Horse Girls

by Halimah Marcus

  One sweltering afternoon at another large show, I was back at the bottom of the pack. Leo and I had performed sloppily all day, my hair was a frizzy mess from the humidity, and I was wiping away tears.

  My father pointed to a young Mexican girl nearby and asked, “Why can’t you be more like her?” I didn’t know this girl, but I’d been noticing her all day. She had thick, dark hair stuffed under a cowboy hat. Her distracted horse stepped out of line, tossed his head high, whinnied loudly, and otherwise threw every event. She placed dead last in everything. The girl couldn’t stop smiling.

  She was like me, but happy.

  A few minutes later she walked past me and said, maybe to no one in particular, “Isn’t this so much fun?” before disappearing into the crowd.

  I was stunned by her maturity, that she could survive, even enjoy, this much failure. Or maybe she didn’t consider it failure. I was taken with the idea that I might make a mistake without it going onto my permanent record. I wanted to let go of all the tension I was storing inside my shoulders and finally do something that young girls were supposed to do: have fun.

  As we were packing up to go home, my father asked me if I had what it took to continue doing these competitions. I’d had one too many sulking moods at this point and he was fed up. “Maybe you should just quit,” he said. This was a test; quitting was a cardinal sin in our house. I slumped down into the passenger seat of our black pickup, exhausted from riding, from crying, from aching to be better.

  The competitions slowly faded out. After a year of homeschooling I started at a private high school and my priorities shifted. My father seemed nervous that I wouldn’t get into a “decent college,” so anything that didn’t resonate on applications took a back seat. I was accepted into the National Honor Society and got an after-school job as a tutor. I doubled down on my other hobby, violin, which I had also been doing competitively since I was eight years old. I ramped up my juries, recitals, and orchestra performances, because my father said that classical music made me a more attractive candidate than barrel racing. At my father’s insistence I applied to a college in the northeast where several of his relatives had gone, and I got in, after which I completed my high school thesis and graduated with honors. By the end of high school, I had taken fourteen standardized tests to get into college: two PSATs, four SATs, four SAT II Subject Tests, and four AP Exams. But because a legacy weighs so much in the college application process, I’ll never know if I was really smart enough to go.

  At some point while I was away at college, my father sold our two horses, and then my parents divorced. I was surprised. Although there had been problems in their marriage, I didn’t think they’d officially call it quits. She moved to Chicago, where her heart had always been, and my father moved into Austin. Our life out in Spicewood was over.

  As a young adult, especially after college when I moved to New York City, most of my friends didn’t know I used to ride. Sometimes I would casually mention barrel racing without realizing this was new information to them, and they would squint at me in disbelief over raspberry martinis in some Manhattan bar that was a world away from dusty Texas. Eventually something called Instagram came along, and with it so many digital tribes, people connecting through their common interests. One day, because I’d been following some accounts connected to prominent Black travelers, I stumbled across photos from Outdoor Afro, a group of Black outdoor enthusiasts that included horseback riders. Besides photographs of myself, I couldn’t remember seeing images of a Black person on a horse before. In one of the Outdoor Afro posts, a young girl in Tennessee held on to the saddle horn with both hands while a grown-up led her horse. The girl’s broad smile seemed to suggest she was experiencing something brand-new, in awe of this animal that was so much bigger than her.

  Seeing that image prompted me to dig around, by which I discovered Cowgirls of Color, a group of Black women who compete in rodeos and aim to inspire young Black girls to do the same. In interviews I watched online, these women spoke openly about being outside the mainstream rodeo culture, some of them starting to ride in their thirties and forties, struggling to gain access to good trainers, hearing people say they don’t have what it takes. I wondered what my childhood would have been like if I’d had access to the robust internet of today, through which I could have seen girls on horses who didn’t look or perform like archetypal rodeo queens. They looked at ease with their natural hair underneath their cowboy hats, gorgeous and free.

