Horse Girls

by Halimah Marcus

  A moonscape of white limestone surrounded our barn, with patches of prickly pear cacti and stubby cedar trees. Much of Texas, including my area, is not actual desert, though, full of grassy ranch land. In fact, many old Westerns that take place in Texas were filmed in the more dramatic-looking desert landscapes of New Mexico or Arizona. We were in a frequent state of drought—our well went dry one summer and people accidentally set land on fire by flicking a cigarette onto the ground or burning trash at the wrong time. We had outdoor cats that lived and died at the permission of wild dogs, and a parade of goats that tore up the grass by its roots so it never grew back again.

  Being out in the country seemed to define everything about us. Spicewood had just a few small houses, a few trailers, and a few people in it. The fact that our house wasn’t on wheels put us at the top of the socioeconomic ladder. Our area had no grocery store, no school, no library, no courthouse, no movie theater, no downtown square, nothing that would bind a community. We were forever “going into town” to do things, “town” being either Austin, which was thirty-five miles away, or Marble Falls, which was fifteen miles away. Spicewood was really more of a rural stretch between places you’d actually need to go. Austin proper was too expensive for us, and besides, my father had long wanted to live out in the country. He was raised in Los Angeles and learned to ride a horse on summer trips up in the mountains. As an adult he lived in cities of various sizes and was eventually ready to have his own little piece of land. On top of that, he grew up watching those very Westerns set in Texas. His childhood coincided with the golden age of those films, which planted the seed for his dream of having horses one day.

  Our mailbox sat on the nearest four-lane road about a mile away from our house, and we had a route number, not a street number like my suburban schoolmates. Sometimes I rode Leo to pick up the mail. Until I got to college, I had never ordered a pizza because no one delivered this far into the country. We had to take our trash into town in the back of our pickup. The school bus couldn’t make it up our rocky, unpaved hill, so my brother and I caught it half a mile away.

  Leo and I practiced barrel racing at home on a flat stretch of dirt, loping through a cloverleaf pattern over and over as I tried to push him faster without nicking any of the three barrels. The idea was to circle each barrel as tightly as possible, which was faster than taking a wide loop around them, but the tighter I turned, the more likely it was that my leg would hit metal. Touching a barrel during a competition added five seconds to your time. Knocking a barrel over, which Leo and I were known to do, was functionally a loss. We practiced keyhole racing, which also had a very tight pattern: gallop in a straight line, then when you reach the top of the “keyhole,” grind to a stop, spin around 180 degrees on the horse’s haunches, and gallop back to the beginning.

  One afternoon I saddled up Buck instead and tried to practice barrel racing him, thinking his speed might give me a competitive edge. I mounted up and Buck immediately started with his jitters. I positioned him at the beginning of the pattern, relaxed the reins, and ever-so-lightly pressed my legs against his sides. I was firm in my seat when he took off, but he circled the first barrel so sharply he stumbled and almost pitched me onto the ground. The second barrel I knocked hard with my leg, toppling it over. The third barrel he tried to skip entirely because he figured the point was to get back to the beginning. Buck may have been fast, but Leo felt more like my friend and teammate, like we were meant to ride together.

  I took some group riding classes with a couple of girls my age from Marble Falls, which my father watched from the sidelines. The classes were led by a hearty, muscular horsewoman who introduced me to the idea of competing, and taught me the ins and outs of Western shows, the rules of barrel racing, and what the judges looked for. She also introduced me to the idea that some girls ride English, jumping and doing dressage, wearing sleek outfits that reminded me of Banana Republic ads. This happened even in Texas, where Western culture is dominant. But that wasn’t for me. I wanted to be a cowgirl. Being a Texan felt like an important part of my identity, and nothing seemed more Texan than being a cowgirl: a tough, capable woman who can do anything a cowboy does. I tried to ignore the fact that the images I’d seen of cowgirls did not feature any curly Afros shoved into unaccommodating cowboy hats. But actually, once upon a time, Black cowboys were commonplace in Texas.

