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Macy found inconclusive evidence suggesting Harriett may have initially agreed to allow the brothers to work for a circus agent. Her research led to some unexpected twists in the plot, calling into question details ranging from the brothers’ paternity to how they first ended up in the circus.
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“You can look at the photographs and you can see their countenances shifting-they just look happier in the pictures.”Īs Macy began to piece together the Muse brothers’ history using old photographs, the testimony of circus historians and interviews with the Muses’ community, she found that the story was a little more complicated than the legend that had developed around it. “It was their choice to and because they could come home, they had more agency,” Macy says. When they retired in the 1960s, George and Willie were in possession of a nice house and a tidy bit of savings, a privileged situation in the black community of Roanoke at the time. The Muse brothers traveled the world while Harriett had a lawyer and a bail bondsman on standby to take action whenever she felt their rights were being violated. Harriett would go on to successfully sue the company for the compensation her sons had been robbed of-and when George and Willie eventually chose to return to the circus, Harriett fought to her dying day to ensure that they received fair pay and the freedom to visit their family whenever they wanted. “She couldn’t read, but, boy, she had something on her side.” “The fact that all these policemen came out when got and the Ringling lawyers-they were a really big deal-and she was still able to take them home says a lot,” Macy says. Get your history fix in one place: sign up for the weekly TIME History newsletter On the day the Ringling Brothers came to town, Harriett walked into the sideshow tent and came face to face with her boys, now men. It finally came in October of 1927 when she heard the circus was on its way to Roanoke. Meanwhile, Harriett kept her ear to the ground, hoping for news of her sons. During that time, they achieved a level of fame performing as Eko and Iko, billed to audiences as everything from “Sheep-Headed Cannibals” to “Martian Ambassadors.” But behind the scenes, as Macy recounts, the brothers cried themselves to sleep every night while their manager stole their wages and told them their beloved mother was dead. Taken sometime between 19, George and Willie went missing for over 13 years. It was against this backdrop that Harriett Muse confronted powerful white authorities to demand her sons be returned. 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. “Once I understood what she had understood and how almost suicidally bold she had been, I was like, that’s the story I want to tell.” “My goal was always to tell a story that had never been told and to do honor, really, to Harriett,” Macy tells TIME.