Library of Congress Before television and radio, circuses and traveling carnivals were a leading form of entertainment for people throughout the United States.
When night fell and her sons were nowhere to be found, Harriett Muse knew something terrible had happened. The popular story which sprang up in Truevine was that the brothers were out in the fields one day in 1899 when Shelton lured them with candy and kidnapped them. It’s possible that a desperate relative or neighbor sold him the information, or that Harriett Muse allowed them to go with him temporarily, only for them to be kept in captivity.Īccording to Truevine author Beth Macy, the Muse brothers might have agreed to do a couple performances with Shelton when his circus came through Truevine in 1914, but then the promoter abducted them when his show left town. It’s not known for certain how George and Willie came to the attention of circus promoter James Herman “Candy” Shelton. As Black children with albinism, the Muse brothers were at a heightened risk of scorn and abuse.
At the time, lynch mobs frequently targeted Black men, and the neighborhood was always on the edge of another attack.
GEORGE AND WILLIE MUSE MANUAL
The boys were expected to help out by patrolling the rows of tobacco plants for pests, killing them before they could damage the precious crop.Īlthough Harriett Muse doted on her boys as best she could, it was a hard life of manual labor and racial violence. Like most of their neighbors, the Muses eked out a bare living from sharecropping tobacco.
The boys had begun squinting in the light from such a young age that by the time they were six and nine years old, they had permanent furrows in their foreheads.
GEORGE AND WILLIE MUSE SKIN
Against almost impossible odds, both boys were born with albinism, leaving their skin exceptionally vulnerable to the harsh Virginia sun.īoth also had a condition known as nystagmus, which often accompanies albinism, and weakens vision. George and Willie Muse were the eldest of five children born to Harriett Muse in the small community of Truevine on the edge of Roanoke, Virginia. It was against this backdrop that Harriett Muse confronted powerful white authorities to demand her sons be returned.Macmillan Publishers George and Willie were displayed under an array of humiliating names, complete with absurd backgrounds tailored to racist beliefs of the time. A thriving chapter of the Ku Klux Klan had formed in nearby Roanoke, boasting a membership that included many of the area’s leading citizens, and lynchings were all too common. The Muse family came from the tiny rural town of Truevine, Va., where, even after emancipation, the black population still faced the virtual enslavement of the sharecropping system and the vitriolic racism of the Jim Crow south. Upon their capture, they were falsely told that their mother was dead and that they would never return home. The two brothers were kidnapped as boys in Truevine, Virginia, in 1899 by bounty hunters and forced into the circus. Harriett, their mother, brought them up in poverty. Two African-American albino brothers, George and Willie Muse, were the grandsons of former slaves and sons of tobacco sharecroppers born in Roanoke, Virginia, in the 1890’s. Welcome to Thoughts Camera Action #ProvokingThought
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