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She was no one’s notion of an easy mare. Not mean, but nervous. Which could come to the same thing if you didn’t account for it.
He’d been slow to master human speech, but he could interpret the horses: their moods, their alliances, their simple wants, their many fears. He came to believe that horses lived with a world of fear, and when you grasped that, you had a clear idea how to be with them.
It was something to remember: a good horse will work with you, won’t mean you ill.
a racehorse is a mirror, and a man sees his own reflection there. He wants to think he’s from the best breeding. He wants to think himself brave. Can he win against all comers? And if not, does he have self-mastery to take a loss, stay cool in defeat, and try again undaunted? Those are the qualities of a great racehorse and a great gentleman. A gentleman likes to have a horse that gives the right answers to those questions, then he can believe that he will give the right answers too. To do my part, I have to give a man a likeness that shows not just how beautiful the horse looks, but how
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he could see how a man like Scott might get confused at a place like the Meadows. Life looked well enough there. It was what you couldn’t see that rubbed your soul raw.
As she stepped out of the truck, a chill fingered its way through her thin cardigan. Spring was still a rumor up here.
Jess missed this, perhaps more than anything else about her Sydney home: the sense of being at the watery edge of things, turning a corner and being confronted by a shimmer of sunlight on waves, a crescent of sand curved below a rock-ribbed headland.
Theo foraged around in his laundry hamper for a Hoyas shirt. He disliked branded, elite-university apparel, but his favorite run took him through lily-white Northwest Washington and Daniel, his best friend at Yale, had instructed him that a Black man, running, should dress defensively.
Viley’s Harry, Charles and Lew. Theo felt whipsawed. Troye may have portrayed these men as individuals, but perhaps only in the same clinical way that he exactly documented the splendid musculature of the thoroughbred. It was impossible not to suspect some equivalence between the men and the horse: valued, no doubt, but living by the will of their enslaver, submitting to the whip. Obedience and docility: valued in a horse, valued in an enslaved human. Both should move only at the command of their owner. Loyalty, muscle, willingness—qualities for a horse, qualities for the enslaved. And while
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He wanted to get down his reactions to that painting, exactly what he’d noticed and his response to it. You never get a second chance to have a first impression.
“Il a une autre course! Ne le laisse pas tomber!”
They were, all of them, lost to a narrative untethered to anything he recognized as true. Their mad conception of Mr. Lincoln as some kind of cloven-hoofed devil’s scion, their complete disregard—denial—of the humanity of the enslaved, their fabulous notions of what evils the Federal government intended for them should their cause fail—all of it was ingrained so deep, beyond the reach of reasonable dialogue or evidence.