  Texas was very late in freeing its slaves, something I didn’t realize until I was an adult. There may have been a note in our textbook about it, but it certainly wasn’t highlighted in class. News of the Emancipation Proclamation finally reached Galveston on June 19, 1865, more than two years after the signing, which inspired the holiday Juneteenth. I’d never heard of Juneteenth as a kid, even though it was a Texas state holiday, and over time it has gained attention nationwide. After emancipation, some former slaves in Texas found work as ranch hands, using skills they had already developed during slavery. Jim Crow gradually took effect though, beginning after Reconstruction and lasting through the civil rights movement. This rigid segregation put Black cowboys at risk for racial violence and prevented them from eating or staying in many establishments as they herded cattle and otherwise traveled for work. Over time the cattle industry evolved and Texas industrialized. As the twentieth century sped onward with its advancing technology and manufacturing, the cowboy started to feel like a thing of the past, and eventually all that remained in the popular consciousness was a John Wayne–esque white man on a horse.

  Because John Wayne loomed so large in Western films, which were beloved in many parts of Texas long after their heyday, I grew up watching him. My father and I loved him in Red River and Lee Van Cleef in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. I flipped on reruns of Gunsmoke after school. I had no idea back then that Wayne openly supported white supremacy, and I naively fell for his Western-frontier mystique—I couldn’t imagine myself riding English.

  My Western outfit from bottom to top included cowboy boots, jeans, a belt I’d made myself out of cloth and metal trinkets, a red-collared shirt, and a black cowboy hat. And my frizzy, coarse, dark-brown curls were slicked back with fistfuls of gel, stuffed into a red barrette at the nape of my neck. Barrettes were no match for my hair—I regularly bent the thin metal out of shape trying to force them closed. Part of me longed to look like an archetypal rodeo queen with long, straight, flowing blond hair and sparkling blue eyes. It seemed to me that’s what a winner looked like.

  Even if my physical characteristics didn’t poise me for success, I assembled my outfit and joined 4-H, the nationwide youth development program. In my area, 4-H kids were mostly known for raising farm animals like rabbits, chickens, and cows, and having them judged at fairs to win prizes. But the 4-H I joined was specifically a horse club that put on Western shows.

  At one of those shows, I led Leo into the ring on foot, and we lined up next to the other contestants, all 4-H kids. A judge circled each horse, checking for physical defects, looking to see if the four hooves lined up in a perfect rectangle, noting head carriage. Contestants with smooth blond hair, glittery pink eyeshadow, and confident smiles walked their horses out a few paces to show off their gait.

  That day Leo was even more low-octane than usual. I repeatedly jiggled his lead rope to wake him up when the judge wasn’t looking in my direction. By the time the judge came to us, I was standing tall with perfect posture, but Leo’s head hung almost in the dirt. He was falling asleep, his back hoof cocked in relaxation, swatting at flies with his tail. On top of that, Leo had a not-so-muscular build and back hooves that splayed out to the sides. To no one’s surprise, we didn’t even place in that event. My father was in the audience, and as I walked out of the arena, he gave me notes. He said I’d worked Leo too hard before the event, so it was on me that he was so tired.

  I didn’t actually have a trainer, meaning someone who worked with me one-on-one to prepare my horse for competitions. I only had my weekly group riding classes, which taught basic technique. My father learned a lot
from watching my classes and shows, quickly becoming well versed enough to weigh in on my performance after every event. That’s the kind of father he was, always pushing his kids to perform at higher levels, no matter the discipline. He spoke very authoritatively, like the professor that he was, and I rarely questioned him.

  Over time I realized that Leo and I shared a chronic problem: neither of us seemed to have the chops or the pedigree to be elite competitors, to really be taken seriously in this horse world. I couldn’t do anything about our pedigree—something determined at birth that no amount of hard work can change—but occasionally I was convinced that we had the chops. After the falling-asleep incident, I took a first-place trophy in barrel racing. Admittedly I wasn’t up against many other riders, but still, my father said I’d done well, which made us both smile. This called for bacon cheeseburgers at Dairy Queen.

