Horse Girls

by Halimah Marcus

  Then we went home, and our lives resumed, horselessly.

  I didn’t ride much for more than two years after that, until I got myself assigned a story about a horseback safari in Botswana’s Okavango Delta. The riding requirements were:

  be able to ride all the gaits

  be able to post the trot for ten minutes straight

  be able to gallop out of danger.

  Danger meant a run-in with big game, so what rule number three really meant was that you couldn’t fall off. I decided to take a couple of lessons before I left just to make sure I wasn’t too rusty, and promptly fell off, landing on a jump. My ankle blew up to the size of a grapefruit, and my foot turned black. It was mostly healed by the time I got to Botswana, but I hadn’t been able to take any more lessons, so my first time mounting up in a wild floodplain crowded with elephants and hippos and lions and Cape buffalo was my first time mounting up at all since landing in the dirt.

  I didn’t give up horses for domesticity. Horses gave me the nerve to create an unorthodox life. In 2019, before COVID-19 would put a stop to things, I spent a total of five months away from home, mostly alone, and while I would say without hesitation that I love to travel, I will also admit that I feel dread before every trip. I’m so comfortable in my little bungalow in Los Angeles, with my little routine, in my city with my friends and the hiking trails I know and the coffee shops I like. Why should I leave these things? Why should I take risks when risks are scary? But I’ve become subject to an experiment of my own design, conditioning myself through rewards yielded by past risks. I don’t mean the reward of continuing to live after going over the Falls in a barrel, nor the thrill-seeker’s rush of celebratory hormones. I mean the reward of an expanded life, of possibility. Boldness is not an absolute, like a time for running a fixed distance. It means something different to all of us. I’m still afraid of most of the things I’ve always been afraid of, but the fear no longer obscures possibility as much as it once did. Fear is about a loss of control, but boldness is also partly about surrender. I think I am seeking surrender. I know I am seeking awe.

  Yes, we startled some lions out of the bushes in Botswana, but they ran away from us. The scariest animals turned out to be elephants, those gentle, empathetic, matriarchal animals that, like horses, move me with their size. Elephants in general are protective of themselves and their young, and plenty of the individuals and families in the Okavango Delta are refugees from poaching in Zimbabwe and have even more reason to be unfriendly. Some people speculate, too, that elephants might have a collective, passed-down memory of being hunted from horseback. So I don’t begrudge the enormous bull who lifted his head and flapped his ears at us, considering a charge. Our guide, in front of me at the head of the line, studied him calmly, assessing his body language. I could feel my pulse in my neck, my wrists. The animal was so big and so close and so obviously unhappy with us. What would come of this latest risk? Where would it lead?

  “Turn your horses,” the guide said quietly. “And get ready to run.”

  Unconquered

  Braudie Blais-Billie

  Growing up on the Seminole Tribe of Florida’s Hollywood Reservation, everyone called us “the Frenchies.” This was because, since I was around eight years old, my mother—a French-Canadian woman conspicuously named France—raised me and my two younger siblings as a single parent on the Rez. Blond-haired and blue-eyed, she stood out at every basketball game and community holiday dinner. “That’s your mom?” my neighbor asked when she picked me up from an after-school playdate down the street. “I look more like my dad,” I offered. It was true. My father and I had the same almond-shaped eyes and sleek brunette ponytail hanging down our backs. Reserved yet mischievous, he oscillated between cracking jokes and reading World War II books in his room; from him, I inherited my quiet, curious nature.

  Most times, “the Frenchies” felt like a warm recognition. Our ekòoshes cooed the nickname with love when we walked through their doors for birthday cakes or sleepovers with the cousins. Other times, it hung in the air like something rotten. When used by certain people on the Rez, “the Frenchies” was a sharp-edged epithet that meant “not like us.” It also complemented the less creative nickname we heard in Canada whenever we visited my mother’s Québécois family: “les Indiens.” As I got older, each label became more uneasy for different reasons.

