Truevine: Two Brothers, a Kidnapping, and a Mother's Quest: A True Story of the Jim Crow South
Truevine: Two Brothers, a Kidnapping, and a Mother's Quest: A True Story of the Jim Crow South - Beth Macy
Non-Fiction
Pages: 432
Circuses are a dying breed these days - after all, modern audiences have quite rightly turned against their spectacle of casual animal cruelty and exhibitionism. But in the mid to late nineteenth century, circuses were the height of popular entertainment in America: many hundreds crisscrossed the country, some small, some, like the famous Barnum circus, were spectacularly large. Many had thousands of workers, hundreds of animals. And in the nineteenth century, no circus was complete without its sideshow and its complement of 'freaks' - dwarfs, giants, bearded ladies, fat ladies, contortionists.
And, in the case of Willie and George Muse, African-American albinos, heralded as men from Mars, sheep-headed men from Ecuador, cannibals from the Pacific. They were a sensation, with their pale skin, pink eyes and clouds of white hair, equipped with the many musical instruments they could play after hearing a song just once. Willie and George spent almost all of their lives in the sideshow circuit, all but prisoners to their managers, exploited and treated as mentally impaired, after being kidnapped as children whilst working in the cotton fields of Virginia. Their mother spent years searching for them, fighting to regain them and their lost earnings through the courts, a heroic stance from an African-American sharecropper in the Jim Crow South.
Or so the family story went. The truth, as Beth Macy sets out to uncover in this book, is a little more murky but no less tragic, with its family secrets buried deep over the years. It took the author many years of encounters with the Muse's surviving family members to slowly earning their trust and their eventual permission to follow the story and write this book - but the payoff is certainly worth it. I could hardly put this down. Whilst sadly neither Willie nor George ever had the opportunity to tell their own story, (even though Willie died at the age of 108 in 2001) and you do feel that lack at this heart of this book, it's a marvellous piece of detective work, teasing out the details of these lost souls from the swirling, shifting, exploitative and unscrupulous world of the travelling circus.