#George and willie muse skin

They were put on display as Eko and Iko, Ecuadorian cannibals or men from Mars. The Muse brothers were taken from their hometown near Roanoke, Virginia by the Ringling Brothers circus sometime between 19.

Johnson was a regular with Barnum's museums and sideshows and performed at Coney Island as he got older.įor at least a year, Johnson performed with a pair of Albino African American brothers named Willie and George Muse. Barnum dressed Johnson in a fur suit and billed him as 'The Missing Link', accompanied by the phrase 'What Is It?'. Originally from New Jersey, Johnson may have had a condition known as microcephaly, where one's head is smaller than the rest of the body. One of Millie-Christine's first appearances would be at Barnum's museum in New York City.īarnum also recruited William Henry Johnson, displayed as 'Zip the Pinhead'. This was Barnum's first foray into sideshows, museums, and circuses. Though at the time he blamed Heth for lying, he later admitted the hoax. At the autopsy, the coroner revealed that Heth was around 80 years old, instead of the 161 years Barnum claimed. After her death in 1836, Barnum staged a public autopsy, charging people $.50 (about $15 in today's currency). PT Barnum took Heth to museums and charged money for people to look at her, claiming she was the 161-year-old nurse to George Washington. She was in her late 70s or early 80s, was nearly blind and mostly paralyzed. In 1835, Heth was sold to PT Barnum by her enslaver in Kentucky. The first well documented African American in this setting was Joice Heth. During the 19th and early to mid-20th centuries, African Americans were unlikely to get jobs as performers in the circus unless it was as part of the side show. The side-show traveled with a circus or carnival but was usually secondary and displayed 'human oddities', such as people with body modifications, conjoined twins, people with dwarfism, and people whose appearance did not fit what society considered to be normal. Through hundreds of interviews and decades of research, Beth Macy expertly explores a central and difficult question: Where were the brothers better off? On the world stage as stars or in poverty at home? Truevine is a compelling narrative rich in historical detail and rife with implications to race relations today.The history of African American performers in the 'circus' starts in the world of museums and side-shows.

#George and willie muse skin

But the very root of their success was in the color of their skin and in the outrageous caricatures they were forced to assume: supposed cannibals, sheep-headed freaks, even 'Ambassadors from Mars.' Back home, their mother never accepted that they were 'gone' and spent 28 years trying to get them back. They were global superstars in a pre-broadcast era. One day a white man offered them a piece of candy, setting off events that would take them around the world and change their lives forever.Ĭaptured into the circus, the Muse brothers performed for royalty at Buckingham Palace and headlined over a dozen sold-out shows at New York's Madison Square Garden. George and Willie Muse were two little boys born to a sharecropper family. The year was 1899 and the place a sweltering tobacco farm in the Jim Crow South town of Truevine, Virginia. The true story of two African-American brothers who were kidnapped and displayed as circus freaks, and whose mother endured a 28-year struggle to get them back.