The saddest show on earth

It’s the early 20th century, and two strange-looking boys, purportedly twins named Iko and Eko, are playing in a circus band in one of the many stopovers on the freak-show circuit running from Ohio to Texas. The brothers are ghostly pale, with thick white dreadlocks and red eyes — natural albinos who, when they are introduced by the sideshow huckster, are described as ‘ambassadors from Mars’ — and this makes them fairly valuable.

Not as valuable as Grady the Lobster Boy, say, or Zip-the-What-Is-It?, a pinhead who had reputedly been found walking on all fours in Gambia (he was actually from New Jersey), but these ‘ambassadors from Mars’ are up there in the second tier of sideshow stars, above the giants and the dwarfs and the fat ladies. The audience does not know that they are in pain — with no protective pigmentation to defend them from the sun’s rays, their eyes water constantly and their skin peels and blisters — and the barker does not announce that these boys are neither twins nor Martians but terrified children, kidnapped from a family of poor black sharecroppers while working in the Virginia tobacco fields.