The saddest show on earth

It’s the early 20th century, and two strange-looking boys, purportedly twins named Iko and Eko, are playing in a circus band in one of the many stopovers on the freak-show circuit running from Ohio to Texas. The brothers are ghostly pale, with thick white dreadlocks and red eyes — natural albinos who, when they are introduced by the sideshow huckster, are described as ‘ambassadors from Mars’ — and this makes them fairly valuable.

Not as valuable as Grady the Lobster Boy, say, or Zip-the-What-Is-It?, a pinhead who had reputedly been found walking on all fours in Gambia (he was actually from New Jersey), but these ‘ambassadors from Mars’ are up there in the second tier of sideshow stars, above the giants and the dwarfs and the fat ladies. The audience does not know that they are in pain — with no protective pigmentation to defend them from the sun’s rays, their eyes water constantly and their skin peels and blisters — and the barker does not announce that these boys are neither twins nor Martians but terrified children, kidnapped from a family of poor black sharecroppers while working in the Virginia tobacco fields. Their real names are George and Willie Muse. They are casually mistreated, cheated of their earnings and, having been told the same lies over and over since their abduction, they believe their mother is dead.

On one level, Truevine is the story of the Muse brothers and their mother’s quest to win them back, a quest conducted against the highest odds, during the Jim Crow years, when the judge deciding a case might be a KKK member, and the white circus owner who believes he owns her sons could afford lawyers and detectives to back that claim. At the same time, the book chronicles Beth Macy’s own quest, as a white reporter, to get a story that the
surviving Muse family considers deeply private.

What makes her account compelling, however, is the history it offers of the lives black people had to endure in the decades following slavery, a history that seems all the more poignant in the aftermath of last year’s Black Lives Matter debates.