  No Regrets

  Jane Smiley

  If I looked through my family tree, I would search in vain for anyone who was obsessed with horses, so I am assuming that it was our TV that did it to me. Black-and-white, there they were, my friend, Flicka, some guy named Roy who rode Trigger, and Fury (which I misunderstood as “Furry”). I paid no attention to the people, except to note that they got to ride and I didn’t. There was one family story about my grandparents’ life on a ranch they owned in Idaho. The ranch was a ways out of town, and it was said that my grandfather and his older brother had seen a storm coming, ridden out to check on the cattle. On their way home it got so cold that they got off their horses and lay down together in a mound of snow in order to not freeze to death. I had no idea if this was true, and I was grateful that my grandfather had survived, but no one ever told me the names of the horses, which was the thing I really wanted to know.

  And then, around the same time that we got the TV, someone set up a pony-ride ring not far from our apartment. We stopped there as often as I could talk my mom into it. I was strapped into a Western saddle, sent at a trot around a small maze. I was hooked. Now that I could “ride,” all I needed for perfect happiness was a horse friend, one who lived in our backyard or, perhaps, in the garage. I thought that this horse friend would be much easier to understand than the kids and the teachers at school—I was an only child, and for only children, social interactions can be head-scratchers. As I got to be a more sophisticated reader, I saw that I was right—horses in books were always there for you, even if they needed a little time to get acquainted. My favorite was Silver Birch, about a girl on a farm in Wisconsin who sees a horse running loose in the woods and uses the carrot rather than the stick to attract it, claim it, and ride it off into the sunset.

  I am sure that my mother thought I was crazy, but she was patient, and she would take me to local farms that offered rides once in a while. She also sent me to a day camp where we rode in old cavalry saddles, mostly at a walk. My fifth-grade teacher ran another camp, down in the Ozarks, where my favorite trail ran across the Current River and up into the hills.

  Just when I was beginning sixth grade, my mother remarried, and her new husband not only had money, he also had a kind heart, and I was allowed to take lessons every Friday afternoon at a stable that specialized in Saddlebreds, not far from our house. I was also sent to summer camp up in Wisconsin—more horses, more trail rides, a wilder landscape.

  The first girl I met who shared my obsession was Dinah Stix. One of the privileges of my new school in sixth grade was that a pony lived there, and two sixth-grade girls were assigned the task of taking care of it. Dinah knew what she was doing, and sometimes I would get to be her assistant. She was more a guide than a friend, and seemed dedicated to her hobbies more than her social life. One Sunday morning in the spring, we went over to feed the pony, and there was a foal, standing by its mom, perfectly healthy. Dinah said that no one had known the mare was in foal when she came to the school, and no one had wondered why her belly was bulging, either. But we got to pet the foal and take care of the mare. Dinah told me all about real riding—Three-Day Eventing and Pony Club. I switched stables and began taking jumping lessons. But I was still an observer—of the horses, of the trainers, of the other girls who were much better in the saddle than I was, of the racehorses from across the river who wintered over in our barn (and were subjected to cruel treatments—blistering, pin-firing, and nerving to make them appear sound enough to run in the summer). In the late
winter, when it was too cold or snowy outside to ride in the arena, the grooms brought the recovering racehorses out of their stalls and threw us on them. Our job was to ride them in a line up and down the aisle at a walk, which got me used to Thoroughbreds and wasn’t dangerous. I continued to read horse books, and the girls and boys in the books continued to make horse friends (my favorite authors and illustrators were Marguerite Henry, Wesley Dennis, and C. W. Anderson). I was not making any horse friends, but now I could post, canter, and jump a few small jumps.

