Truevine Page 16

  Though Harriett had no idea where her boys were, most people in New York paying any attention to the comings and goings of the circus would have. Eko and Iko were often among the top tier of sideshow headline grabbers, especially during Ringling’s annual four-to-six-week indoor opening-season engagement at Madison Square Garden, in which John Ringling was a major shareholder. As eighty-four-year-old Zip lay near death at Bellevue Hospital in the spring of 1926, reporters poured on the love, hyping the various ways in which his fellow freaks were grieving: Clicko allegedly stopped doing somersaults, for instance, and the Texas giant was mooning in a corner. “Even the Ambassadors from Mars, who don’t say much as a rule but look at the monkeys and at Big Bill the rhinoceros, are standing in front of his seat in the basement of the new Madison Square Garden, scratching their yellow matted heads and mumbling in low tones.”

  One thing the elbow nudging between Fellows and the press undoubtedly demonstrated was just how famous the brothers from Truevine had become. Their strange, singsongy names had entered the mainstream vernacular everywhere Ringling played—especially New York. As early as 1922, the REO Speed Wagon that ferried Ringling sideshow performers between their dressing rooms and performance tents was a jalopy that resembled an old milk truck, with six letters painted on the side: EKO & IKO.

  Perhaps the best indicator of their fame came in an unrelated New York Times book review of a new work by Gertrude Stein. The reviewer hated the book in particular, hated Stein’s repetitive modernist style in general, and, in a harsh bit of trash talking, likened Stein fans to “people who have paid good money, gold or boloney, to be amused by the gift of tongues, whether exemplified by Miss Stein talking nonsense, Eko and Iko muttering gibberish, or Habu, the man with the iron tongue, lifting three-hundred-pound weights from the sideshow floor.”

  They were objects of ridicule, yes. But they were also bona fide characters, as exaggerated and outsized as the banners fastened to their sideshow tent. With their silk sashes and faux-official medals, the Ambassadors from Mars had been gawked at by millions of people from Hawaii to the Hudson Valley of New York.

  But not by their mother.

  Not yet.

  Seeing how they were held up as amiable lads in one account and ridiculed as slow-witted mutterers in the next, I wondered how much control Candy Shelton still exerted over their public image and in their daily life in 1927. Divorced by 1926, he’d spent that Christmas with the brothers, according to an eerie photograph recently found by the curator of the Tibbals collection at the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota. (The picture was attached to belongings associated with Candy’s first wife, Cora, also known as Frankie. She’s the one who mockingly dressed up as a Muse brother for the 1924 Halloween costume party.)

  Wearing long one-piece bathing suits and standing thigh deep in a Florida lake, the Muse brothers lean on each other for support. They appear to be in a water amusement park—one that’s strangely barren but for them and the two men flanking them, as if they’d all jumped the fence and snuck into the empty park for Christmas. One of the men sits on the high end of a teeter-totter while the other—the pudgy Candy—holds the seesaw firmly in place with his foot underwater.

  “Eko and Iko on Xmas day, taking their annual bath,” someone, presumably Frankie, scribbled on the back of the picture.

  It was the thirteenth Christmas in which Harriett had not seen, or heard from, her sons.

  The following spring, in its coverage of Ringling’s 1927 opening day, the New York Times made note of a new performer in the sideshow, a bearded lady hired after her predecessor’s beard had deliberately been singed by the fire-eater. Or so the story went.

  The sabotage was sheer luck for Madame Adrienne, the new bearded lady, and a sign, the reporter wrote (apropos of nothing at all), that “Eko and Iko knew their home planet was in the ascendency.”

  The past year, in fact, had brought with it a lot of change to the circus, including three deaths that would portend the end of an era for the Ringling sideshow: Zip, the dean of freaks; Krao Farini, a Laotian-born bearded lady who was also much beloved (she’d asked to be cremated so no spectators could view her body after her death); and the December 1926 demise of Charles Ringling, the best-loved brother and known as Mr. Charlie by all, including the rousties. It was Charles who’d managed daily circus affairs while John began chasing riches in Oklahoma oil fields and Florida real estate.

