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 Macy presents evidence that’s sometimes contradictory, and which leads to more questions.
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.
(“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/$34 Canada, 432 pages.)
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