  And then my parents joined a recently founded club across the Missouri River that specialized in English sports—skeet and trapshooting, horse riding. I had no idea why they joined, but I enjoyed the horses and the landscape beyond all things. That summer, a horse appeared at the barn who immediately drew my gaze—a tall dark bay Thoroughbred mare, sturdy, graceful, and beautiful. Her name was Rivertown Gal, and for some reason that I didn’t understand, her owner never rode her. Dinah would come with me to the club and ride, and I was allowed to ride the bay mare. Sometimes we rode in the small arena and other times we rode all over the grounds—to the bluffs overlooking the river, into the valleys, along the edges of the fields. I was thrilled and happy, and the following spring, I proved my love of the horse after I broke my arm high-jumping in my track-and-field PE class by visiting her at her owners’ house, down the hill from the stables where we rode the racehorses. I took her for hand walks around the property and the neighborhood. I was devoted to her, and my parents bought her for me. All summer, I went to Strathalbyn, the club across the Missouri, as many times as I could get my grandfather to drive me, and rode Rivertown Gal, sometimes with someone else, sometimes alone. My best memory is of a clear summer day, a trail ride when my mare and I walked up a hill out of the woods, then wandered around among the blackberry bushes, me picking and eating ripe blackberries, her snatching bites of rich grass.

  I enjoyed riding her, loved her looks, and came to ride her more skillfully, but I had no sense that she was my friend. When I showed up at the barn, she would sometimes look at me, but usually she would continue to eat her hay. If I sat in her stall, she would ignore me. It was not that she had no relationship with me, it was that none of my horse books had taught me to know what that relationship, realistically, might be, and no one around me, instructors, grooms, friends, ever talked about making a connection. Human/horse interactions were practical—horses were to serve and obey and we were to get them to do what we wanted them to do, often with the whip and the spur, sometimes with the carrot. Most of my instructors were men, some of whom had been trained in the US Cavalry. My guess is that they were not encouraged to connect with the horses they rode, but to see them as instruments of war (as a point of information, the cavalry as a horse-riding battalion was disbanded after World War II) rather than friends.

  I became adept enough to go fox hunting sometimes with the local hunt—Bridlespur. The day was Thanksgiving, the ground was wet. We followed the other riders over a fence, then through a field. We made a slight turn and Rivertown Gal slipped, fell, and stood up, hobbling. The fall had broken her stifle joint. A few days later she was put down. I kept riding, but in some sense, my dream had died with Rivertown Gal, and I stopped riding completely when I went off to college, Vassar, which, unlike a few other colleges, had no riding program. I thought I was done with that, and to be done with it was rather common—horse girls didn’t often turn into horsewomen if they didn’t have many skills, and I didn’t. I wasn’t going to make it as a competitive rider, and I wasn’t going to make it as an instructor, and I was too tall to make it as a jockey (as if . . . ). I didn’t even read horse books anymore. I was a grown-up.

  I didn’t ride for twenty-five years. By the time I was forty-three, I had a career, three children, two houses, a love of cooking (though not of cleaning), a love of travel, a love of writing (eight published books, a Pulitzer, plenty of support) and of reading. My life was full. In the summers, my husband and I took the family to a house on a lake in northern Wisconsin where he fished and I swam or hiked about. My son had been born in the fall, two days after my own birthday. To lose the weight, I had bought myself a treadmill. It didn’t work. One day in late July, I was driving around the north woods, looking for a woman who sold baby toys. I had my son in his car seat. I turned down the wrong road and there was a stable, with an arena, jumps, and turnouts. I was dumbfounded, since this was lake country, not horse country. I got my son out of the car seat and went into the barn, where I found no one, then around the barn to the arena, where a man was giving a lesson. Almost immediately, a woman showed up. They were friendly, professional, younger than I was. Since the treadmill hadn’t worked and I knew I needed the exercise, I asked if I might take lessons, and they were happy to give them to me. When I showed up the next day in some outfit that I had put together, they lent me a helmet, and once I got into the saddle and began walking and trotting around, I could feel my body remembering what it was supposed to do—heels down, chin up, straight posture, light hand, sit deep. I was amazed that the skills seemed to be coming back. The next day, they put me on a fourteen-year-old ex-racehorse, dirty white, tall, good-looking. His gaits were smooth and I liked him. When I returned the day after that and approached his stall, he looked right at me and nickered. Completely unexpectedly, I had found my horse friend. I fell in love, bought him, named him Tick Tock. The excess weight that the treadmill could do nothing for came off in two weeks.

