They brought him over, and they put him in a cage. GROSS: I mean, who was Ota Benga He was not really a pygmy liberated from the Congo. It's - he was displayed in the Bronx Zoo with an orangutan. He was first displayed in 1904 at the World's Fair, alongside Eskimos, Filipinos and Native Americans. He was called a pygmy who had been liberated from the Congo by an American missionary. GROSS: Then there was Ota Benga who is billed as the missing link between human and ape. And maybe that person would also have a snake wrapped around their neck, too. It's kind of a strange time to get your head around because it's hard to imagine that people would want to pay money to see people with some of whom had disabilities, some of whom just had special skills like sword swallower. And so there would be photos of Eko and Iko, ambassadors from Mars or there would be photos of a large woman or a very thin man - the skeleton man - there would be the doll family was a popular family of small performers who were also - many of them cast in the "Wizard Of Oz." Jack Earle, the Texas Giant was a big draw during that time. And there would be banners on the side of the tent trying to entice people to pay that extra quarter. It was a way to get an extra quarter out of a patron. So the circus was the most dominant form of entertainment between 1840 in 1940, and the sideshow was a big part of that. Would you describe what freak shows were like in the early 20th century and who some of the human exhibits were?īETH MACY: Sure. The Muse brothers performed in freak shows at the height of the freak show era. Macy is a former reporter for The Roanoke Times and author of the earlier book "Factory Man."īeth Macy, welcome back to FRESH AIR. My guest journalist Beth Macy is the author of the new book "Truevine," investigating the story of these brothers that tells a larger story about race, class and entertainment in the first half of the 20th century. Their real names were George and William Muse, and they grew up in Truevine, Va., near Roanoke, the sons of a sharecropper. One spiel about them said the brothers were descended from monkeys in the dark continent with Neanderthal heads, caveman bodies and tremendous shocks of hair that stand out on their heads like the wigs on Raggedy Ann dolls.īut these brothers weren't from Africa, Ecuador or Mars. They were billed in several ways Eko and Iko, the sheep-headed cannibals, two Ecuadorean white savages, ambassadors from Mars. In the era of the freak show when people paid to gawk at people who look different, two albino African-American brothers whose condition left them with white skin and light-colored hair were exhibited as rarities.
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