Reuben Bedford Walker III, the jockey in C. E. Morgan’s new novel, “The Sport of Kings” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), is five feet three inches tall, a hundred and eighteen pounds, and three-per-cent body fat—diminutive even by the standards of his profession, but in all other ways wildly outsized. Lord of the wire and emperor of the shedrow, he is black and gay and talks like a man who takes three elocution classes a day, one each from Christopher Marlowe, Uncle Tom, and Ahab. On the track and off, he is unstoppable, unkillable, outrageous. At the Laurel Futurity, he takes a flying horseshoe on the bridge of his nose at forty miles an hour and goes on to win. Afterward, cribbing from a long-dead Union prisoner, he raises a toast in an all-white bar to Jefferson Davis:
“Aye,” the white patrons roar back over the golden slosh of their raised drinks. Only a groom named Allmon Shaughnessy, the one other black man in the place, cannot tolerate him. “How come you can’t talk like a normal fucking human being?” Shaughnessy explodes. “Who the fuck do you think you are?”
It is a good question. “The Sport of Kings” is about racing, but also about race: about the original American sin of slavery and its ongoing consequences. Although the novel ends shortly before Barack Obama’s first term begins, it is a literary response to the racial politics that emerged when the obvious became clear—that electing an African-American to the Presidency had not signalled the triumphant end of four centuries of systematic oppression. “They say there’s gonna be a black president someday,” Allmon thinks at one point. But he has done time, and he is not optimistic about what that supposedly historic event will mean for him or for anyone he knows. “Either way, you won’t ever get to vote. . . . Won’t have a place to live, ’cause you won’t qualify for Section Eight housing to get your feet on the ground, won’t ever serve on a jury to keep a brother out of jail, won’t ever get a good job once you X the little felony box, can’t legally carry a gun to keep some crazy racist from killing you, and there never was any protection against the cops to begin with.”
Such grievances are currently being aired elsewhere in our culture: individually, by journalists and public intellectuals; collectively, by the Black Lives Matter movement. But novelists can do things that other writers can’t—and Morgan can do things that other novelists can’t, starting with creating Reuben Bedford Walker III, the bad conscience of her new book. There are no kings in “The Sport of Kings,” but there is a Fool, clothed in the harlequin brilliance of silks, uniquely able to speak truth to power. An outsider by both race and sexuality, Reuben is schooled in the operations of prejudice in America yet impervious to it. He is all-knowing, amoral, obnoxious—here to mock, chide, explicate, stir up trouble, and get out while he can with his own however-gotten gains.
It is Reuben who reminds us that when the first Kentucky Derby was run, in 1875, thirteen of the fifteen jockeys were black, including the winner. Horse racing was the first professional sport in the country open to African-Americans, and, until the early twentieth century, it was the N.B.A.: an athletic confederacy dominated by black men, albeit those on the other end of the size chart. Then, with the rise of institutionalized segregation and the complicity of white jockeys, their numbers began to dwindle. Today, fewer than five per cent of members of the Jockeys’ Guild are black.
This is the central preoccupation of Morgan’s novel: the way that African-Americans have been forced off track, literally and figuratively, to the psychological, political, and material advantage of whites. The resulting book is enormously flawed, ceaselessly interesting, and strangely tremendous, its moral imagination so capacious that it overshadows its many missteps. Morgan recounts the long history of American racism, which is also the long history of America: liberty and bondage, settlement and expansion, white prosperity and black subjugation, the Great Migration and mass incarceration. In the face of our national faith that individuals can lift themselves up by their bootstraps, “The Sport of Kings” insists that this history constrains us all in ways we have barely begun to acknowledge, still less to escape.
“And why is it that you publish under your initials?” one of Morgan’s characters asks M. J. Deane, a writer with a brief but crucial role in “The Sport of Kings.” Deane responds tartly, “ ’Cause I ain’t nobody’s business.”
In context, that answer is so plausible that it scarcely reads like the curt autobiographical nod it is. C. E. Morgan, whose full name is Catherine Elaine, has made it her business to be nobody’s business. She was born in Cincinnati and lives in Kentucky. She studied English and voice at Berea College, a tuition-free school in Appalachia for the academically talented but economically strapped, and has a master’s degree from Harvard Divinity School. She has declined to make public almost anything else about her life. What attention she has received has come unbidden, in the form of laurels: the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” list, in 2009; this magazine’s “20 Under 40” list, in 2010; and, earlier this year, a Windham-Campbell Prize for fiction.
