2000). Micheaux’s Roanoke office operated from 1922 to 1925, according to the documentary The Czar of Black Hollywood, Block Starz TV, 2014. He also had offices in Chicago and Harlem.
Roanoke Times’ response to The Birth of a Nation: Raymond Barnes, A History of the City of Roanoke (Radford, VA: Commonwealth Press, 1968), 527.
Lynchings of World War I veterans: Butters, “From Homestead to Lynch Mob,” part 2.
Lynching as spectator sport: Ibid., 207.
Micheaux explored the negative traits: Ibid., part 1.
“Oscar was just light-years ahead of his time”: Public lecture by Bayer Mack on The Czar of Black Hollywood, which he wrote and directed, Grandin Theatre Film Festival, Roanoke, May 3, 2015.
Blacks now owned $53 million in property: “Negroes in Virginia Owners of Property Valued at $53,516,174,” Roanoke Times, July 20, 1924.
three-quarters of African Americans living in the South were still working as day laborers or sharecroppers: Jill Quadagno, “Unfinished Democracy,” in Louis Kushnick and James Jennings, eds., A New Introduction to Poverty: The Role of Race, Power, and Politics (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 77–78.
stringent Jim Crow laws: In 1902, Virginia adopted a new state constitution that was never put to the voters for ratification; it had provisions for a poll tax and a literacy test for voting, according to C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955), and Geoff Seamans, “A Quarter Century of Racial Change,” Roanoke Times and World-News, May 13, 1979.
Visiting Swedish writer’s take on segregation: Woodward, Strange Career of Jim Crow, 117–118.
Black-white interactions could now be as bizarrely intimate: Naomi A. Mattos, “Segregation by Custom Versus Segregation by Law, 1910–1917, City of Roanoke,” written for Roanoke Regional Preservation Office, 2005; on file with Kern Collection, Virginia Room, Roanoke City Library.
more than seventy African Americans had been lynched: Woodward, Strange Career of Jim Crow, 115.
Spiller, who would go on to serve as the city’s commonwealth attorney: Barnes, History of the City of Roanoke, 509, 649, 652.
Roanoke Klan parade and rally: “Klansmen Stage Big Celebration,” Roanoke Times, Oct. 17, 1925; also recounted by Mike Hudson, “Visible Empire,” Roanoke Times, Dec. 2, 2001.
Spiller and company declared: Barnes, History of the City of Roanoke, as initially reported in Roanoke Times.
law-and-order defender of racial integrity: Spiller biography from Philip Alexander Bruce et al., History of Virginia, vol. 4 (Chicago: American Historical Society, 1924), 312–313.
At ninety-eight years old, retired but still a legend: Author interview, Melville “Buster” Carico, Jan. 20, 2015.
During Prohibition: Prohibition took effect in Virginia in 1916 and was legalized federally in 1920 via the Eighteenth Amendment.
illegal ’20s drinking: Clare White, Roanoke: 1740–1982 (Roanoke, VA: Roanoke Valley Historical Society, 1982), 98–99.
“permissive law-breaking”: Ibid., 98.
Spiller’s campaign against gambling: Barnes, History of the City of Roanoke, 665.
Black-crime coverage: “Police Court Notes,” Roanoke Times, Feb. 27, 1923.
“Fifty and thirty”: “Police Court Notes,” Roanoke Times, Feb. 28, 1923.
Arrest of Harrison Muse for assault: Case No. 3761 in Corporation Court for City of Roanoke, filed March 1923.
Cabell Muse as Oscar Micheaux–type character: Ralph D. Matthews, “Tragedy in Wake of Circus Freaks,” Baltimore Afro-American, June 1, 1929.
Chapter Nine. The Prodigal Sons
Interviews: Frank Ewald, Rand Dotson, Nancy Saunders, Dot Brown, Melville “Buster” Carico, Jerry Jones, A. L. Holland, John Molumphy
officials had gone to the trouble: In 1914, the State of Louisiana mandated that all circus and tent exhibitions provide two separate entrances and exits, separate ticket offices, and at least two ticket takers to divide black and white patrons, requiring that they be at least twenty-five feet apart: http://chnm.gmu.edu/acpstah/unitdocs/unit5/lesson5/jimcrowimages.pdf.
back-end blues: A. W. Stencell, Seeing Is Believing: America’s Sideshows (Toronto: ECW Press, 2002), 178.
“Mr. Ringling’s niggah”: Taylor Gordon, Born to Be (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1975), 105. “Niggah didn’t mean anything, but to be a rich man’s niggah—that established the amount of liberty the individual niggah was to have,” Gordon wrote.
Dot Brown’s recollection of Harriett’s dream: Author interview, Dot Brown, March 2001, with Roanoke Times cowriter Jen McCaffery.
Prohibition violence in Roanoke: “Liquor Blamed for Five Deaths: Four Officers Have Lost Lives,” Roanoke Times, Oct. 9, 1927.
George Davis’s camera and borrowed car: Author interview, Frank Ewald, Sept. 18, 2014.
Lynching picture from Davis’s collection: Says author/historian Rand Dotson, who has written several articles about Virginia lynchings, “That image is very likely from a lynching of four black miners in Clifton Forge in 1891. It could also be from a lynching of four black men in Richlands, Virginia, in 1893. Both of these events were covered (i.e., celebrated) in the Roanoke Times. Indeed, some of the rope used in the Richlands murder was presented to a reporter in Roanoke.” E-mail to author, Oct. 2, 2014.
“all strange oddities”: Roanoke Times, Oct. 14, 1927.
they were found floating off Madagascar: Fred Bradna, The Big Top: My Forty Years with the Greatest Show on Earth (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952), 237, and “They Got Permanent One Back at Home in Madagascar,” Sun (NY), March 31, 1925.
Treatment of Clicko’s hair: Neil Parsons, Clicko: The Wild Dancing Bushman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 98.
Patrons could have their picture made with the brothers: “Soar on Clouds of Circus Canvas,” Plain Dealer (OH), June 4, 1928, and “A Camel Has Zero on Eko and Iko,” Fairfield (IA) Weekly Ledger, Aug. 10, 1922.
“as a chicken moults”: “Strange People,” Talk of the Town,” The New Yorker, Nov. 5, 1927. The writer misspelled Eko’s moniker as Eeko.
hampered in terms of sentence construction: Author interview, A. L. Holland, Oct. 27, 2014.
Willie Muse’s intelligence: Author interview, John Molumphy, Aug. 4, 2015; mental competency seconded by lawyer Nick Leitch, who also deposed Willie Muse in 1996.
“Mr. Fellows’s stories are taken for granted”: Guy Fawkes, “The Wayward Press: Spring Fret,” The New Yorker, May 10, 1930.
Eko and Iko were often among the top tier of sideshow headline grabbers: One such headline was MEN FROM MARS SNUB OTHER FREAKS, New York Evening Post, April 23, 1927. The bogus story that ran beneath it claimed, “Iko and Eko do not fraternize with the other ‘strange people.’ For that matter they don’t talk to any great amount with each other. By the hour they stand before the monkey cage, wrinkling up their foreheads and shaking their shaggy heads.”
Muses and others reportedly mourn Zip’s impending death: “Fellow Freaks Sad as Zip Nears Death,” New York Evening Post, April 9, 1926.
Brothers’ names chosen for side of gilly: “Reo Speed Wagon in New Role,” pictured in April 17, 1921, Fort Worth (TX) Star-Telegram; purpose of vehicle explained in “Reo Holds Freak Job,” Oregonian, Jan. 8, 1928.