  Perhaps as an acknowledgment of my new horse’s wide-ranging experiences, I called him “Mr. T.” I knew he had ended his racing career in Chicago. There was evidence of a suspensory injury on his left front leg. I knew he had been retrained and sold to George and Tina, the owners of the stable. A few months after I bought him, I looked under his upper lip and wrote down the number and letters that were tattooed there and sent them off to the Jockey Club. The report they sent back was impressive—fifty-two starts, $165,000 in winnings. What was more impressive was, according to the vet, that the conformation of his legs was perfect, and apart from the evidence of the suspensory injury, he had no soundness issues, and more important than that, he was born in Germany, had been trained and raced in France (I was amused that one of the races he won was called the “Prix du Nabob”), and then he raced in the US, on the East Coast and the West Coast, before ending up in Chicago. A world traveler! My old fascination with racing, and with Thoroughbreds, came rushing back, enhanced by my new horse’s evident sophistication. Mr. T was my model—good temperament, excellent conformation, a stayer rather than a sprinter, followed by a pleasant retirement as a versatile riding horse. I thought I might try breeding a racehorse or two—had no idea what I was doing, and if I had, if I could go back and do it over, I would do it for one reason only—what I observed and learned about horses and their connections to humans.

  The first horse I bred was born in 1996, and the last one in 2007. I chose the first broodmare I bought, Biosymmetree, because she was the daughter of Big Spruce, who was known for kindness, good looks, longevity, and winning plenty of money. I went to the California farm where Biosymmetree lived; they walked her around and trotted her. She was graceful and sound. When I put her back in the stall, she turned her head, looked at me, set her chin on my shoulder. I was smitten. I bred her to another stayer (second in the Belmont Stakes, with plenty of other wins) and in the spring of 1997, the darling was born. His registered name was Sylvanshine. I called him Jackie. He was a dark bay who even as a day-old foal had a spring in his step and a curiosity about what was going on—mom was eating hay, Jackie was staring down the hill through the bars of the pen.

  In the meantime, Mr. T. and I continued to connect. When I moved to California, I kept him in my backyard. He would watch me, greet me, come when I called. I would get on him and ride him idly down our road with the dogs (a Great Dane and a Jack Russell) coming along. If anything strange happened (as in, the Great Dane running into a neighbor’s backyard and stealing a chicken), he wou
ld stop and stand quietly while I got off and sorted the situation out. Yes, I fell off him once and broke my ankle, but it wasn’t his fault—he turned and I was out of balance and slid off. He let me ride him anywhere—into the howling cold wind down dirt roads in Iowa, into the hills and the woods in California, over jumps in arenas and on event courses. He continued to nicker when he saw me. He did not seem to like my husband, and when my husband left me and the guy I came to love showed up to fix the paddock fence, Mr. T followed him everywhere—sniffing the back of his neck, looking into his toolbox, watching him hammer the railings onto the posts. After that, he was much friendlier toward my new beau than he had been toward my ex. It made me laugh, but I also respected his perspicacity. He taught me that connection is a form of equine intelligence, a way of understanding consequences—if I was kind to him, he would be kind to me; if I attempted to understand him, he would do the same.

  But let’s turn that around. It seemed to me that he knew that if he was kind to me, I would be kind to him, and if he attempted to understand me, I would attempt to understand him. I am sure my childhood instructors would have sneered at this idea, but if you look at horses in herds, they evidently know that they each have jobs, that it is best to get along, and getting along involves reciprocation. At the very least, if you see a herd of horses gallop down a hill, they hardly ever bump each other—they know who’s where and how to stay in their own spaces, even at a run. Bucks, pinned ears, bites, and kicks are communication devices, as are standing close to one another, mutual fly swatting, a horse curving his neck around another horse, nuzzling. A whinny can be a warning, but also a greeting.