  But George and Willie were about to see how, when your home planet’s in ascendency, as the astrological theory goes, you have greater power and influence over others.

  The line was a throwaway gag for the reporter—and no doubt dictated by the Minister Plenipotentiary himself. But the joke would backfire on the Greatest Show on Earth.

  George and Willie can’t read the WELCOME TO ROANOKE sign as their train car rolls through the mountains east from Bristol, past the crimson fall foliage and into the booming city, where civic leaders had fretted that Roanoke wasn’t big enough yet to host a spectacle of Ringling’s size. They probably recognize the topography of their childhood, though, as the sun rises and the train chugs through the red-clay hills where the Alleghenies meet the Blue Ridge. Past Poor Mountain, past Twelve O’Clock Knob, then past Fort Lewis until, finally, the train cars come to a creaky halt in Roanoke, where Mill Mountain stands sentinel over the town.

  The four-engine, five-ring behemoth arrives in Roanoke at 9:00 a.m. The tents and banners are hoisted, the animals disembark. Walking into the fairgrounds late that morning, George and Willie are as surprised as anybody to run into a familiar face.

  It’s Leslie Craft Crawford, their neighbor from New Castle. They haven’t seen her since childhood, not since they played together in Craigs Creek. But they recognize her immediately, exclaiming “Miss Leslie!” together and waving their arms.

  Surely it occurs to them how close they are to home: if Miss Leslie’s here, then maybe their mother is also nearby—if she’s alive.

  The brothers take their place on the sideshow stage, and when it’s time to introduce themselves and play the mandolin and guitar, they squint hard, their eyes scanning the standing, milling crowd. (As is typical with Ringling and other large circuses, there are no chairs inside the sideshow tent, making it the rare place in the circus where segregation codes often break down.)

  Their vision has dimmed considerably in recent years, but if they squint just right, they can make out the faces near the front.

  They sing their favorite song as they strum:

  It’s a long way to Tipperary,

  It’s a long way to go.

  Outside the tent, Harriett probably spies her sons’ banner picture first, though it’s doubtful she recognizes them from it. Their cartoon likeness is displayed near Clyde Ingalls’s platform. The banner takes up prominent real estate, just to the right of the sideshow entrance—with a giant sign announcing continuous performances and topped by waving American flags.

  ARE THEY AMBASSADORS FROM MARS? it says at the top, just to the left of the banner for Jolly Irene (real name: Amanda Siebert), who at 620 pounds likely suffers from an untreated thyroid disorder.

  Harriett Muse is not your typical mark, or rube. She finds her place near the back of the crowd as the inside lecturer wanders from one performer to the next, giving his spiel.

  As the crowd follows him, she nudges her way toward the front.

  George and Willie are halfway through “Tipperary” when their mother’s face comes hazily into focus.

  There are worry lines on her forehead, a deep crease between her brown piercing eyes.

  She’s wearing a hand-sewn black dress, its collar cinched by a safety pin, a belt circled loosely around her waist. Her dress is so long that it almost touches the tops of her creased, laceless shoes.

  Georgie spots her first and stops playing the moment he does. He elbows his brother, in a scene the family would recount often, with pride, over the years.

  They tell the story so often that each member recites
it consistently and verbatim, down to the stilted, old-fashioned vernacular the brothers often used.

  “There’s our dear old mother,” Georgie says. “Look, Willie, she is not dead.”

  The crowd is puzzled when the brothers drop their personas, along with their instruments, and rush from the stage.

  They greet their mother, folding themselves into her tall, sturdy frame.

  Ingalls is so flabbergasted that he can only resort to his fallback cry for his bandleader, P. G. Lowery, “Bally, P.G.!”

  He who hustleth while he waiteth, Lowery is no doubt thinking as he stifles a grin, then strikes up his band.

