The incredible story of two brothers kidnapped by the circus

There's a story that's been going around Roanoke, Va., for over a century — and it took journalist Beth Macy almost three decades to tell it.

It's the story of George and Willie Muse, two young African-American boys who were kidnapped at the turn of the twentieth century and forced onto the carnival circuit. The brothers were albino, and the carnivals exploited that, labeling them "ambassadors from Mars" and displaying them as a sideshow exhibit.

Their mother, Harriet Muse, never gave up hope that she could bring them home again, even as the circus took them around the world. Everywhere they went, crowds poured in to gawk at them. Macy, after years of research, has set down the truths she could find about the Muse brothers and their incredible lives in a new book, "Truevine." The book is named for the small Virginia community where the boys grew up.

When Macy first tried to tell the story nearly 30 years ago, she approached the Muse brothers' grand-niece, Nancy Saunders, who took care of them in their old age. Saunders ran a restaurant at the time, and simply pointed at a sign on the wall when Macy asked her about the brothers.

The sign read: "Sit down and shut up."

"She was not going to let anyone do this story," Macy told MPR News host Kerri Miller. "Because she had been humiliated her whole life about it, and [the brothers] had been exploited."

"I had no idea how the family story had been quashed. I didn't know her first memory as a kid was people banging on their doors, demanding to see 'the savages that eat raw meat.' I didn't understand the minefield that I was walking into, in that clueless way that we have as young journalists, thinking it's alright to ask for a story without really understanding the nuance and history, the subjugation, the way this family had been mistreated. I'm sure I came across as somebody who didn't yet deserve the right to tell this story."

So Macy went looking for that nuance and that history, and it became about more than just the Muse brothers. It became a chance to capture what life had been like for black families, and black children, in the Jim Crow South.

She interviewed residents of Truevine and Roanoke about what life had been like at the time — about the backbreaking work of sharecroppers and about the rough neighborhood where Harriet landed after the boys were taken. She searched museum archives for photographs of the brothers, dressed in their carnival costumes, standing next to the man who bragged about buying them.

The earliest photograph she found dates back to 1914. The brothers' birth dates vary widely in different documents, but they are still young in the photo. The strained seams of their carnival suits show that they'd been wearing them for a year or more, and that they were outgrowing the outfits to the point of bursting.

"They just looked like scared boys," Macy said. She tried to "suss out what must have been going on in their heads, from a photograph."

The boys had been told their mother was dead, and that they should "quit crying." They wouldn't find out the truth — that she was desperately looking for them — for more than a decade. In researching the exploitation of the Muse brothers, Macy came across many dead ends and hard questions. One of the hardest, Macy said, was: "Were the brothers better off traveling with the circus? Where at least they had three square meals and a place to play their head?"

As she researched life in the Roanoke neighborhood where Harriet lived, in a shack with no running water, where slum lords accepted sex for rent, it remained a difficult question. Macy interviewed others who had grown up in the neighborhood. A woman recalled walking by a house on the way to school where a white woman had taught her parrot to squawk racial epithets at them as they passed.

"I was grateful to be able to get these stories from these older folks, while we still can get them," Macy said.

It wasn't until 1927 that Harriet saw her boys again. By that time, the Muse brothers had been sold from one carnival to another. When the Ringling Brothers circus came to Roanoke, George and Willie were one of the musical acts. Harriet got a ticket.

"You can imagine her making her way up to the front," Macy said. Due to their albinism, the brothers could not see very well — they were legally blind.

"This is a scene that Willie would recount for his remaining days, just how astonished he was to look up after his brother elbows him and says 'Look, there is our dear old mother, she is not dead.'"

"It's such an amazing scene," Macy said. "And it's even richer when you know how much she was up against."

For the full interview with Beth Macy about George and Willie Muse, and her book, "Truevine," use the audio player above.