  Competition is a long-standing part of 4-H, though its origins were actually more focused on engaging young people to help modernize old farming practices. The very first 4-H club was formed in Ohio and was known as the Tomato Club or the Corn Growing Club. This was in 1902, so for decades, 4-H clubs were segregated by both race and gender. Girls’ clubs in Texas offered lessons on canning, food preparation, home economics, and even sewing, while boys concentrated more on the organization’s core agricultural mission. When it was founded, Black kids were not barred from the organization altogether, but they held separate meetings and couldn’t compete in state or county fairs alongside their white counterparts. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 finally outlawed segregated clubs, and by the time I joined 4-H, it had been integrated for only thirty years.

  But even now, change comes slowly and unsteadily. The Iowa chapter of 4-H was accused of racism numerous times in recent years, culminating in a 2019 lawsuit, according to an investigation by the Des Moines Register. 4-H’s first Latino leader at the state level in Iowa, John-Paul Chaisson-Cárdenas, alleged harassment and systemic discriminatory practices amid his push for greater diversity.

  Of course I didn’t know any of this when I went to my first 4-H meeting at age twelve. I didn’t know about the organization’s rocky path to integration, nor did it occur to me that I would have been relegated to a different, segregated club a few decades earlier. One aspect of 4-H that has always been firmly in place is the organization’s emphasis on achievement. Participants are expected to deliver results. Way back in 1919, contests and prizes became an integral part of Texas 4-H, highlighted by its girls’ club motto, “To Make the Best Better.”

  Almost eighty years later, I entered the ring wanting to achieve a new personal best, and often walked out feeling like I had failed. But the ring gave me something that I didn’t have elsewhere: a sense of knowing how I was being judged. In middle school, especially when it came to my social life, it felt like the ground was constantly shifting. One day in the courtyard between classes, my group of white girlfriends upped their usual teasing about my appearance. The leader of our group, someone I considered a friend, routinely called me names—dirty, scary, rat’s nest, Medusa, Don King, Sideshow Bob—but that day she reached out, grabbed a fistful of my hair, and yanked as hard as she could. I yelped, surprised by the jolt of pain. I stared at her, holding my head, trying to understand the violence that had just been committed against me. Then she did it again, harder and harder, until I thought she was going to rip hair from my scalp. The other girls in our group cackled with the excitement of a throwdown. Soon I was grappling at her hair, but her smooth blond locks slipped right through my fingers. The bell rang and we shuffled off to class, me behind everyone else, my supposed friend announcing she had won.

  The white boys in our class used to say I had pubic hair all over my head. They said I was an idiot who’d stuck her finger in a light socket. Unsurprisingly, I had never kissed a boy, and wouldn’t for years.

  My teachers were more diplomatic, but they could see I was unpopular. Bless her little heart, they seemed to say, with their soft eyes and weak smiles.

  My hair became a focus for me. I tried to tame it into something that would slip effortlessly into a barrette, that could be held up with thin little bobby pins, that would cascade down my back, that would reflect sunlight, that looked “clean” to the girls and boys at school who told me to try using shampoo for once in my life. I took forty-five-minute showers. I studied the pages of Seventeen magazine like they were notes for a final exam. I tried products like Frizz Be Gone and Frizz Ease. I got my hair thinned at Supercuts. It didn’t make any difference.

  I was better at my actual schoolwork than the social politics that played out between classes. I had been in the gifted-and-talented program for years, although my father informed me one day that these special classes were actually kind of silly and not very rigorous. I made the honor roll and got As in my honors classes. I entered the science fair and placed fourth in my category. When I came home from the fair, my father rolled his eyes and asked why I’d done such a flimsy experiment about mares and geldings liking apples or carrots, which had no real science behind it. This had not occurred to me. I was embarrassed and hid my ribbon out of view. I was invited to take the SAT in seventh grade, but I scored so low that I didn’t even come close to qualifying for the smart-kid summer camp, where my older brother went every year. I genuinely liked being in class, and thought it was fun to ride horseback, but my father’s critical gaze cast a pall over these simple pleasures, and I had an increasingly hard time enjoying them.

  After the hair pulling, I asked my parents to take me out of public school. I told them I didn’t want to be bullied anymore. They were surprised, as I wasn’t in the habit of coming home from school and telling them how exactly I’d been humiliated that day, but I knew they’d support me and wouldn’t blame me for the cruelty of other children. I also knew that they prioritized education above all and would be happy to help me focus on my studies. So I spent eighth grade at home, with no classmates and my parents as my teachers.

