Review: An Account of Black Albino Brothers in Beth Macy’s ‘Truevine’

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/17/books/truevine-review.html

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As she did her prodigious reporting for “Truevine,” her second expert work of nonfiction, Beth Macy came across a shocking picture. It seemed to depict George and Willie Muse, the brothers around whom “Truevine” revolves, sitting with shackles binding their legs to their chairs. Ms. Macy glimpsed this photo during a late-night web search, but when she called it up again the next day she realized she’d been mistaken.

The boys were wearing socks and knickers. The stripes she’d thought were shackles were just their bare white skin.

But the Muse brothers weren’t Caucasian. They were albino African-Americans born into the Jim Crow South, in a town called Truevine outside of Roanoke, Va. Ms. Macy’s years as a reporter in this region led her to write “Factory Man,” an extraordinary examination of a family-run Appalachian furniture company, several generations of its black and white workers and the determination of one of its owners to get into a trade war with China, if necessary, to keep his business in America.

“Truevine” isn’t as clear-cut as that, even though it, too, takes race as one of its main subjects. Its story has gaps that are impossible to fill, though that is part of what makes the book so lifelike. It begins with a mother’s anguish. Harriet Muse, a laundress, could not bear having her sons work in Virginia’s tobacco fields: Their pale skin and weak eyes couldn’t tolerate a sharecropper’s workload and daylong exposure to the sun. They were 6 and 9 at the time.

That was when, according to family lore that would persist for an entire century, “that very bad man” came along. And when he left Truevine, the boys left with him. He had stolen them! And dusty, poky Truevine was so isolated that nobody ever heard what became of them, though they became famous. The bad man had spirited them off to a circus freak show, where they developed long white dreadlocks and were treated as virtual slaves. They worked for different circuses, including that of the Ringling brothers. And they traveled around the world. Newspaper coverage of circus freaks was condescending and shameful. But nobody ever recorded how the brothers felt about their treatment during these years.

Because George and Willie had developed permanent squints in an effort to protect their eyes and were shy by nature, they were treated as simpletons for much of their early lives. And they had been thrown into an atmosphere in which some blacks were forced to go along with being presented as the missing links between man and monkey; the consequences of fighting back — unemployment, bullying, bigotry — could be far worse. Ms. Macy’s backdrop for “Truevine” is an America of lynchings, of the Ku Klux Klan marching proudly down Pennsylvania Avenue to Calvin Coolidge’s White House, of racism so endemic that even parrots could cast slurs. One Roanoke bird in particular liked to coarsely announce the presence of blacks coming down the street.

Ms. Macy gives herself several objectives for the strange story told in “Truevine.” First and foremost, she wants to examine the story that members of the Muse family believed for 100 years, even though Ms. Macy could quickly tell that it couldn’t withstand scrutiny. Second, at a time when Roanoke remains a city that “demographers still consider among the most segregated in the South” and racial tensions have been aroused throughout the nation, she means to provide an eerily resonant vision of the past.

And last, though hardly least, she wants to try to understand what happened to the Muses. Precious few records exist, but the family’s longevity is amazing. Ms. Macy found a number of octogenarian and nonagenarian members with long and excellent memories. Willie himself lived to 108.

Here is what she dares to put forth: She doesn’t believe the boys were kidnapped. She thinks Harriet Muse made some kind of arrangement with a traveling circus recruiter. Harriet had no way of offering her boys a decent life in Truevine, or any assurance they would survive there. She may have thought the circus would be a better place for them. But she seems to have lost track of George and Willie, and no wonder: Their billing changed often. They were known at various times as “Ecuadorian white savages”; “sheep-headed cannibals from Ecuador”; Eko and Iko, a pair of musicians; and, most memorably, “ambassadors from Mars.”

And after they disappeared in prepubescence, they were gone for many years. Not until their 30s did they see Harriet again, and their stay with her was loving but awkward. 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.

Nor could their mother have had much of an idea of what to do with them. Add to the fact that by then they were very valuable in show business, and you can see what was fated to happen. Harriet was ready to give them up again but this time not without taking legal action.

Ms. Macy, whose reportorial methods are inspiringly persistent (and whose books certainly bear that out), managed to piece together the legal aspects of Harriet’s case, even though the records of it were scarce and hard to find. Suffice it to say that in addition to being a loving mother, the woman was no fool. She found the right lawyer. She permitted “a ploy that was racist, patronizing and illegal.” But she got what she wanted, and you can feel Ms. Macy’s admiration wafting off the page.

Harriet had few rights and no good options, but who is Ms. Macy — or anyone who becomes transfixed by the family nightmare set forth in “Truevine” — to judge her?