#George and willie muse skin#

Worse still, when the boys were young, they were told that their mother had died to curb any emotional connections. They weren't allowed to read or write and didn't receive any financial compensation for their work, despite being top earners. They were transformed into a money-making sideshow act that served to keep them as docile as possible. But we do know that during the thirteen years of their abduction, the boys were ever changed.

It's not known whether the families of the brothers had anything to do with their kidnapping. The poverty-stricken lives of these people served as an easy target for circus promoters, who offered them a 'way out.' Due to the stigmatism largely associated with genetic disorders, people living in this period were regularly shunned from society. Circus promoters would go on tours worldwide to search for unusual people they could entice into their slideshows. The latter part of the 19th century saw the rise in freak show attractions. The boys were often misdiagnosed as having a mental illness, but it's now understood that this was due to a lack of knowledge surrounding partial blindness. They suffered from glaucoma and had extremely poor vision as a result. It would seem that the brothers were an easy target because of their bright blue eyes and blond hair which is rare in the African ancestry genome. The next thirteen years would see George and Willie's mother go through turmoil, trials, and tribulations as she tried to bring awareness of the loss of her boys. It was a small industrial town on the outskirts of the bible belt that offered no real prospects for its many lower-income families. The South Virginia town of Truvine is where these boys hailed from. A Mother's Loss Of George And Willie Muse The boys were gone in the blink of an eye, and panic ensued amongst the family and community. When the boys were just six years old, a circus promoter made his way onto the field that the boys were working on and coaxed them with a piece of candy. Life was undoubtedly hard for black families during this period, who often sent their kids to work at a young age as an extra resource. George and Willie Muse's parents were tobacco sharecroppers and worked long brutal hours in the hot weather to make a basic living. It was commonplace for as many as twenty children to go missing per month, especially in the South. During the late 1800s, after the post-war baby boom, black children were regularly abducted from their homes.

The Muse brothers were the grandsons of former slaves. The dehumanization that the Muse brothers faced during their time as circus freak show attractions were immense. George and Willie Muse's namesakes were taken away, and the brothers were instead given the names of Eko and Iko, the sheep-headed cannibals from Ecuador. The resulting Civil War would make the South a deeply inhospitable place for persons of color up until the Reconstruction period. The 13th amendment to the constitution outlawing slavery only took place thirty years before, in 1865. The late nineteenth-century South was a tough place to grow up if you were African American.

#George and willie muse skin#

Whilst working in a field in 1899, George and Willie Muse were kidnapped by a circus ringmaster who saw their rare skin disorder as a cash cow. Born in Truevine, the unfortunate siblings were kidnapped and forced to work in the circus. It was in Roanoke, Virginia, the legendary location of a colonial massacre, that the albino brothers George and Willie Muse would seal their fate.