Ask the Author: Beth Macy
Answered Questions (2)
Beth Macy
Deadlines help! Seriously, a story has to move me for me to dig into it. Then teasing out the facts, unraveling one thread at a time, becomes this great search. In "Truevine," the most astonishing things didn’t revolve around the sideshow spectacle but rather around what ordinary African-Americans faced during Jim Crow. The daily cruelties didn’t seem to shift so much between the end of slavery and civil rights. To bring those truths to light, I had to piece together so many disparate threads, driving octogenarians and nonagenarians and even centenarians around the old neighborhoods, sifting through old property deeds and maps, and reading oral histories. Archival research only took me so far; to really put meat on the bones of the story, I had to go out and really talk to people on the ground. And that, to me, is inspiring. Reporting is such fun, though -- there are still days I can't believe I get paid to do it!
Beth Macy
That’s hard to answer because there’s almost no time in my career when I haven’t been thinking about the story that resulted in "Truevine." Like others who’d asked before me to do the story, I’m sure I was initially attracted to the great yarn that it was. But once I really got to know the brothers' caregiver and great-niece, Nancy Saunders, and understood deeply what she’d gone through to protect her uncles — a process that took a couple decades — I saw the Muse brothers’ story not as a great yarn but also as a way to reflect society at large. Were the brothers better off, ultimately, traveling in the circus than they would have been at home in Jim Crow Virginia? That question led me to explore sharecropping and life during segregation; all the untold micro-aggressions black Virginians faced, including the Muse family, as well as how the general circus-going public, whose fascination with sideshows said more about the audiences, truly, than the freaks.
There were a lot of layers of meaning and universality tucked within this one outlier story. The longer I worked on it, the more interesting and multi-layered it became to me. This book could not have been written by an outsider; it could not have been produced in a hurry. It had to be pieced at by a local, on a slow simmer. I’m not generally the world’s most patient person, but this one was worth the wait.
There were a lot of layers of meaning and universality tucked within this one outlier story. The longer I worked on it, the more interesting and multi-layered it became to me. This book could not have been written by an outsider; it could not have been produced in a hurry. It had to be pieced at by a local, on a slow simmer. I’m not generally the world’s most patient person, but this one was worth the wait.
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