The Story of the Muse Brothers — Black Albino Boys Kidnapped Into the Circus — May Be Coming to the Big Screens
Paramount and Dicaprio’s Appian Way are in the works to acquire the screen rights to the book Truevine: Two Brothers, A Kidnapping, And A Mother’s Quest; A True Story Of The Jim Crow South. This book written by Beth Macy tells the story two Black brothers who are kidnapped and displayed as circus freaks while their mother spends 28 years searching for them.
The book takes place in 1899 in the Jim Crow town of Truevine, VA on a tobacco farm where ‘The Muse brothers’ were two young Black albino brothers who were born into 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. Forced into the circus they become global superstars in a pre-broadcast era where they perform for the likes of royalty at Buckingham Palace and headline numerous shows at Madison Square Garden. But the root of their success were their albino skin and the dehumanizing caricatures they were forced to portray like “cannibals,” “sheep-headed freaks,” even “Ambassadors from Mars”.
Through hundreds of interviews and decades of research, Beth Macy expertly explores one central question: Where were the brothers better off? On the world stage as stars or in poverty at home?
Personally, I don’t think it’s even a question of whether they were better off after being ripped from their homes and paraded around as “circus freaks” for audiences of White people BUT I am interested in seeing this story come to the big screen. Let just hope it’s done right….