  But all the Dixieland jazz on the planet will not cloud this astonishing reunion, this almost-surreal instant in time.

  The memory of this moment will outlive everyone inside the tent. It will surface and resurface. It will be repeated so often and for so long that one day people will just assume it’s a myth.

  Their mama went down there and got them…

  It had come to her, you see, in a dream…

  Don’t wander off from me at the fair, now, or you’ll be kidnapped, too.

  Before the Dixieland is over, Candy Shelton appears. Who is this woman, and why is she disrupting my show?

  Harriett stands firm, clutching her sons. It’s dawning on her that he’s the man in charge, the man responsible for the trafficking of her sons.

  For the thirteen years of family holidays, birthdays, and weddings that have passed without word of their health or whereabouts.

  She will not leave the fairgrounds, she insists, unless George and Willie accompany her home.

  But they are Shelton’s children, he has the nerve to insist. They are his property. He even has documents, somewhere, paperwork proving that they have the same last name!

  A scrum of Ringling executives arrives to try to shore up Shelton’s claim, men in dark suits and fedoras—the people George and Willie call City Hall.

  The police are on their way, too.

  The Ringlings are powerful people, they remind the maid. They’re multimillionaires who have the ear of presidents, their own railway lines, and mansions in several states.

  Still, standing amid the sawdust in her dusty oxfords, Harriett refuses to budge.

  In an act of extraordinary defiance, a stance that could have easily landed her in jail, she does not move when eight Roanoke police officers converge on the lingering, growing crowd, everybody eagerly listening and watching for her next move.

  “They are my children!” she says.

  And, pointing out the obvious: “Can’t no white man birth two colored children.”

  So what happened?

  According to newspaper accounts, Harriett tells the officers that years ago, she had contracted for George and Willie to travel with a carnival operator named Stokes, who was passing through the area. Conflicting news articles have her meeting the original carnival operators in Roanoke, Covington, and Clifton Forge. (One account even placed the transaction in an unnamed Tennessee city.)

  But after a few months had passed, someone who she now believes is Shelton—this man—lured them away from Stokes, then refused, for thirteen years, to bring them back.

  During their entire absence, George and Willie have told their mother, Shelton lied and told them she was dead.

  Harriett had called on social service organizations to help her find them, she explains to police, and she’d been searching for them in crowds ever since. She even took out a notice in Billboard.

  With nightfall approaching, the day’s performances over, the candy butchers, troupers, and rousties begin folding up the show, preparing to depart for Lynchburg, the next stop.

  But the drama is still unfolding. Shelton and the executives insist the Muse brothers join them as they prepare to take the gilly back to the train station.

  Reluctantly, George and Willie say they’ll get back on the train. “But only for a moment,” the paper explains, awkwardly attempting to convey Harriett’s dialect without directly attributing it:

  “For anxious and beseeching words from the lips of their ‘old mammy who yo all aint seen for all dese years’ turned their thoughts.

  “No, they would not go.”

  It wasn’t a likely outcome, but by the end of the verbal tug-of-war, the police tell Shelton the Muses are free to leave with their mother if that is their wish. It was a shocking turn of fortune, given the widespread record of police abuse and unfair treatment of blacks by the courts in 1927. (That year, blacks were incarcerated at a rate three times higher than whites; by 2010, the rate differential had doubled. According to recent Bureau of Justice Statistics, one in three black men can expect to be incarcerated in their lifetime.)

  But Harriett relayed her side of the story firmly and convincingly to police. “Off they went with their mother while beneath the big top disturbed showmen tore their hair and appealed to the law,” a reporter recounts.

  “The law was helpless. Eko and Iko are certainly privileged to go where they choose, the law averred.” The brouhaha is presumably not big enough to draw Prosecutor Kent Spiller’s attention, for at no point is he recorded as weighing in on the legal back-and-forth.

  And so the Big One pulls away from Roanoke without its Martian ambassadors.

  And so George and Willie, finally, are home.

