George and Willie Muse, sideshow performers for dime museums and circuses including Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey, were known for most of their lives as “Eko and Iko,” often trailing sobriquets like “Darwin’s Missing Links” or “Ambassadors from Mars.” Done up in tuxedos and wearing their blond hair in tangled dreads, they traveled across America being ogled, silent but for the music they played in accompaniment. Hype men told the journalists and rubes in the sideshow tent that they had been found in the Amazon or had crashed their spaceship in the Mojave desert. The prosaic truth was that they were albino black brothers from Truevine, Virginia, abducted sometime around 1899 by a six-fingered ticket-seller named James Herman “Candy” Shelton. At least if the family is to be believed. One of the story’s many lacunae concerns whether George and Willie were initially kidnapped, or contracted out by their mother Harriet, who lost track of the boys after Shelton absconded with them at the end of the circus season. Whatever the case, Shelton told the brothers that Harriet, an illiterate laundress, was dead; in fact, she would spend more than thirteen years seeking their return, and a lifetime fighting Ringling Bros. for back pay and fair treatment. The surprise is, she won.