Horse

by Geraldine Brooks

All manner of misfortune can come of a Black man and a White man in the same room with a knife, even if no drop of blood is spilled.

Jarret hadn’t come into his full height, but he was set to grow into a good-size man. Harry hadn’t had that chance. He was only five, small for his age and slight boned, when they threw him up on his first thoroughbred. Every time he fell off he earned a beating, so he soon learned to stay on. If he gained weight, they cut his meager rations to a single turnip for dinner and a pint of milk for lunch. If those starvation portions didn’t keep enough weight off, they set him to walk a ten-mile circuit at the end of his chores, and if that didn’t work, they sweated him. Buried up to his chin in piles of steaming manure on the hottest days of summer, he felt his scant flesh melting. He spent his youth with an ache in his gut and a lightness in his head. When you’ve been famished like that, you don’t forget the hurt of it, even if the hunger fattened the pile of money that later bought your freedom.

“Maybe you don’t need to be no gentleman to feel like that,” he said. “That Darley foal. He makes me feel—hopeful. Like the future gone matter more than it did the day before he come.”

“Not just Horse,” she said. “The horse. What you have here is the greatest racing stallion in American turf history.”

Only horses were honest, in the end.

he felt compelled to look Lexington in the face, being to being. In his mind, he posed the question: “Can you do it?” The horse twitched his ears forward, arched his strong neck, and inclined his head, as if to nod yes. Then he turned his head sideways, regarding Jarret with an eye whose expression clearly said, “Why ask? You know I can.”

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Where did that come from? Emerson? Yes, that was it. That stupid essay, “Self-Reliance.” Theo had been required to read it for a seminar on American Idealism. He’d written an angry screed in response, arguing that individualism to an almost infantile extreme was America’s great weakness. He asserted that Emerson’s insistence on allegiance only to himself and those like him, his characterization of alms to those unlike as “a wicked dollar,” was the kind of thinking that underpinned the country’s yawning divisions. He’d drawn a sharp contrast with the more communitarian ethos that prevailed in societies with which he’d had personal experience—Yoruba, Australia, even Britain in times of crisis.