In the Early 1900s, Albino African-American Brothers Were Stolen From Their Virginia Home to Be Circus Performers. This Is Their Story.

In the Early 1900s, Albino African-American Brothers Were Stolen From Their Virginia Home to Be Circus Performers. This Is Their Story.

Their music briefly became famous, but today their history is mostly forgotten. In an excerpt from her book Truevine, Beth Macy resurrects their mother’s fight to free her boys.

Talk to any person of color over age 60 in my part of Virginia and they know the story by heart: Black children reared during the postwar baby boom rarely left home without being admonished by their mothers, “Y’all stay together now or you might be kidnapped, just like Eko and Iko.”

Eko and Iko were the sideshow stage names of George and Willie Muse, the grandsons of former slaves. They were born at the turn of the century to parents who sharecropped tobacco, like everyone else in the rural enclave of Truevine, Virginia.

George and Willie were just six and nine, as the elders tell the story, when a circus promoter crept onto the tobacco field where they were working and enticed them with a rare piece of candy. In the time it took to fetch a hoe from the shed, the boys vanished.

They were kidnapped in a dusty corner of southern Virginia named for the only thing that gave these Reconstruction-era blacks any semblance of hope—the biblical promise of a better life in the hereafter. “I am the true vine, and My father is the vinedresser,” Jesus said in the Gospel of John. “Every branch in Me that does not bear fruit He takes away; every branch that bears fruit He prunes, that it may bear more fruit.”

For the next 13 years, their mother, Harriett, watched and worried. And she waited for signs of fruit.

They were easy pickings for a traveling circus. The brothers were African-American albinos with watery blue eyes and blond hair, and their vision was poor, the result of an oscillating eye condition routinely misinterpreted as a mental deficiency.

In the late 19th century, the height of circus popularity, bounty hunters scoured America’s backwoods—and the world—looking for people they could transform into sideshow attractions. Acts such as Chang and Eng, the world’s most famous conjoined twins, “discovered” by a British merchant in Siam (now Thailand) in 1829. Or the Wild Men of Borneo, as impresario P.T. Barnum pitched a pair of dwarf brothers to audiences in 1880 . . . though they actually hailed from a farm in Ohio.

Somehow Barnum had heard about the albino brothers—maybe from a shopkeeper in nearby Rocky Mount, the county seat. Maybe a neighbor had seen the ads that showmen took out in newspapers and trade publications for “freak hunters,” as they were called.

Wanted — to hear from the man that grows three feet in front of your eyes . . . Call DAN RICE, Sioux City, Iowa.

Maybe even a member of their own family had given the boys up. Continue reading