All photos courtesy of Little Brown and Company
Annons
Annons
Beth Macy: They were among the top acts of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey sideshow throughout most of the 1920s and 1930s, a time when that circus, a.k.a. "The Big One," was king and also the top form of entertainment in America. Next to Christmas Day, circus day—the day it came to your town—was the most important day of the year, and people flocked to see the circus trains unloading in the early morning hours, even if they couldn't afford money to go to the shows later in the day.The Muse brothers performed in front of British royalty and at sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden. Their act was sometimes featured in headlines of the New York Times. When they were young teens, they were featured as pure "exhibits" with smaller traveling carnivals; their milky skin and blue eyes were considered novelty enough. After a few years, their managers gave them instruments as props, but the joke backfired. It turned out the Muse brothers harbored the ability to hear a song once and play it on almost any instrument, from the xylophone to the saxophone and mandolin.
Annons
She's the real unsung hero—an illiterate black maid during the harshest era of Jim Crow segregation, living in a city where the top cop was the founder and leader of the KKK. She squared off against not just him, but also powerful Ringling lawyers [when she successfully fought to get her sons back from the circus]. Think about her audacity. She could have been lynched. If she could prevail against those powerful forces for a couple of decades, continually subverting systems designed to quash her legal rights, think what she'd be like today. Somebody should put up a statue in her honor. She spoke truth to power. She was a total badass.
Annons
How were the Muse brothers treated at the circus? Did their lives get easier as their fame increased?"This is really a book about historic erasure, and how one family's story was systematically quashed by white-run institutions."
They were illiterate because they were never allowed to attend school, so there was no trove of letters for me to mine. They told relatives that their initial years working for various shows were traumatic, in that they were held captive and told their mother was dead. We also know they were mocked constantly in media accounts, and the fact of their trafficking was never questioned.Once their mother got them and won a settlement from the circus, it was their choice to go back, but it was a very complicated choice. Which was better—life at home crammed into a 517-square-foot shack with no running water (and where people mocked and ogled them), or life on the road with the circus (which, by that point, was the only home they really knew)? Their lives got better once they were being compensated and were allowed to visit their mother. You can tell from the photos alone they were happier after that.
Annons
The brothers' great-great-great niece, Erika Turner, has this great 2015 anecdote near the end of the book. She's in a high school psychology class following the riots in Baltimore over police treatment of Freddie Gray. Her predominantly white, suburban classmates are criticizing the looting as she tries to explain how these events weren't happening in a vacuum, they were precipitated by centuries of systematic exploitation and bias.So many white people don't want to talk about race; it's uncomfortable. Many reason that slavery happened more than a century ago, and people alive today had nothing to do with it. But the particulars of these stories, from slavery to segregation to civil rights and mass incarceration, are at the marrow of life in America today. I cite the examples of an elderly lady who still shudders at the memory of the parrots taunting her with racial epithets as she walked to school, or the sharecropper who was handed her lunch through a window and forced to eat outside in bad weather because the rule was, "No niggers in the house."Racism was so much more insidious and ingrained than separate water fountains. And even though I've spent three decades writing largely about marginalized people, it was much harsher than I understood. Newspapers across the country ran racist syndicated cartoons, including Hambone's Meditations. Blacks were considered subhuman beings by most whites, including most of our own white ancestors, some of whom benefitted from the systemic exploitation of a black underclass. I think we all need to own a little piece of that inheritance. And to own it, we first need to acknowledge it.The book may deal with a focused narrative about the exploitation of these brothers, but it's really a story about bigger concepts like love.
The circus sideshow may have been the wow factor, the hook into a great yarn, but this is really a book about historic erasure, and how one family's story was systematically quashed by white-run institutions. The heart of Truevine is about the travails of two strong black women who agitate to get justice for their family. Not just Harriet, the mother, but also her great-granddaughter Nancy, who sued the largest corporation in town when Willie Muse was mistreated later in life. Nancy had grown up being mocked and made fun of because of her uncles by people, black and white, and she long ago developed a façade of toughness. Her relatives lovingly call her the Warden. After 25 years, she finally let me tell this story not so much for her family's sake, but because she believes people need to learn to embrace each other's differences. Also, because she believed her Uncle Willie—who was never interviewed—deserved, for once, to have the final word.'Truevine' is available to purchase here. Follow Seth on Twitter.