Those honors have followed from just one previous full-length work, Morgan’s 2009 novel, “All the Living.” Its main and virtually only characters are Aloma, a thwarted pianist who was orphaned at three and raised in a settlement school, and her boyfriend, Orren, whose father died young and whose mother and brother are killed in a car accident just before the book begins. In its opening pages, the two move in together on the scrabbly tobacco farm that Orren has just inherited. Thereafter, he works himself to exhaustion trying to maintain it during a drought, while Aloma gets a job at a nearby church playing the piano, befriends the preacher, and otherwise spends her time struggling to learn to cook, clean, and accept the unfamiliar presence of love.
That is, more or less, all that happens. Like the lives of its principals, the novel is closely circumscribed. We come to know perhaps four other people, two trucks, one farmhouse, the tobacco field out back, and the mountain that looms up behind—notable for how it, too, restricts the characters’ world, keeping the farm in shadow until late in the morning and making night fall fast. Yet Morgan lifts from that small world an exceptionally beautiful novel. She understands her characters perfectly, and expresses their relationship in ways at once precise and startling. (Aloma, contemplating her relationship with Orren: “It was shocking really, she thought, what all entailed the difference between her and him, as if a whole new person could be made from the sum of that difference.”) And her prose is beautiful and strange and entirely consistent, as if she were writing in the dialect of a place where only she had ever lived.
Aside from the calibre of the mind behind it, “The Sport of Kings” could hardly be more different. It consists of six sections, five interludes, and an epilogue, which together span some two hundred and fifty years, from the Revolutionary War through 2006. It is set mainly in Cincinnati, Ohio, and Paris, Kentucky, the so-called Thoroughbred capital of the world, but its real geographic extent is unmistakably that of America. Some passages unfold in the intimate first person, some in the inclusive, indicting second, and some in the panoptic third, but the over-all narrator remains elusive. Aptly, for a book that is partly about who controls what stories get told, it is not at all clear who is telling this one. And the style is similarly varied. Morgan excels at straight prose—you could carve four or five realist novellas out of “The Sport of Kings”—but she makes use of many other forms: sermons, textbooks, rules, excerpts from other works (real and invented), Socratic dialogues, flashbacks, parables, stage plays. All of that could read like the obligatory kitchen-sinkery of so many postmodern novels, too suspicious of conventional narrative to settle down. But in Morgan’s hands it feels urgent in its ends and sincere in its faith in the power of literature—the resort of a voracious intelligence trying to do justice to an overwhelming world.
In keeping with that sense of abundance, “The Sport of Kings” has a huge supporting cast: vets, jockeys, farm managers, preachers, deadbeat fathers, deadbeat mothers, distant ancestors, servants, slaves, cellmates, ghosts. But Morgan focusses on three main characters, all of whom we watch grow from children to adults. The first is Henry Forge, scion of one of Kentucky’s oldest and richest families. His mother, Lavinia, is a beautiful deaf woman; his father, John Henry, has savagely antebellum ideas about race and similarly antediluvian theories about women and child rearing. Henry Forge grows up close to his mother but in thrall to the father he despises, and he ultimately inherits his sensibilities. After his wife divorces him, their ten-year-old daughter, Henrietta, is left alone with her father and the Forge legacy. The second major character in this book, she is homeschooled by Henry to protect her from the putatively pernicious influence of integration, and kept too close at hand in other ways as well. Her curriculum includes horse breeding (she grows up to help manage the family farm), while her extracurricular interests run to geology, genetics, and, later, sex: what the earth is made of, what we are made of, what we can make.
Among her lovers is Allmon Shaughnessy, the biracial son of a loving but overworked black mother and a largely absentee father, “known in high school as that fucking Irish fuck.” When his father’s already unreliable contributions dwindle to nothing, and his mother is diagnosed with lupus, a condition she can’t afford to treat, Allmon earns money the only way he knows how: by accepting an entry-level job with the neighborhood drug dealer.
Thus is Allmon undone, less by the vicissitudes of chance than by the forces of history. At the age of seventeen, he is arrested with a stolen car and five grams of crack; by the time he has been paroled, six years later, the observant, thoughtful, sensitive boy has built a fortress of stoicism around his heartbreak and anger. Courtesy of a program at Blackburn Penitentiary, he has also been trained as a groom. In a moment of rebellion against her father, Henrietta hires him. That is how the characters in “The Sport of Kings” eventually converge around a horse: Hellsmouth, spawn of Secretariat, pride and joy of Henry Forge and bane and delight of Reuben Bedford Walker III, who, before the end of the book, is perched on her back, inside the starting gate of the Kentucky Derby.
