Muse brothers skin#
When they were young teens, they were featured as pure "exhibits" with smaller traveling carnivals their milky skin and blue eyes were considered novelty enough. Their act was sometimes featured in headlines of the New York Times.
The Muse brothers performed in front of British royalty and at sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden. Next to Christmas Day, circus day-the day it came to your town-was the most important day of the year, and people flocked to see the circus trains unloading in the early morning hours, even if they couldn't afford money to go to the shows later in the day. "The Big One," was king and also the top form of entertainment in America. Can you tell me a little bit about their lives during the peak of their "fame," so to speak?īeth Macy : They were among the top acts of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey sideshow throughout most of the 1920s and 1930s, a time when that circus, a.k.a. VICE: Prior to reading this book, I wasn't familiar with the Muse brothers. Recently I talked with Macy about the Muse brothers journey, why their mother deserves a statute, and how racism during Jim Crow was more insidious than separate water fountains. In her book, Macy paints a striking portrait of rural Virginia, the complicated stardom of circus freaks, and the amazing story of a black woman defying white men in order to transform two black boys from property back to humans.
Muse brothers full#
It took Macy 25 years to get the full story, using "gentle persistence" and building trust with the remaining family members before they'd share the entire narrative with her. For decades, the closely guarded story of how "Eko" and "Iko," as they were called in the circus, became George and Willie once again was only known to family members-many of whom were illiterate. She recounts the Muse brothers' tale, but more importantly details their mother's quest to find them.
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In a new book, Truevine: Two Brothers, a Kidnapping, and a Mother's Quest: A True Story of the Jim Crow South, out October 18 from Little, Brown and Company, journalist Beth Macy gives a gripping account of what black oppression was like at its most extreme during the beginning of the 20th century. But throughout all this their mother Harriet refused to accept that they were gone, and spent the better part of three decades trying to get them back. The brothers were international superstars long before the age of television, playing to huge crowds at Buckingham Palace and New York's Madison Square Garden.
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