November 14, 2018
Readers Up #2: King of the Wind
So maybe I was destined to love this sport.
Girls inclined to horse literature as children usually have a favorite Marguerite Henry novel, and it’s usually Misty of Chincoteague. I blazed through the Henry canon between the ages of eight and eleven, reading Justin Morgan Had a Horse and Brighty of the Grand Canyon more than once, poring over the glassy, dreamlike watercolors populating Album of Horses, devotedly dreaming of the white map on Misty’s withers--but King of the Wind captured my imagination like none of the others. The copy I own is the copy I bought from the Scholastic Book Fair in fifth grade, the copy with the DARE sticker in the front cover and my name scrawled across the top edge in orange marker, because some books just stay with you. After a point, it's less a book and more a holy object, transcendent, a repository of ourselves in a time and place for better or worse. As I read, I was reminded of what I had loved about this book at the start. Agba’s epic hero journey, spanning Morocco, France, and London before his beloved horse’s bloodlines arrived on American soil, appealed to me as a reader who devoured historical fiction from Mildred Taylor's Logan Family books to the Dear America series and children’s biographies of figures so unrelated as Jim Bowie and Jane Addams.
What I loved then is not necessarily what I love now. The thrust of King of the Wind--its framing chapters of Man O’War and Eclipse, its core as a depiction of one of modern racing’s forebears--was lost on younger me. The book, true in its essentials or not, is a fairy tale: a boy and his horse and his cat against the world. Dire circumstances to be risen beyond, villains (human and equine) to be fought and defeated, faraway locations revealed in Henry’s shimmering prose and the translucent inks of her longtime collaborator Wesley Dennis. It’s a beautiful book, in story and construction, and one of the classic breed of children’s books that, in hindsight, seem childlike in their wonder and heart but very adult in their details and themes.
“When Allah created the horse, he said to the wind, ‘I will that a creature should proceed from thee. Condense thyself.’ And the wind condensed itself, and the result was the horse.”
I’m not one to particularly laud children’s media as 'also enjoyable for adults and therefore superior,' but reading King of the Wind as an adult and from a racing fan’s perspective is a different experience from my childhood absorption. There’s often the fear that bygone favorites will be visited by what Jo Walton refers to as The Suck Fairy; this is true of Little House on the Prairie, for instance, and The Giving Tree, perhaps the Narnia books depending on where you’re standing, definitely the Xanth series. King of the Wind is akin to my reread of Animorphs; everything is more fucked up than I remembered. Agba on his own in the capitals of Europe at the ripe old age of twelve or thirteen? Check! Sham abused in heartfelt detail by a sadistic wood-carter? Check! Agba consigned to prison for alleged horse theft? Of course! Agba and Sham abandoned by their rich patron because of a truly hilarious insult to the man’s overbred-yet-classless horse? Sure, why not! Constant borderline starvation for all involved? You bet! Despite this, Agba stands out as one of the first Muslim heroes in Western children’s lit, an overall empathetic portrayal who nevertheless deserves a bit more than Henry gives him at the story’s end. His sensitive nature and understated good humor ultimately recede into the background, our narrative voice dismissed in a single line. The fact that Agba literally cannot speak echoes the resounding silence of grooms in our own age, men and women whose lives are usually superseded by those of the horses they care for. But then, the conclusion of any good story is foretold by its first pages.
Agba did not hear the rest of [the Sultan’s] letter at all. Drums were beating inside him. As long as that horse shall live. As long as that horse shall live.
This is Sham’s story, the myth of the Godolphin Arabian, and as any racing fan can attest, we’re here for the horses. Sham (and is Sham, the nearly-as-good brother of Secretariat, named for this Sham?) is irresistible from his portentous birth to his crowning moment as sire of three real-time Newmarket winners. Henry's knack for delving just far enough into the horse's personality to produce the occasional equine-perspective line of dialogue is unparalleled; those asides never feel forced, always seem in character, and isn't that the hallmark of horse writing, the ability to translate an animal's character onto the page? Like the best folk heroes, Sham is at once mythic and down-to-earth. The impact of his legend for this adult Thoroughbred enthusiast was occasionally profound, as I found myself teary at points where the author may not have intended it, passages I didn't recall lingering on ever before. The bookending first and final chapters center the Godolphin Arabian’s legacy in contemporary times, portraying Man O’ War and Sir Barton’s Kenilworth match race in precise detail and reeling off Sham’s talented progeny as they smash records and net laurels. Henry’s exacting eye extends to descriptions that were meaningless to my younger self but hugely satisfying now, such as Sir Barton’s trainer planning his ‘explosion race’ and the fervor with which crowds greeted Eclipse. Though published in 1948, the book’s depiction of Man O’War calls forward in time to that other big red colt, Belmont’s tremendous machine. And this underdog story, a rags-to-riches tale predating Hirsch Jacobs and Stymie by two hundred years, speaks undeniably to racing’s perennial concern with bloodlines and class--while highlighting, intentionally or not, the sport's tendency to convert the labor of unrecognized people of color into British pounds and American dollars.
And then Mr. Riddle began to think about the Godolphin Arabian. He had not raced at Newmarket either. And he had no pedigree at all. It had been lost. He had to write a new one with his own blood--the blood that flowed in the veins of his sons and daughters.
So maybe the pattern of growth is consistent, roots moving unseen beneath the surface. Maybe blood will always out. After all that--after years of early obsession and years of fallow distraction--maybe the circle remains unbroken.
