Truevine Quotes

“Words linger and words matter, I learned, and it’s not possible to predict the fallout they can have on a subject’s life.”
― Beth Macy, Truevine: Two Brothers, a Kidnapping, and a Mother's Quest: A True Story of the Jim Crow South

“I think we all need to own a little raw piece of this history. And to own it, we need to understand it and acknowledge it. As Julius Lester has said, “History is not just facts and events. History is also a pain in the heart, and we repeat history until we are able to make another’s pain in the heart our own.”
― Beth Macy, Truevine: Two Brothers, a Kidnapping, and a Mother's Quest: A True Story of the Jim Crow South

“He was as serious as a copperhead in a wood stack. His”
― Beth Macy, Truevine: Two Brothers, a Kidnapping, and a Mother's Quest: A True Story of the Jim Crow South

“During the time the Muse brothers began performing, Nicholas pointed out, adults could legally mail children - by affixing stamps to their shirts and putting them on a train.”
― Beth Macy, Truevine: Two Brothers, a Kidnapping, and a Mother's Quest: A True Story of the Jim Crow South

“Freaks are called freaks and are treated as they are treated—in the main, abominably—because they are human beings who cause to echo, deep within us, our most profound terrors and desires.” The true grotesque, in Baldwin’s view, isn’t the monster or the freak but rather members of mainstream society who, clinging to safety, abhor differentness.”
― Beth Macy, Truevine: Two Brothers, a Kidnapping, and a Mother's Quest: A True Story of the Jim Crow South

“The entire country was obsessed with the notion of separating people into greater and lesser breeds. But”
― Beth Macy, Truevine: Two Brothers, a Kidnapping, and a Mother's Quest: A True Story of the Jim Crow South

“She makes bread and she has guts”
― Beth Macy, Truevine: Two Brothers, a Kidnapping, and a Mother's Quest: A True Story of the Jim Crow South

“Still, in this remote and tiny crossroads, where everyone knew everyone for generations back, George and Willie Muse were different. They were genetic anomalies: albinos born to black parents. Reared at a time when a black man could be jailed or even killed just for looking at a white woman - reckless eyeballing, the charge was officially called - the Muse brothers were doubly cursed.”
― Beth Macy, Truevine: Two Brothers, a Kidnapping, and a Mother's Quest: A True Story of the Jim Crow South

“Their world was so blindingly white that the brothers had to squint to keep from crying. On a clear day, it hurt just to open their eyes. They blinked constantly, trying to make out the hazy objects in front of them, their brows furrowed and their eyes darting from side to side, unable to settle on a focal point. Their eyes were tinged with pink, their irises a watery pale blue.”
― Beth Macy, Truevine: Two Brothers, a Kidnapping, and a Mother's Quest: A True Story of the Jim Crow South

“Jordan's Alley, now part of the West End, is still the poorest section of the city, still overwhelmingly black; the rate of neighborhood-school students qualifying for free and reduced lunch is by far the highest in the city, at 98.17 percent. But as Sweet Sue and Mother Ingram described the community the way it was when the Muse family migrated there, I realized I had to look beyond the peeling paint and the sagging porches. I sensed there were plenty of rich histories waiting to be unearthed on the tongues of octogenarians, in old scrapbooks, and in remote court files. I just had to dig.”
― Beth Macy, Truevine: Two Brothers, a Kidnapping, and a Mother's Quest: A True Story of the Jim Crow South

“This is nothing like contracting with a carnival showman to put your two young teenagers on a train, granted, even if you thought he'd bring them back. But who is anyone to judge the pressures facing an illiterate washerwoman raising five children alone in rural Virginia during the harshest years of Jim Crow?”
― Beth Macy, Truevine: Two Brothers, a Kidnapping, and a Mother's Quest: A True Story of the Jim Crow South

“As the historian Benjamin Quarles has written: “Whatever the Southerner had surrendered at Appomattox, he had not surrendered his belief that colored people were inferior to white.” In”
― Beth Macy, Truevine: Two Brothers, a Kidnapping, and a Mother's Quest: A True Story of the Jim Crow South