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Truevine: Two
Brothers, a Kidnapping, and a Mother’s Quest: A True Story
of the Jim Crow South
by Beth Macy
c.2016, Little, Brown
$28.00 / $34.00 Canada
432 pages
By Terri Schlichenmeyer
The Truth Contributor
Life these days is a three-ring circus.
The clowns at your job dominate Ring Number One. Ring Number
Two features The Juggler (you) and your checkbook, schedule,
chore list and family obligations. And in Ring Number Three,
there’s a wild combination of the other two. Run away and
join the circus? Yeah, that’s already happened but in the
new book Truevine by Beth Macy, it was far
from voluntary.
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Harriet Muse was nearly beside herself with worry.
According to legend handed down from mother to child for
generations, Harriet’s sons were snatched away from their
field chores on a warm day in 1899 – kidnapped in broad day
light by a white man with candy because Willie and George,
ages six and nine, were not like other African-American
children of their day. The two Muse boys were albinos, with
white hair, pale skin, and pink eyes.
Perfect, in other words, for the sideshow.
But was the legend true? For Macy, a modern-day journalist,
it was an intriguing tale. She wrote a story on it for her
newspaper and then started to dig some more, but she was
thwarted by a great-niece intent on protecting an elderly
uncle. Even so, lots of people remembered the Muse boys, but
nobody knew what had happened to them nor did dates or
details explain how the Muses end up as sideshow exhibits.
Circus memorabilia collectors may recognize Willie and
George from old postcards. The boys had supposedly been
“discovered” by “freak hunters” in a country du jour and,
through the years, were mostly captive to a series of
handlers, circuses, and managers who paid them nothing,
Still, the boys seemed to have embraced circus life
although, from town to town, their names often changed, as
did their stories and racial stereotypes they were forced to
enact. In truth, they were just two uneducated boys with a
genetic anomaly who’d been told all their lives that their
mother was dead.
The boys were men before they knew that she wasn’t…
And therein lies the most difficult unknown in this book:
what was the role of “dear old mother” in what happened to
the boys? Author Beth Macy presents evidence that’s
sometimes contradictory, and which leads to more questions.
That’s not a bad thing, though. In Truevine, Macy
patiently puts things into perspective through an overall
sense of the times; a micro-look at one area of Virginia, a
century ago, and peeks into circus life. More importantly,
we feel the crushing despair of Jim Crow laws and the
despair Harriet Muse must’ve felt. When her Mother-Bear
power emerges, we’re surprised, but not too much.
Through all this, Macy forces readers to see things as they
were, to consider what survival means, and to be open to the
idea that maybe today’s unthinkable was yesterday’s
possibility.
While this book is a little on the long side, it’s got a
story that’s overdue in telling, and that will appeal to
historians and circus buffs alike. If Truevine sounds
like a winner, then ring this one up. |
