C. Morgan - The Sport of Kings

Hadn’t his own education, prior to his tutoring, been a waste? Even at Sewanee, he’d had to fight for the relevance of his education to his true life as a horseman. Formal education had always seemed a war of attrition designed to starve him of his own history and bring his culture to its knees. But the farm was a whole round world, and Henrietta was a product of that world — she’d one day take ownership of it. It was his bounden duty to reverse the effects of her miseducation.

He placed a hand on each slumping shoulder and said, “Look at me, Henrietta.” He noted the wrinkle of worry between her red brows, the lashes made by tears into little black spikes. He said, “Were they very hard on you today?”

She nodded once.

“Tell me who built our fences,” he said.

“What?”

“You heard me. Who built the stone fences?”

“The … Irish?”

“No, goddammit, our slaves. The impolite, inconvenient truth, but there it is.”

“I said a bad word.”

“You got a bad education! Consider yourself withdrawn.”

She reared back. “What?”

“Henrietta, you’ve suffered the misfortune of being born into an age of political correctness, when a polite lie is the truth, and the truth is anathema. The simple reality is what no one dares to say: Blacks are inferior and it’s always been that way. It’s a genetic reality. People police words to avoid grappling with reality.”

“Daddy, I don’t think—”

“Henrietta, listen to me. Consider this your first

Lesson

Is a horse a blank slate? Is each animal sprung from the forehead of Zeus? Is a foal a patented invention? No, the horse is a house we build from the finest materials of the previous generations. How can we accomplish this with any reliability? Because biology is destiny, that’s why. Gold from gold, and brass from brass. Secretariat wasn’t born from a hack and a knacker; he was from Bold Ruler out of Somethingroyal, winning horses from long and respectable lines. Secretariat never had the option to be slow. Speed and stamina are heritable. The animal bred true.

Oh, I can see the objection in your eyes that a horse isn’t a human. Fine. But the human is just as subject to his biology by fate. Now, I’m not going to bore you with the histories of the polygenists and craniometrists, but I will tell you that Morton’s skulls are a fact; the White brain is bigger than the Black brain. This should appeal to your little scientific mind. Just as musical skill and athletic prowess are inheritable, so is intelligence. How could it be otherwise? The average African IQ is 70; the average White is 100. And that’s a fact even the Marxists can’t avoid! You can find exceptions, but the exceptions don’t disprove the rule. And how did racial difference develop in the first place? Think about it, Henrietta. The human populations that headed north contended with difficult weather and living conditions that demanded the development of higher intelligence and organized societies in order to survive. Those left near the equator could get away with investing no attention in their innumerable children, and ignoring social development. The laxity of the elements created a species of indolence, and what no one will say out loud is that Blacks were decreed different by nature. The ascendance of certain races is, in fact, proof of the wisdom of nature. You don’t have to be a madman to acknowledge the obvious.

I’m going to tell you what my father told me: throughout the history of this country, we have saved an inferior people from themselves, and now that they’ve won everything they clamored for, they can’t manage their own freedoms. They’re the kings and queens of dissolution. They’re ruled by base instincts, but lasciviousness is so intrinsic to their nature, most don’t even see it as abnormal anymore. Look at our cities — Black women can’t keep their legs shut, and they’ve run the country down with their endlessly multiplying, uneducated spawn. They still live off the White man’s money, only now they don’t even have the protection they once enjoyed on a plantation or in a small town. They get to live like rats in their projects, because they don’t possess the genetic wherewithal to make anything productive of their lives. They’re seemingly incapable of the abstract thought required to plan for the future or even to detect a suitable mate. It’s not 1860, but rest assured, there still has to be a White man making sure they get enough to eat and that they have a roof over their heads. The reality is White men saved Black people in this country. They saved them from themselves.

The most painful irony is that Blacks clamored for a freedom that can never be. So long as they are bound to bodies bequeathed to them by their ancestors, they can never taste true freedom. They’re enslaved by their own materiality, and no White man anywhere has the power to free them from that.

* * *

Over her drowsy head, the daily war of morning ensued: dews rose, shrugging off their sleep and skimming briefly over the fields in the shifting dark. After a long night of sleep in the underbelly of the earth, the armored sun rose and charged the horizon, pressing against the dark with long arms until night fell back, wounded and floundering, to earth’s antipodal edge. Now the lingering armies of dew turned to mist, mustering over the great house and muffling the voices of animals. The sun cast great handfuls of heated light, looting what was left of shadow, and the dew dispersed, not retreating toward night but fleeing in all directions.

Henrietta shambled down from the upstairs at six thirty, pouring the cup of coffee her father now allowed her to drink and turning into the study where he waited. There, the books were spread wide before him, so it appeared he had been sitting, waiting here for his student all night. He gestured toward the black Windsor chair beside the desk. Her education was under way:

They began with the classics, working through The Iliad for the third time in Henrietta’s life, and soon thereafter Xenophon and Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides; then science through the esotery of pedigree charts and animal husbandry and the variables of genetic inheritance; mathematics through word problems exploring the numerical influence of a mare if she appeared four times in a foal’s chart; but also by working with Beyer’s numbers, then the basics of handicapping. Anatomy was equine form, and soon she could parse the elastic maze of musculature, which through endless acts of flexion, extension, and adduction made the horse an animal of tremendous power and speed, and drew men to race it. History was the tale of the Greeks, their branched and ill-fated houses; and also the dynasties of speed and conformation — the lines of the Darley Arabian and his Eclipse, Sir Archie, Sir Gallahad III, War Admiral, Native Dancer, Danzig. The families branched and then their limbs curled back again to their source as bloodhorses were bred back into their own lines, so the families grew deep and redundant with inbreeding, their limbs twisted. For Henry, recalling his own earliest years in study, these recounted histories were so long and tangled; they became confused in his mind, all houses the names of myth, so the horses became indistinguishable from the Greeks and the Greeks from the horses, or the horses became attendant somehow to the fall of the houses, like night-bred furies saddled by fate and ferrying black messages from the gods to men and back again. He often confused their names and misspoke, but his daughter could intuit his meaning. Through it all Henrietta asked no questions, said no unnecessary words, eyes strict on the page, listening, absorbing, memorizing. The first four hours of the day were spent side by side in this manner, heads bent, poised between past and future. There were no breaks until her coffee dried in the mug’s white well, and then it was dinnertime. What she could not manage to learn in these four hours of the morning — what she did not learn of the rest of the world — she did not learn at all, and a year passed.