When “The Sport of Kings” opens, Henry, aged nine, is tearing through a cornfield, trying to escape a punishment he knows he deserves. “Henry Forge, Henry Forge!” someone hollers. Then the narrator takes over: “How far away from your father can you run?”
It is a clever opening, a flashlight shining down the dark road of the story. Where Morgan’s previous novel was about orphans, this one is about parentage—about how far we can get from the familial and social coördinates into which we are born. That makes her choice of subject matter canny. There is no more lineage-obsessed sport than horse racing, and serious aficionados know their begats better than Bible scholars. Morgan’s main characters come pedigreed, too, in a manner of speaking. Although they are our contemporaries, they are defined first and foremost by being either the descendants of slaveowners or the descendants of slaves.
We learn Henry’s story first. The Forge family had already been in Virginia for a hundred years when his great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Samuel Forge headed west across the Appalachian wilderness, with one of his slaves, made it through the Cumberland Gap, and became one of Kentucky’s earliest settlers. Subsequent generations of Forges rose to wealth and power via the unpaid or underpaid labor of black Americans, whose exploitation is omitted when the family history is drummed into young Henry. Nonetheless, he is cowed by his ostensibly illustrious lineage, which he refers to only as “It.”
The real “It,” however, is Allmon’s past: a thing without content beyond persecution and loss, simultaneously scary and empty. Morgan recounts it in two interludes separated from the main body of the text, as the enslaved were separated from their families and Allmon himself is separated from his history. His great-great-great-grandfather Scipio, a runaway slave, intended to escape from Kentucky alone but wound up trying to help another runagate, a pregnant woman named Abby, cross the Ohio River. He survived; she died. So scarring was the experience that although he reached the North, he never truly lived in freedom.Allmon has heard none of this, beyond Scipio’s name; unlike Henry Forge, he knows almost nothing of his ancestry. “I am going to find my father,” he declares at one point:
That is Allmon’s entire lineage, a family tree in winter.
Morgan recounts these stories to show how radically both fortune and misfortune compound over time. It is history, not biology, that is destiny, she insists; this book is partly a rebuttal of racial essentialism. Henrietta, who begins to distance herself from her father’s politics while studying genetics, comes to see the matter in equine terms. Even the hyper-controlled universe of high-end horse breeding does not produce predictable results—if it did, this week’s Derby would be a lot less fun—and just selecting for something as seemingly simple as coat color is fiendishly tricky.
For Morgan, in other words, it is not our genes that control our fate. They may be potent, but they are not all-determining. More decisive, in her view, is the sheer unstoppable momentum of the past. Her characters have all of American history for a backstory—and, as with any backstory, it both constrains and explains their behavior. Morgan is not a fatalist; she clearly believes that we can and must refuse to perpetuate the sins of our fathers. But she is a very sombre realist. Almost no one in her book truly loosens himself from the bonds of birth.
Among the exceptions are those who have no real family in the first place—most of them women, who generally stand to gain less from lineage, anyway. Morgan, who is astute on all kinds of power, is as clear-eyed on sexism as on racism. Females qua females do fine in this book, including fillies, but mothers, daughters, and wives—women defined by their relationships to men—suffer silence, sickness, abuse, and early death. The aforementioned M. J. Deane dodges those fates and escapes the path on which history put her, but at the price of leaving home, changing her name, and having no family to speak of. Allmon’s mother cannot escape her history, but she has the clarity not to romanticize it: obsessing over the past, she tells her son, is “just some black-pride Roots bullshit, and it’s always some black man saying it.” And then there is Reuben Bedford Walker III, who, despite or because of being the avenging angel of all of African-American history, claims to have no personal past. That suffix adorning his name like Ionic columns is a joke. He begins by ironically insisting on this pedigree—“The Third, mind you. Not the first, a pederast, nor the second, a wife beater, in fact none of the priors”—and ends by ridiculing it. “I piss on family and order, I lie and I counterfeit,” he declares. “No mother made me, I bore my own damn self.”
There is just one other model in this book of how to slip the bonds of history: not by having no family at all but by deciding that your family includes everyone. When a young Henrietta asks her father’s kindly farm manager, Jamie Barlow, why it is wrong to use the word “nigger,” he quotes her a line of Scripture: “God hath made of one blood all the peoples of the earth.” That is also the motto of Berea College, Morgan’s alma mater, and the deep moral conviction behind her book: that the only lineage that matters is the one common to us all.
