Readers Up #7: I Dedicate This Ride
Young and old point at me and their eyes say hero.
They probably never heard of Austin Curtis
or other slaves who did more than what I do
a hundred years ago but under the lash.
Isaac Murphy was not quite the last of the great Black American jockeys. He died in his early thirties, when Jimmy Winkfield was a wide-eyed Lexington teenager about to make his break, leaving behind a legacy of prowess, wealth, and an unmatched win rate somewhere between 34 and 44%. His life and sport are explored in Frank X Walker’s poetic biography, I Dedicate This Ride, with the author taking on the voices of Murphy’s parents James and America Burns, wife Lucy, trainer Eli Jordan, and Murphy himself. Poetry might seem a bold choice for biography, but given the meager historic record, an intuitive and necessary one.
(Murphy’s gravesite was lost until the 1960s, to give an idea of how much time and attention US historians and record-keepers initially paid to the rider--shades of another Black luminary’s remains. Poetry, the format of connection and aesthetic and ambiguity and connotation, is flexible enough to fill in the gaps.)
Even in death I feel the sting of race and sport, Walker writes from Murphy's tomb, while I hover at the front doors of the Park--like a ghost lawn jockey.
Do you remember when an activist group in Saratoga placed Confederate flags over the lawn jockeys lining the front walk at the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame? Sure was a blip in the news cycle--even within its own sport, the affair came and went within a day or so. The museum itself responded poorly, defensively, ahistorically; its front office seemed to care more about appearance than core, which is a neat metaphor to pair with the quite literal whitewashing of racist caricatures into racially non-specific mannequins. The spoken and visual language of racing is woven inextricably with race. And as good as White writers' biographies of Black riders generally are (thoughts on Wink, The Great Black Jockeys, and Black Maestro forthcoming), they tend to elide not the question of institutional racism in those riders' own times but the echoes in our time. You can't build a sport on slave labor from the ground up and expect the precedents, the norms, the structure to spontaneously dissipate and morph into something equitable once slavery has ended. Walker, a Black writer, is unwilling to disentangle identity from achievement, uninterested in preserving White readers' sense of themselves as observers of contemporary history rather than participants in history's creation.
Horse racing, like any sport, is a useful medium with which to paint portraits of American culture. Given the incredible domination of the early sport by enslaved and free Black men, racing is especially illuminating of eighteenth and nineteenth-century African-American life and society. Walker utilizes angles as diverse as religion (both American Christian and African diasporic), military service, fashion, and horsemanship to depict Murphy’s rise. The searing realities of the first Black pro athletes are placed alongside quieter moments, personal reflections, the fact of the Murphys' childlessness presented simply and without sentiment. The result is both origin story and elegy, boot-strap fairy tale and keenly calculated awareness of image. Murphy of the brilliant hands, Murphy the technician, is as alive as Murphy the son building something his parents never had, and Murphy the husband negotiating his and his wife's places in their world, and Murphy the man among men intent on reading only from the text of his skin.
I waited for white folks to look at me
and see a man.
To catch me near a stable
without my racing silks on--
and not want to put a shovel in my hand.
A bit dismaying to hear of certain traditions in the sport, extant or otherwise; dismaying, on a rolling and continual basis, to start from a place of charity when confronted with Things That Just Don't Make Sense, only to find the same old culprits at base. Murphy’s grave was unmarked, the greatness of his name robbed in death and his legacy shattered by a White imperative that systematically drove African-American riders out of the sport. His remains were re-interred in a place of honor, yet honor is a double-edged sword for people whose genius is rarely separated from their marginalization. Murphy at the gates of the Kentucky Horse Park: hero or token? Where are the Black jockeys, an op-ed asks every now and then, hashing out the decline of Murphy, Hamilton, Simms, Winkfield, and the rest, naming C.J. McMahon, Kendrick Carmouche, and DeShawn Parker as the lone inheritors. Cheryl White, foremother and contemporary and lone paladin all in one, typically rates a mention during Women's History Month, not Black History Month. Black Cajun jocks are relegated to a chapter within a book that might rightfully center their history and experiences. If and when there are contemporary, active African-American riders beyond those known names, how often do we hear about them? What are their names, what tracks do they ride, are they destined to slip between the cracks in this sport of fragments and motley, so resistant to even the immediacy and all-seeing eye of social media?
Like the rest of us, racing isn’t immune to the tendency to wring its hands and bemoan the state of things, as though there is no recourse, no hope for a different future, no changing leads. Frank X Walker isn't interested in those habits, either, and the proof is in his poetry: immersive, oblique or bold, confident of the author's connection to the past and his right to speak to our present moment.
Yours among the 796s (and also the 300s),
Diana