Hope you guys had a safe and happy holiday!  We're ringing in the new year with the story of George and Willie Muse.  Born to a mother who was a black sharecropper at the turn of the 1900s, George and Willie were like other boys except for one thing that made people stare - they were albino.  Their mother, Harriett, knew that they would face hardships, but she never thought that someday her boys would be kidnapped and forced to perform as sideshow performers for the Big One, the Greatest Show on Earth - Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey.  She would spend years praying for their safe return and would fight for them against a system that was rigged and an unscrupulous manager, James Herman "Candy" Shelton, who would stop at nothing to keep them in his control.

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Sources:

Dunn, Morgan.  “George and Willie Muse, The Black Brothers Who Were Kidnapped by the Circus and Billed as ‘Martians.’”  All That’s Interesting,  25 Aug. 2021, https://allthatsinteresting.com/george-and-willie-muse.

Jeffries, Stuart.  “American Freakshow: The Extraordinary Tale of Truevine’s Muse Brothers.”  The Guardian, 15 Mar. 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/15/american-freakshow-the-extraordinary-tale-of-ruevines-use-brothers.


Macy, Beth.  Truevine, Two Brothers, a Kidnapping, and a Mother's Quest: A True Story of the Jim Crow South.  Little Brown and Company, 2016.