Novels, too, have lineages, and Morgan’s own literary ancestry is extensive, as she acknowledges. “A word from an ancient word,” she writes, “this book from many books.” For the most part, those are not books about horses. “The Sport of Kings” shares some DNA with “Lord of Misrule,” Jaimy Gordon’s near-perfect 2010 novel about life on a third-rate West Virginia racetrack, but has little in common with most other racing stories, which have generally been relegated to detective novels (notably by Dick Francis) and children’s fiction (“The Black Stallion,” “National Velvet”).
This is Morgan using horses the way Ralph Ellison used paint: to render absurd the idea of white supremacy and racial purity. Like Ellison’s Optic White, which was made brilliant by the addition of black, whiteness in the horse is dependent on the existence of a darker hue. “White is less a color than a superimposition,” Morgan writes in her first interlude, an elaboration on the Jockey Club’s color qualifications for Thoroughbreds. (She knows who got there first. Melville: “Whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors.”) As a result, Morgan writes, “A white horse—or what seems a white horse—is capable of great reproductive surprises.”
Like her real subject, then, Morgan’s true influences lie far afield of horses. There is the whale, for one.“The Sport of Kings” is indebted to “Moby-Dick,” and shares many of its obsessions: with origins, identity, class, status, work, the problem of evil, and the special dispensation, if any, of America. Faulkner is here, too—especially “Light in August,” a novel that begins, as “The Sport of Kings” ends, with a house burning down. Harriet Beecher Stowe gets a nod, although a chilly one: the scene where the runaway slave Abby dies while attempting to cross the Ohio River is a pointed revision of Eliza’s crossing in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Mark Twain shows up as a leavening influence, as when a slave takes revenge on a vicious overseer by packing his pipe with gunpowder. (The most Twainian part is that he doesn’t die. He just departs to another county to recover.) And then there is the entire shelf of literature that Morgan ransacked to create Reuben, her epic imp, who rides not only the horse but the story itself to its dramatic ending. He is Caliban, Chaos, Br’er Rabbit, John Kennedy Toole’s Ignatius J. Reilly, Cormac McCarthy’s Judge Holden. (Reuben also has Shakespeare to spare, down to the darkly silly ditties he sometimes sings: “I jumped in the seat and gave a little yell; the horses ran away, broke the wagon all to hell; sugar in the gourd and honey in the horn, never been so screwed since the day I was b— Allmon, as I live and breathe!”)
As Reuben’s delightful presence suggests, none of these influences get in Morgan’s way. She is devouring but not derivative: no anxiety, all appetite. She has an exceptionally large and occasionally improvised vocabulary, but her language never feels ornamental. Instead, in her hands, unusual words read very nearly like facts. A horse’s stomach is bossed out; hogs are forced to the slaughter by drovers’ staves; a creek bells out of its banks. The land through which she guides us is flavid, agnate, calcined, karsty. Like Eden, almost, it is a world newly named.
It is also a world closely observed. Morgan has an excellent eye for detail: the way you can push so hard against a doorbell that the color drains from the tip of your finger; the way the soft toilet seat in an old woman’s bathroom exhales a puff of air when you sit on it; the way a boy using both hands to carry a tray out of a room will turn the light off with his nose, as a grown person might do with an elbow. (That eye for detail makes Morgan a superb sketch artist. Henry’s childhood neighbor, for instance, a red-headed seven-year-old girl, has “a face mottled with freckles, and knees as fat as pickle jars.”)
Crucially for this book, Morgan also writes exceptionally well about horses. A startled gelding, upon relaxing, lets out “a long, ruffled breath.” Hellsmouth’s legs, that scarily slender birthright of Thoroughbreds, are “dark and knotty rose stems.” When she is led outside after a long confinement, her “nose rode high like a schooner on waves.” Throughout the book, Morgan mines racing for its thematic possibilities without draining away its ten-ton reality. Waiting at a track before the starting gun, we hear “saddles creaking like winches.” Afterward, we watch a jockey exult in his stirrups, while under him his horse “spins like a weathervane, wet earth fanning out from under her hooves like seeds from a sower’s hand.”
