...[an] extraordinary book ... at once poignant and rigorous, a compassionate dual biography and a forthright examination of codified racism. Macy is a resourceful reporter and a strong but never showy writer ... The overall effect is extremely powerful. Truevine may focus on events that began a century ago, but its guiding spirit couldn’t be more urgent.
...[an] expert work of nonfiction ... Its story has gaps that are impossible to fill, though that is part of what makes the book so lifelike ... Though Truevine can’t get into their heads, it does a fine job of describing what their circus companions were like and how lost the brothers must have felt once stranded back home in Virginia.
Truevine is a moving attempt to reconstruct this David and Goliath story, a chronicle of the Muses’ unlikely victory in a game that was doubly rigged against them ... Warm, personable, and empathetically speculative, it centers on experiences that shed light on the brothers’ inner lives ... You can’t fault a writer for not discovering what isn’t there to be known. But it’s hard to escape the sense that some of the time Macy spends developing the Muse brothers’ scant personal history might have been better spent on a subject she assiduously avoids: the attraction of their stage personae as sideshow freaks ... The book’s most glaring flaw is its unwillingness to make a study of the sideshow’s spectators.
Macy, for her part, works hard to illuminate the brothers’ story, including the context of the social lives, personalities and cultures of the other so-called freaks among whom Willie and George spent decades ... Macy is a gifted storyteller and a dogged researcher, and readers will be riveted by her account of Harriet Muse’s struggle to find her sons ... Yet it remains hard for a book like this, about African-American victims of white violence, to escape an old way of telling American stories. In that old way, black people’s suffering provokes entertained voyeurism or self-congratulatory pity, not the kind of empathy that leads to solidarity and action. Beth Macy grapples long and hard with that conundrum. Readers alone can decide whether she escapes it.
Macy’s conscientious reporting (affirming the story's accuracy) and her vigorous storytelling make the saga of George and Willie Muse even more enthralling than fiction ... It is also by turns infuriating, heartbreaking and, ultimately, inspiring in recounting a mother’s struggle, through daunting odds, to not only find her lost children, but to secure their proper treatment by the people exploiting them ... Macy is especially adroit at placing the Muses’ story against a backdrop of myriad indignities and atrocities that were accepted as rigid customs in the racially segregated South of a century ago ... Macy is as tender and solicitous in telling their stories as she is in recovering, in print, the dignity of a family broken apart by avarice and injustice.
Macy is a digger and a listener, as all great reporters are. That means combing archives for research and old newspaper stories. It means taking the time to foster trust ... Truevine isn't just an obscured chapter of American history; it's also a peek inside a dogged reporter's process.
Macy puts their story into its larger historical context, giving the reader an understanding of the virulent, often violent racism of the Jim Crow era, which affected the Muse family deeply. She also provides a fascinating history of the circus ... Macy also offers an understanding of people like the Muse brothers that goes beyond our contemporary tendency to dismiss their plight as a relic of the past.
Macy sets up, then follows, so many leads, hints, trails and issues that the reader longs for a timeline and a list of characters, relatives, circus owners and sideshow agents just to keep things straight ... from Macy’s heart-wrenching description of life in general for African-Americans in rural Virginia in the Jim Crow South, the reader may wonder whether George and Willie were perhaps better off as Iko and Eko.
It’s hard not to be moved by Macy’s thumbnail sketches – of Krao Farini, a Laotian-born bearded lady who asked to be cremated so that spectators wouldn’t be able to view her body after death; of the Inuit who died shortly after being brought to America and had a funeral faked for him only for his son, nine years later, to discover that his body was inside a glass case at a museum; of Ota Benga, a pygmy exhibited at Bronx Zoo and stoned by local boys after ending up in Lynchburg, who shot himself in the heart next to a campfire he built in the woods ... It is quite some story, and Macy has told it skilfully, vividly, compassionately.
Truevine is an expanded version of a series of Macy’s newspaper articles about George and Willie, and at times the book seems to be padded, with more detail about the times and the shows than readers may have patience for. But Macy’s digging, and how she chronicles her effort to find the truth, even if they end up less than definitive, make Truevine a true mystery that provides insight into a long-gone world that still has echoes today.
