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Title:
Truevine : two brothers, a kidnapping, and a mother's quest : a true story of the Jim Crow South / Beth Macy.
Author:
Macy, Beth, author.
Publication Information:
Farmington Hills, Mich. : Thorndike Press, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning, 2017.

©2016
Call Number:
E185.96 .M175 2017
Abstract:
"The true story of two African-American brothers who were kidnapped and displayed as circus freaks, and whose mother endured a 28-year struggle to get them back. The year was 1899 and the place a sweltering tobacco farm in the Jim Crow South town of Truevine, Virginia. George and Willie Muse were two little boys born to a sharecropper family. One day a white man offered them a piece of candy, setting off events that would take them around the world and change their lives forever. Captured into the circus, the Muse brothers performed for royalty at Buckingham Palace and headlined over a dozen sold-out shows at New York's Madison Square Garden. They were global superstars in a pre-broadcast era. But the very root of their success was in the color of their skin and in the outrageous caricatures they were forced to assume: supposed cannibals, sheep-headed freaks, even 'Ambassadors from Mars.' Back home, their mother never accepted that they were 'gone' and spent 28 years trying to get them back. Through hundreds of interviews and decades of research, Beth Macy expertly explores a central and difficult question: Where were the brothers better off? On the world stage as stars or in poverty at home? Truevine is a compelling narrative rich in historical detail and rife with implications to race relations today"--Publisher description.
Edition:
Large print edition.
ISBN:
9781410496188

9781432840044
Series:
Thorndike Press large print peer picks

Thorndike Press large print peer picks.
Physical Description:
609 pages (large print) : illustrations ; 23 cm.
Contents:
Prologue: I am the true vine -- Sit down and shut up -- White peoples is hateful -- And still the cry against us continues -- Your momma is dead -- Some serious secrets -- A paying proposition -- He who hustleth while he waiteth -- Comma, colored -- The prodigal sons -- Not one single, solitary, red penny -- Adultery's siamese twin -- Housekeeping! -- Practically imbeciles -- Very good old colored woman -- Wilbur and John -- God is good to me -- Epilogue: markers
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