For Black History Month.....

I have been so busy but I was not going to let February end before I could highlight at least one interesting, unique African American for Black History Month.  Unfortunately, I did not make it before the end of February but fortunately, I did get it done. 

 I found a very unique story about African American brothers from Truevine, Virginia.  The brothers were three years apart in age but what makes them so unique is the fact that there were albino African Americans.  Their eyes were the palest blue, their skin was ghost-colored, and they both had thick, white dreadlocks which made the brothers a hot commodity for fairground freak shows and circuses.  In fact, both brothers did participate in circuses (namely Barnum and Ringling Brothers) but this was not by their choice.

Early in the 1900s, George and Willie Muse (grandsons of former slaves-sharecropping family-tobacco farmers) were kidnapped from their home and forced to be part of a freak show due to their rare affliction of albinism.  They were just 6 and 9.  Word got out that the albino brothers were working in the tobacco crops routinely.  One day a "freak hunter" secretly came into the field and offered the brothers candy to leave with him, of course, they did so and that is how they ended up being part of a freak show.  Between 1914 and 1927, the brothers were famous the world over as freaks.

A photo from one of the shows the brothers were in along side the rest of the "freaks." (Not my word).

During this time, the brothers were not allowed to go to school, learn to read or write, and were not even paid for their work.  The circus people told them their mother had died to make them stop asking to go home.

The brothers were dressed in whimsical outfits, and their dreads were crafted into crazy chicken wattle-looking designs.  The circus advertised the boys using various outlandish names such as "the Sheep-headed Cannibals," "Barnum's Original Monkey Men," and "the Ambassadors from Mars."  Stories were spread of how the boys were found outside the remains of a spaceship in the Mojave Desert or they were found floating down the coast of Madagascar on a raft.  What ever would sell the most tickets. 

Fast-forward 13 years and the small town the boys grew up in was able to host the circus.  Even though the brothers had been gone from the area they grew up in for 13 years, they amazing still recognized their old hometown. 

The circus was set up, people bought their tickets, and brought their families out for a new kind of fun and that is when it happened.  The mother of the albino brothers walked into a sideshow tent and was face-to-face with her sons who had been taken all those years ago. 

She caused such a ruckus while demanding her sons be let go, the police were called.  The boys were allowed to go with their mother but their mother did not stop with just getting them back home.  She sued the Barnum Circus for all the money the boys should have been paid for their work, and they were paid. 

The family reunited.

The brothers decided to return to the circus to continue to earn money since they basically grew up in the circus but now, they were being paid and had the freedom to come and go anytime they pleased thanks to their mother. 

Before they retired in 1960, they were able to travel all over the world, and they even performed for the Queen of England.  They were able to buy a small house and had enough money to live on.  George died in 1971 and Willie died in 2001 at the age of, wait for it, 108!