  Homeschooling was, in my case, very focused on math and English, which were the subjects my parents knew best. I woke up, got dressed, and ate a bowl of cereal when my older brother did, but instead of going off to a school campus with him, I went into my parents’ bedroom to start an algebra lesson. I sat in a chair beside my father’s desk and he read the lesson aloud, verbatim from the textbook, then sent me to my room to complete a few dozen exercises. When I came back, he graded them quickly in front of me. He never needed an answer key. His standards were higher than I’d ever seen from a teacher; when my older brother exhausted his high school’s math curriculum by taking AP Calculus as a sophomore, my father had him take calculus again at the university because, evidently, the high school did not do the topic justice.

  When I got more than a couple of answers wrong, sometimes my father said I wasn’t really trying, or that I was being lazy. When I got all the answers right, we moved on to the next lesson. Math class lasted about three hours every morning. It was reminiscent of him evaluating my performance at Western shows, except that math was truly his specialty. At home he got to be both teacher and judge.

  The first time I encountered a math lesson of his that was too difficult for me to understand, I was sitting alone at my little desk, dripping fat tears onto my loose-leaf paper. I knew my father would be disappointed by my inability to grasp the exercises, but even worse, he would think less of me for crying. He had lectured me many times about how we should never feel things like anger, exasperation, jealousy, or self-pity, which he said were unproductive. I dried my tears and left my barely complete, tearstained paper on his desk with a note apologizing for crying. He read my apology while I was elsewhere doing another lesson. He wrote below it that he loved me and thanked me for my honesty. I felt a little better upon reading those words, but I also understood that failing and crying were unacceptable in his eyes, and I was not supposed to do those things again.

  After math class each day, I ate a peanut butter sandwich with tortilla chips for l
unch and then went down to the barn to practice racing with Leo. In the afternoon I spent another few hours on English with my mother. She assigned me novels and short stories to read, and then gave me questions to answer in essay format. I was not a fast reader, but my mother was patient. Once I read an excerpt from The Red Badge of Courage and got a reading comprehension question wrong, but even worse, I didn’t understand why the correct answer was correct. Her frustration was momentary and then I could see she was back to loving me, or maybe she’d never stopped. I always felt a little more relaxed in class with my mother, like there was less at stake. I could stumble and grow in fits and starts instead of needing to perform at my peak at all times.

  My mother wasn’t a horsewoman, and 4-H was not in her wheelhouse—in fact she was a bit afraid of horses—but she was a doting cheerleader, whether I brought home a ribbon or not. She seemed to understand that life was filled with ups and downs, and couldn’t possibly be one long upward trajectory. My mother was a child of the Great Migration, having been born in the Mississippi Delta and then raised in Detroit, and knew the push and pull of hardship and perseverance. In contrast, my father had all the educational, financial, and social advantages of growing up white when segregation was still a legal practice. My parents met at the University of Michigan, both lovers of books and art, but they came from very different worlds that came out in how they approached parenting.

  My father didn’t understand why I hung my head when Leo and I left the ring without a ribbon. He didn’t understand why I got frustrated with schoolwork, or why I spent an hour doing my hair, only to emerge from the bathroom in tears. When I sulked, he snapped, “Pull yourself together!” or, “You’re losing your cool!” I felt my permanent record being tarnished.

  Still, I kept having victories, tiny marks of improvement. My father watched me compete in a “trail” event at a Western show that was much larger than we’d anticipated. Trail was essentially an obstacle course, and if Leo had one useful quality here, it was his unflappable calm. He would walk over bumpy bridges and go backward through mazes like it was no big deal, things that would spook many other animals. I came out of that event with a shiny, fire-engine-red, second-place ribbon, and my father ran over to me beaming. He congratulated me on performing so well against so many older competitors with their expensive animals, some with professional trainers even, and I had the ribbon to prove it. My cheeks hurt from smiling and I could feel the blood rushing through my veins. I felt a great sense of accomplishment for placing, but more than that, I’d made my father proud.