Kidnapping, racism and circus sideshow shenanigans fuel ‘Truevine’

Little, Brown & Company

432 pages, $28

Beth Macy’s “Truevine” is the saga of George and Willie Muse, black albino brothers born in the 1890s who became major sideshow attractions in the 20th century circus world. As children, they were removed from their home, Truevine, Va., a tobacco hamlet south of Roanoke. As one resident told Macy, “Only in a place like Truevine … could the notion of being kidnapped seem almost like an opportunity.”

Were the Muse brothers abducted by a “freak hunter” named “Candy” Shelton, or were they “contracted” to the circus by their mother, Harriett Muse? While it remains an open question for Beth Macy, an indefatigable journalist who regularly “writes about outsiders and underdogs,” there can be no doubt that, in 1927, Harriett recovered her sons from a circus passing through Roanoke, outwitting both Jim Crow jurisprudence and the chicanery of Big Top barons. For decades, Harriett fought legal battles on behalf of her sons — at one point Candy Shelton was ripping them off for the modern equivalent of $5,400 weekly.

Macy reveals George and Willie in each of their manufactured sideshow identities — cannibals one year, interplanetary visitors the next — just as she documents the shifting fortunes of the circus, which she calls “the predominate form of American entertainment between 1840 and 1940.”

Conceptually, sideshows were derived from late 1800 “dime museums,” which Macy describes as pseudo-scientific amusement centers featuring performing freaks. (According to Steve Goodson’s “Highbrows, Hillbillies and Hellfire,” Atlanta had its own dime museum, the “Hall of Science,” which displayed wax heads of famous murderers.) Sideshows, then, were mobile dime museums, and, by the time the Muses made their first documented appearance in 1914, the separate tent with its dedicated admission fee had become “a central part of the circus experience.”

Known as “Eko and Iko,” George and Willie were billed on different occasions as “Darwin’s Missing Links,” or as “Sheep-Headed Cannibals from Ecuador,” when they weren’t pitched as “Ambassadors from Mars.” They became star attractions alongside Clicko, the Dancing African Bushman, and “Zip” Johnson, who was promoted as “something between a man and monkey.”

Since they were albinos, they were prized “among the rarer finds, somewhere between a giant and a limbless man in the freak show pecking order.” However, within black and white communities, they suffered the “double curse of differentness,” which isolated them as near-aliens. With their sensational topknots of blond dreads, George and Willie Muse were subjected to ridicule as “cartoon characters,” though they were hardly without talent — indeed, they were well regarded as multi-instrumentalists, who played guitar, sax, mandolin and xylophone.

The social order of the circus was more complex and contrary than the world-at-large. Gays were not excluded in the more sexually open “live-and-let live circus culture.”

But there was a “rigid caste system,” one carnival manager told Macy, in which big tent performers snubbed sideshow workers. Then there was the intrusion of Jim Crow reality: African Americans were dispatched to a “separate cook tent and dining car,” though a performer known as the “Anatomical Wonder” says, “Nobody wanted to lose a good black act, so if you started picking on them, you’d hear about it.”

Nevertheless, diverse sources tell Macy that sideshow stars had “the highest opinion of themselves” and “Shakespearian hauteur.” She writes, “The superior thing was to be alive and on the road — unlike the people in the towns, who were thought to be sleeping through their lives.”

While “Truevine” is often a pandemonium of abominable showmen and “human oddities,” not to overlook the Old Dominion’s drooling segregationists, Macy fastens her comprehensive historical narrative to the heroic Nancy Saunders, granddaughter of Harriett Muse. (The author took a similar approach in her award-winning 2014 account, “Factory Man,” in which a Virginia furniture maker saves his family’s company — and hundreds of jobs — from the depredations of globalism.)

Nancy Saunders protects the Muses in their declining years when they are blind, a consequence of their albinism. For a quarter-century, she dismisses Beth Macy’s attempts to gain access to the Muses’ story. When Saunders finally submits to Macy’s cajoling, it’s with one stipulation: “you have to remember: In the end, they came out on top.”

Nancy Saunders’ aim was noble: to restore “the love, respect, and dignity that had been stolen from [the Muse brothers] as children.” George died in the 1970s; Willie lived to be 107, a full life, Macy emphasizes, that overlapped “three centuries from Grover Cleveland to George W. Bush,” exceeding in longevity all his circus contemporaries.

“Truevine” is dominated by delight and triumph. Macy is a fine Blue Ridge wit (“He was as serious as a copperhead in a wood stack.”), and she occasionally darts out of the vine on a lyrical sprint (“The walls are the hue of ferns unfurling, of Easter-basket grass, of springtime in Virginia”).

She paints vivid portraits of wily, creative minds: James Anthony Bailey, the “self-taught circus engineer,” who was spied upon by the German military so they could “learn the best ways to move men and equipment by rail”; Roanoke attorney Wilbur Austin, a “champion fidget” who persuades an arch-segregationist judge that George and Willie are “practically imbeciles” — a daring, ironic gambit that imposes a binding settlement on Ringling, also expelling Candy Shelton from the picture for good.

Few could have believed that Eko and Iko were “Ministers from Dahomey,” any more than Donald Trump and his followers believe that Barack Obama was “born in Kenya.” These are identical racist and xenophobic fabrications that reinforce the fantasy of Anglo-Saxon superiority. When exposed, the response is the same: We knew it wasn’t true all along, but it was a useful, if entertaining, fraud. This is what’s known as the Deception of the Deception, which was the convoluted foundation of the sideshow scam. In a timely way, “Truevine” explodes the presumption that moderns are less gullible than in an earlier era.