  Across town that night, George Davis prepares to lug out his monster camera. He imagines he just might nail the photograph of his career.

  On Ten-and-a-Half Street, the Muse family reassembles, finally, in Harriett’s humble abode. Word has spread throughout Jordan’s Alley about her bold move, and the neighbors converge to greet the long-lost relatives—to see the showstopping spectacles for themselves.

  The brothers oblige, pulling out their instruments and playing a few songs on the front porch.

  “They had been gone since childhood,” ninety-eight-year-old A. L. Holland recalled of the reunion. For years, he remembers, people talked about that magical, mysterious night. “It was like the prodigal sons coming home.”

  It’s well past dark by the time the tired maid from Truevine rests her head for the night, with nary a rainbow in sight.

  But Harriett pauses to thank God, finally, for delivering her sons from the storm.

  The quarters are cramped in Jordan’s Alley, the shotgun shacks crammed three and four to a lot—so close you can hear neighbors sneezing and shouting and doing all manner of Lord-knows-what. For the first time in recent memory, the brothers prepare to rest their heads not on a creaking train-car bed but on solid earth. The trains in the rail yard couple, and people couple, and soon the surprising cacophony of everyday life in Jordan’s Alley gives way to the smell of something even more surprising—and delicious—coming from the oven. Ash cakes.

  After all those years, they can’t quite believe they’re in a house with their dear mother, who after so many years is baking her humble bread.

  10

  Not One Single, Solitary, Red Penny

  By the time Baby Dot’s daddy came home from work that night, there were so many people crowding the Ten-and-a-Half Street porches and front yards that the very sight of it made Herbert Saunders’s stomach sink. The neighbors were all out front, spilling onto the alleyway and dirt road.

  There were strangers, too, a rare mix of black and white people who had converged from all quadrants of the city, drawn as if by some mystical, magnetic force.

  So many people stood milling around the front of the clapboard shacks that Herbert’s mind went to the worst-possible scenario: he thought Baby Dot had died.

  But the beautiful two-week-old baby hadn’t registered in visitors’ minds. Martian brothers who’d become stars of the Ringling sideshow were now staying in this working-class enclave? For the next several days, everyone in town wanted a look.

  They came by streetcar. They came by automobile and on foot.

  Harriett’s reunion with her sons had been “told of in the newspapers, others talking o
f it, all the while humming happy mammy songs,” the Roanoke Times reported in its usual racist language. “And the chapter of difficulties was opened.”

  Twenty-four hours. That’s how long it took before Cabell thought to put out a tin cup for the “throng of curious” traipsing through the family’s front yard. If all those white men had profited from exhibiting Willie and George, why shouldn’t he?

  By Sunday, the news was all over town. More than a hundred people had elbowed their way through the family’s tiny house. The admission price was “a free will offering, tenderly taken at the door,” a Roanoke Times reporter noted. “Eko and Iko sit with the two tin cups, grunting mystic words to the sweet accompaniment of falling dimes and quarters.”

  Candy Shelton found his way to Jordan’s Alley, too. He offered Harriett Muse $100—a pretty pile of cash for the time, worth about $1,400 today—and the promise that he’d wire home $20 a month to her if she allowed her sons to return to the circus, which was due to perform in Richmond the next day. He pointed out the obvious—that the circus had more resources to keep the brothers fed, housed, and clothed than their parents could ever dream of having.

  As the Roanoke Times described it, “To avoid any disturbance, detectives were called in to take a hand in the matter. The officers, however, could not settle the misunderstanding and departed.”

  The paper continued in its characteristic mocking tone: “Still the woman refuses. No doubt her resolve is strengthened by the sound of falling dimes.”

  The brothers would not return to Shelton and the circus, and despite “persistent efforts [that] failed to get them from the house, there was talk of resorting to legal channels for settlement of the affair, which causes the loss of two performers.”

  Harriett sent Shelton and his cronies away.

  With Ringling now threatening to sue, Harriett would have to formulate a legal strategy of her own.