Readers Up #30: Salute Your Shorts

Although my relieved Tumblr friends might think otherwise, I have actually been following The State of the American Jockey this year. Ferrin Peterson tearing a path from California to New York (not that I can watch her at Aqueduct this winter); DeShawn Parker finally nabbing the leading rider title at Indiana Grand; differing track protocols and jocks'-room outbreaks during the pandemic; an exhibit at the Kentucky Derby Museum that I'd love to see, and which is basically the same as one I had a certain archivist create in the first horsey manuscript I ever tackled... 2020 inside horse racing has been about as momentous for riders as the world beyond the racetrack's circuit. 

The most protracted conversation has revolved around whip rules.

Retired and active riders alike have spoken their minds as the personnel most affected by policies governing stick form. The Jockeys' Guild even took legal action in New Jersey, the jurisdiction with the strictest new rules. Most of the sport's elder statesmen and Hall of Famers, such as Ramon Dominguez, Mike Smith, and John Velazquez, zeroed in on rider safety, pleading for the lived experiences of their colleagues to be taken into account by governing bodies--but it was Eddie Delahoussaye's opinion that caught my attention.

Those gamblers, said Eddie D. If they see you're not trying, they'll just quit the game. 

Pondering November's newsletter options, I considered Ride to Win, being that the Breeders' Cup ran earlier this month and that book is filled with many wonderful anecdotes and examinations of historic Cup races. As I recalled my enjoyment of Garrett Gomez's Classic insights and Rosie Napravnik's notes on Shanghai Bobby, my thoughts wandered instead to a pair of short stories, one famous and one not. I'd done a journal club-style entry during Saratoga summer last year, a poetry discussion early on in this newsletter's history, so why not a short story edition this year? Short fiction, in popular understanding, is often misunderstood or poorly classified; in recent years it's experienced (in my opinion as a reader) both a major resurgence and flowering as well a dilution, an inverse shoeshine that occurs when marketers promote short fiction as "bite-sized" or "perfect for your commute." A short story is not an aborted novel. It has its own business.

As a format, it may be the perfect shape and size for jockey narratives.

Clocking in at two minutes and change (otherwise known as 2,060 words), Carson McCullers' "The Jockey" is about as brief and brutal as any horse race. The cast of characters is the set-up for a joke: a rich man, a bookie, a trainer, and a jockey walk into a dining room. By no mistake at all, the story refuses to give the jockey his name. Other characters know it--the reader knows it--but the jockey he is and must ever remain, his title, role, and function superseding birth certificates and endearments. The punchline is that the rich man is attached to no name, either, save that of his horse. The horse is, after all, what matters--if the ride that clipped the jockey's good colleague's career short had claimed the mount's life, no doubt the trainer, the bookie, and the rich man would be in their cups to mourn and wail. Instead they pooh-pooh the jockey's demands for his friend's straits to be considered. Danger is the name of the game. Occupational hazards of jockeydom: threat to life and limb, loss of livelihood, an utter fading into the background even when speaking, the status of set dressing on track and nameless, formless off track. There is something of McCullers' jockey in her literary inheritors. Jaimy Gordon and C.L. Morgan both situate jocks among their sprawling ensembles, and in both cases the riders spawn from McCullers' fertile grounds; Morgan's is a Shakespearean clown, his manner of speaking and mode of dress drawn from the jockey's reflexively elaborate voice and fish-out-of-water suit, while Gordon's is molded of the same tough protein as the "lead soldier" depicted in McCullers' story. But Gordon and Morgan's casts inhabit novels, and their aims are novelists' aims. If less is more for short fictioneers, "The Jockey" can safely be classed with "Hills Like White Elephants" in that its dialogue--elliptical and elusive, accusatory and abnegating--is where the story lives.

Accusatory dialogue defines the relationship between horseplayers and raceriders. Eddie D.'s point sounds as though it's cutting to the chase of what horseplayers and think tanks consider the sport's imperative: if no gambler is willing to put down their $3, racing crumbles. But from my view, what Delahoussaye was getting at is horseplayers' inherent distrust of jockeys.

If the men in McCullers' tale deny the jockey his name, in mine they couldn't say, if pressed, who the figure on the horse is at all. It's easy to be in conversation with McCullers, not least because she's dead and can't answer. Most any queer Southern writer has some McCullers in their lineage, and my reading of "The Jockey," uncovered in the initial mad plummet into racetrack literature, came as a sweet shock indeed. Here was a short story (my format!) about a jockey (my subject!) by Carson McCullers (one of my pantheon). It was a sign. Of course, I didn't get around to engaging with my omen for almost five years. When I did, what emerged was maybe the most *Paul Hollywood voice* overproved story I've managed to date. Prior to "In a Religion Where God is a Horse" I had put a lot of time and energy into examining The Plight of the Jockey™, but nearly always within the bounds of romance genre conventions and always long-form. A high-literary short story didn't seem able to contain all my feelings. Then again, Carson had done it (with some lite implied queerness to boot!), and regardless of how hard I try to rewire my English lit major brain, expand my reading horizons, and embrace the beautiful multiplicity of genre and format in print media, my tendencies will likely always err on the side of litfic. Why not lean into it, just this once?

The second-person perspective that Narration & Description professors rail against. The non-specific, unnamed, genderless narrator. Plot, what plot? Rule after writing rule put to the sword in what was as much the pursuit of emotion and romance as any of the kissing stories I'd attempted, because at the end of the day Thoroughbred racing--its ritualized distinctions, its remove from everyday life, its opacity and mystery--is romance. The externalities of jockeys as depicted in McCullers' story are poignant, but what happens if they're turned on their heads? What is the inverse of the commonly-known facts of raceriders, their mean stature and their subjugation to the horse and their voicelessness? What alchemy is required to transmute slings and arrows into personal weapons and badges of honor?

These are queer questions. Those types of questions usually have answers both expansive and achingly simple--answers able to be displayed, if not contained, within the bounds of short fiction.

Yours with occasional brevity,
Diana