Books like Truevine by Beth Macy

Truevine tells the remarkable true story of siblings George and Willie Muse, born on a tobacco farm in 1899 in the Jim Crow South. After a chance encounter with a white man, the brothers were pulled into the circus circuit, where they performed before royalty at Buckingham Palace and sold out New York's Madison Square Garden. Their fame, however, was built on demeaning racial stereotypes—labelled cannibals, “sheep‑headed freaks,” and even “Ambassadors from Mars.” Back home, their mother, a sharecropper, refused to accept their disappearance and devoted 28 years to trying to reclaim them. Beth Macy’s biography, grounded in extensive interviews and decades of research, examines the difficult question of whether the brothers were better off on the world stage as star performers or in poverty at home, offering a vivid portrait of race relations in America and the lasting impact of the circus industry on African-American performers.

First publish date: 2016