The Sport of Kings

All roads have led to you, Henry, and I won't have you throw everything away for a heap of rhinestones. I'm a planter's son, and you're a planter's son. There is no need for improvement, Henry, only adherence to a line that has never altered, because it's never proven unsound.

The Sport of Kings is a tough book to get my mind around: It is big and weighty, so interesting at the sentence level and ambitious in scope – Is there ever anything more topical in America than class and race and the cultural residues of slavery? – but it is also undeniably overwritten, a little self-pleased, and ultimately, I was left uncomfortable, wondering if this was truly author C. E. Morgan's story to tell: From the perspectives of both white, old money Kentucky horse breeders and an inner-city black youth (to neither of which groups does Morgan herself belong), I constantly had the sense of the author projecting cliched values and motivations onto these characters; white people are bad and black people are good, and as the mechanics of the novel form require characters to transform, we end with enlightened white people and a black man who is forced to give up on playing by the white man's rules of civility and earthly justice; and while we might all nod at the former – poor little rich folks needed to learn some tolerance – I rather recoiled at the latter. Over a hundred and fifty years ago, it took a white woman to write Uncle Tom's Cabin in order to stir up the abolitionist movement, but today, I tend to the belief that the black experience is for black writers to tell; I don't think a person of colour would have concluded this book in this manner. If I was in a book club, this is what I would most want to discuss; yet, it was ultimately worth reading for the negatives as well as the positives.

These imperfect little fillies would be protected, coddled, and prized in aeternum if they proved themselves in the sport of kings – what strange luck to be a thoughtless horse. What woman could hope for half as much in this world?

On the one side, The Sport of Kings traces the life of Henry Forge – from his childhood under the racist traditionalist John Henry (who forbade his dreamy son from transforming the family's former plantation into a garish horsebreeding concern, in perpetuity), through Henry's efforts to breed a Derby winner, to his controlling relationship with his own heir, Henrietta – and throughout, the most important thing is lineage: not only is Henry forever reminded of his duty to his own forefathers (back to Samuel Forge who first surveyed and claimed their farm's edenic acres), but with frequent insertions of information about genetics and evolution, both the possibility of in-line breeding to create a perfect Thoroughbred and the purported inferiority of the Negro-genotype are stressed. There is an unsubtle (and not unwarranted) connection made between Henry's present day obsession with breeding horses for prestige and his forefathers' with breeding slaves for wealth, and the racism that Henry espouses seems bred in the bone. Much is made of the idea of freedom – Henry isn't free to follow his own dreams, ex-slaves thought they wanted freedom but “didn't know what to do with it”, throughout the generations, women had the least freedom of all – and there's such irony in the idea of horses (a powerful symbol of freedom) being the new slaves; tethered and fettered; put to work on the racetrack at the risk of their own bodies; suffering the sting of the whip.

They told him that he could rub horses, pull himself up by his bootstraps, distinguish himself, play the sport of kings. He wasn't naïve or romantic, he saw through it pretty quickly: horse is just a different kind of drug, horse is heroin. See, the rich hustle too, but they think their gambling is just a game without real consequences.

On the other side, The Sport of Kings focuses on Allmon Shaughnessy: the only son of a chronically ill black mother (and absent white father), Allmon grew up on the poorest streets of Cincinnati; what was once the promised land – a first point of freedom on the underground railroad – is now a place with so few opportunities and institutionalised racism that as a boy, he had no choice but to join a gang of thugs and do whatever it took to get by. Eventually sent to prison where he was trained as a groom, Allmon is hired on at Forge Run Farms by the mischievous Henrietta, and events are put into motion that marry classic tragedy to the Southern Gothic; there will be cosmic justice seen on this lot first tilled by the sweat of slaves.

The third most important character in The Sport of Kings would be the state of Kentucky itself: once the wild frontierland of Daniel Boone fame, much is made of its situation on the border between North and South; a supposedly morally nebulous middleground that the former slaveowners tried to exploit for instant respectability in the wake of reunification (“At least we ain't Mississippi.”) Morgan intricately describes the state, from the cities to the pastureland to the hill country, and we learn all about both its diverse geography and its storied history (and not least of all, its close proximity to freedom for the runaway slave: if only one reached the banks of the Ohio River, liberty was just a strong swim away). Often, Morgan breaks off the narrative with flights of Cormac McCarthyesque musings, and while perhaps too numerous, I thought they were well done:

Everything fell away, and the sky rode down a thousand feet like the falcon dropping. No ease here, toeing the crystalline seam of firmity and nothing. And then the sense came, intuited perhaps for the first time, that the earth itself was predatory, inbuilt with dangers, and it suddenly made sense why people wanted to pave it and smother it and sell it to render it simple past. Maybe they saw the beauty, maybe they could look out here to the west and admire the old knobs, the soft, bosomy remnants of the mountains, so lush in the soothing sunshine, but their genetic memory was far-reaching and wise and avenging. They knew the beauty of the earth rendered a fugue state, and while they gazed in blissful wonder, forgetting their own names and the names of their children, they froze in the Arctic chill and died of pustulent boils and rotting diseases, and sometimes they drowned or burned like bugs under glass or died of exposure, and some fell. So tamp the earth, burn the earth, pave the earth with abandon. Of course they did. Of course they would. It was their only revenge upon this wild, heartless theater.

And at the close-up level, I was consistently charmed by the descriptions of small moments:

After a half minute's pause, he turned the knob and pressed the old door as his mother bent behind him, so two light heads peered samely round the jamb.

So, there are these huge themes, playing out like a classical tragedy in which every wheel will turn back on itself eventually, and along the way, there is much social commentary – it wasn't lost on me that a lame horse gets instant, expensive veterinary care while the working poor suffer through debilitating infirmity due to lack of medical insurance – and Morgan, in an already long book, breaks off the narrative frequently in order to insert authorial asides (in which I don't think she, herself, is meant to be this author; perhaps the whole thing is the tell-all promised by one of the characters), streams of consciousness, modernist digressions of factual information, and inter-chapter breaks containing folk tales, biographies, and standards of the Jockey Club; I can understand how the overweighted whole might strain a reader's patience. The main point seems to be that the persistent racism of the Forges of America – people whose forebears once owned slaves will always need to justify it, protecting their family names, by insisting on the basic inferiority of African-Americans – along with biased legal and judicial systems, all railroad the objects of their prejudice into acting like stereotypes; thereby perpetuating the stereotypes. This is taken to such an extreme in this book (Allmon eventually becomes everything he has ever been falsely accused of) that I didn't end up quite believing it; and, again, I got the uncomfortable sense that this wasn't Morgan's story to tell. And yet...Morgan can certainly write; I delighted in the trees if not the forest. I would definitely continue to read her work as she matures into her talent.