Morgan’s ability to write well about horses is a subset of her ability to write well about the natural world. She can linger on a landscape like twilight rolling in over Kentucky, more content than most modern writers to keep you outside watching until the stars come out, and better at it. But she can also bring in botany and biology and geology, quote Darwin and Dawkins and, once, a text called “Limitless Variation and the Advent of Life,” by K. Aubere: “In the waters, life was a thin, primitive, fragile sheet. . . . Photosynthetic organisms crowded to the top, striving for light, while their buried peers split the weaker sulfide bonds to survive.” Then, during the Cambrian explosion, “The denizens of the seas grew to an inch, then a foot, then a meter, in the form of terrifying fishes that established suzerainties in the depths.” I would read that book in its entirety, if it existed. But beware of writers with initials who claim that they aren’t anybody’s business: K. Aubere is C. E. Morgan. Among her influences, by far the most crucial one is her own remarkably multivalent mind.
None of this quite does justice to the expansive, self-assured eccentricity of “The Sport of Kings.” Morgan, having read Mad Uncle Melville, is unafraid to go off the rails sometimes—really, to tear the rails from the land, and let the train hurtle into the primordial American wilderness. When she retells the story of Samuel Forge for Henrietta’s benefit, for instance, it slips and gets stranger: the journey to Kentucky diverges into the underworld, the Ohio River turns into the Styx. When she rewrites Genesis, she swaps the snake for Br’er Rabbit and the apple for a pawpaw, like something out of the civil-rights activist Clarence Jordan’s “Cotton Patch Gospel.” Elsewhere, she unbuilds Henry’s pristine horse farm, dismantling it down to an earlier, rougher incarnation, inside which an ancestral Forge is going mad with grief and taking it out on his slaves, while his wife is upstairs trying to nurse the latest in a long line of dying infants, and the body of the only one in sixteen years to survive into childhood, beloved blond Barnabas, is newly cold in his coffin, having accidentally shot himself while trying to scare a rabbit out of a log with the butt end of a rifle.
All this is startling, terrific stuff, as is so much of “The Sport of Kings.” And yet the book is full of equally arresting flaws. Like the horse at its heart, it is bad out of the gate, not because it dances and prances and takes its time settling in but because it is heavy-handed. Henry Forge’s father is horrifically bigoted—plausibly so, given his background, and crucially so, for the plot—but too much of his character is conveyed to us via excessively didactic lectures to his son. The adult Henry’s conversations with his daughter are similarly contrived. Plenty of people explicitly school their kids in prejudice, but Morgan’s book is not served by lines like “Your mother, for all her faults, was a damn fine piece of property.” And her dialogue also goes astray with Abby, the runaway slave, whose unschooled voice is the prose equivalent of blackface. That may be intended as commentary on “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” but, as is so often the case with dialect, the effect is simply to downgrade her intelligence and reduce her to a caricature—a pity, given how haunting and lovely the Ohio River interludes are in every other respect.
Those flaws are part of a larger problem with this novel. The risk of exploring how much your characters can liberate themselves from the bonds of history is that they will not liberate themselves at all. That is fine if their struggle and capitulation appear on the page; less so if they simply seem agentless, pawns in the author’s private providential game. Too often, Morgan’s characters seem fated, rather than motivated, to act as they do. There is a lynching that feels more like a plot device than like a catastrophe, and an incestuous relationship that belabors the point about lineage without illuminating either party’s experience. And in the final pages both plot and character get manipulated too conveniently into position: every gun on the wall gets fired, including one that turns the scene into a melodrama. Morgan’s first novel was a model of emotionally intelligent storytelling; even the slightest action seemed to flow forth from the characters’ feelings. Her new one, for all its strengths, sometimes seems organized backward, from the outside in.
Yet it is a testament to “The Sport of Kings” that it cannot be brought down by its flaws. Even at its worst, it is tremendous, the work of a writer just starting to show us what she can do. Sooner or later, Morgan will square the intimate understanding of her previous book with the world-reckoning scale of this new one.
In the meantime, that scale and that reckoning are their own defense. We live our lives within doubled constraints—the mystery of human nature operating within us, all of history bearing down upon us. Morgan places her characters in these binds and asks what it would take, in the face of them, to be moral. “The Sport of Kings” hovers between fiction, history, and myth, its characters sometimes like the ancient ones bound to their tales by fate, its horses distant kin to those who drew the chariot of time across the sky. One of Morgan’s remarkable achievements in this novel is to wind all the clocks at once: a mortal one, which stops too soon (“time is a horse you never have to whip”); a historical one, which stops when memory runs down; and a cosmological one, which never stops at all. “The sun rose with a pitiless red,” she writes toward the end, “and the shuttle rattled across the ancient loom.” That is a beautiful sentence, but the great accomplishment of this book is to remind us that the cloth of history is not made. We make it. ♦
