Truevine by Beth Macy

I first heard about Truevine from an interview I read with Beth Macy when the book first came out in 2016. I was instantly intrigued by the subject and I downloaded it onto my Kindle right away, a rare thing for me to do for a nonfiction book. I didn't get around to reading it at the time, but Truevine consistently stuck in my mind as one of the ones I really wanted to get to. I was convinced it was going to be a powerful and interesting novel. Naturally, when I was making my True Books 2020 Challenge list, this was one of the first books to go on it. I finally sat down to read it this month. 

Truevine tells the story of George and Willie Muse, two African American brothers born near Roanoke, Virginia in the 1890s. George and Willie were albino, and their stark white skin and blonde hair gave them a very distinctive appearance. Eventually, a man from a traveling circus show learned about their existence and, as Muse family legend tells it, abducted the young boys one day and turned them into a sideshow act. The brothers were forced to perform in various circuses all over the United States for years under the stage names "Eko" and "Iko." Their managers created various exotic backstories for the children. Sometimes they were billed as being two wild men found off the coast of Madagascar. Other times, they were billed as being ambassadors from Mars. Crowds flocked to see them and, of course, they were not paid for their work. 

Their mother, Harriet Muse, spent several years trying to track her sons down. Eventually she discovered their whereabouts and caught up with them when their circus was in town. She took George and Willie home, but her fight didn't end there. Determined to get some justice for her sons, she sued the circus for their back pay and was awarded a settlement. George and Willie Muse would go on to return to the circus life, but this time, they were paid for their work. Harriet had to hire a lawyer to ensure all payments were made promptly and to track down her sons when their managers attempted to disappear with them again (which, unbelievably, happened a few more times). They worked on that way until the brothers retired.

Parts of Truevine were interesting, sad, and powerful, as I suspected they would be. George and Willie's story is undeniably shocking and outrageous. Their mother's efforts to get them back home and fairly compensated for their work were moving. It is clear that Macy's research into George and Willie's life was extensive, and she does a good job of explaining how the politics and racism of the time period made it possible for something like this to happen. She also includes a lot of pictures and interviews in the text, which really helped bring the Muse brothers to life.

Despite these positive aspects, however, I did not have a great experience with this novel. Simply put, most of it wasn't actually about the Muse family. Records from this time period were spotty and poorly preserved at best, and not enough documentation has survived to tell a complete story. To fill in the gaps, Macy includes hundreds of pages worth of additional information about topics related to George and Willie, including the history of circuses, the rise and fall of freak shows, the backstories of other sideshow performers, interviews with circus enthusiasts, the history of sharecropping, Jim Crow laws, segregation, and gentrification, and more. She also inserts details about her own research, explaining how she tried to find records about the brothers and how she had to build relationships with the surviving members of the Muse family to get their blessing to write this book. Truevine is around 400 pages long. Maybe 100 of those pages directly concern George and Willie. So much extra information made it very difficult to piece together a timeline of events. I was consistently lost as to which order things were happening in, what year it was, and how old the brothers were. Just when I felt like I was getting a handle on the chronology of the story, Macy would take a long detour through another topic and I would be confused again.

To add to the difficulties I had, the details that have survived about George and Willie Muse are fragmented, vague, and often conflict with one another. Macy's research turned up discrepancies about nearly every aspect of her subjects' lives, and as a result, key pieces of the narrative are shrouded in mystery.  For example, the ages of George and Willie, the identity of their father, their true mental capacity, and their personal feelings about circus life are all unknown. Even the story of their kidnapping is unclear, as Macy discovered details that seemed to show that Harriet Muse initially allowed them to join the circus. Almost everything about them has a giant question mark hanging over it. By the end of the novel, I'm not sure how much I actually learned about George and Willie.

That being said though, I do think that the story of the Muse brothers deserves to be told. The reason that there isn't clear information about them available is because they were poor, exploited, and subject to incredible racism. Those types of stories should not be forgotten. I just did not enjoy the way Macy put this novel together. The extra information, while generally interesting, was excessive. It went beyond providing proper context and became a disruption to the story for me. Ultimately, I appreciated the bits and pieces I learned from this story, but I definitely did not enjoy it as much as I was expecting to.

Challenge Tally

True Books 2020: 10/14


Total Books Read in 2020: 53