  My siblings, Tia and Dante, and I were born without a Clan. A traditional extended family unit, Clans are matrilineal, meaning that because our mom is white, we’ll never have one. It meant that “the Frenchies” were not invited to partake in ceremonial medicine like the Green Corn Dance, that we were always considered “half,” that we were not wholly welcomed in the place we call home. Because our Seminole father, July, was absent from our childhoods, his mother—our empóshe, Grandma Hannah—would visit on weekends to feed us candy and teach us the culture that France couldn’t and July didn’t.

  “We’re unconquered people,” Grandma Hannah said. Like my mom, she stood around five feet tall, and she was commanding despite her soft-spokenness and salt-and-pepper hair. On the days Grandma Hannah picked me up from my Head Start preschool program, she told the legend of our ancestor, Chief Osceola. Osceola was a warrior who led Seminole resistance forces against the US military in the nineteenth century. He famously drove a dagger through the 1832 Treaty of Payne’s Landing, refusing to concede the Tribe’s Florida lands in exchange for “Indian Territory” west of the Mississippi. It was a heroic, radical act that quite literally made it possible for us to be here today, thriving in Florida. Through her eyes, I saw our little neighborhood of brown relatives and cookie-cutter homes built by the government’s Department of Housing and Urban Development as a blessing.

  It was Grandma Hannah who brought me to my first rodeo. From an early age, I passively absorbed rodeo culture as an integral part of Rez culture; it was evident in the rusty horse trailers parked in neighbors’ driveways and the Tribal Councilmen who donned cowboy hats and Western boots at every public event.

  As an adult, years after Grandma Hannah’s introduction, I learned that the connection between my people and horses comes from a long line of cattle keeping. Before moving into gaming in the 1970s—both my dad and Grandma Hannah worked stints at the Seminole Classic Casino—the Seminole Tribe of Florida provided for our people through enterprises including citrus groves, tourism, tobacco shops, and, most prominently, cattle. Over the past century, the Tribe has risen as a major player in the cattle industry. Seminole Pride, the Tribe’s beef brand, is a sizable contributor to Florida’s beef cattle herd—the tenth largest in the nation, according to a 2016 report by the US Department of Agriculture. When I drive through any of the more rural Seminole reservations—like the winding fourteen-mile Snake Road that cuts through the Everglades to the Big Cypress Rez—I see horses and cattle dot the swampy pastures.

  As a child, I wandered the rodeo grounds sweating through the South Floridian heat in my traditional patchwork skirt. I watched in awe as Tribal members competed in events like barrel racing, bronc riding, and “stray gathering,” in which a team on horseback captured runaway calves with lassos. “One day you’ll be down there,” Grandma Hannah declared as we sat in the bleachers chewing warm frybread and sipping cold ponche, the Mikasuki word for “soda” that I thought was universal until I started going to my white friends’ houses. She noticed my ease around horses, that counterintuitive confidence required to handle a potentially lethal animal. My mom had been taking me to riding lessons since I was six, where I was encouraged to lead the ponies myself and stay attuned to their body language. Up in the bleachers, I held my breath as steeds swiveled around barrels, running against the clock, exhilarated by the possibility that it could be me whipping through the loose dirt of that arena. At the rodeo, I wasn’t just a “Frenchie”; I could be another rider.

  My parents separated when I was in third grade. My dad’s alcohol abuse—an illness that cycled, destructive and dormant, througho
ut my parents’ marriage—had reached the point of unmanageable. “Daddy’s going to live somewhere else from now on,” my mom told me as I stood by the front door. She crouched down to meet my eyes and rubbed my back as Tia and Dante wailed on the couch. When the school year ended, my mom packed us up and we spent the entire summer at my grandparent’s house in Québec, Canada. My dad didn’t come.

  That was the year I started riding at a new show jumping barn called Fox Run Ranch in Davie, a few towns over from the Hollywood Rez. My mom rode English, so I wanted to ride English, and once I discovered you could jump a horse, I wanted to do that more than anything; it seemed unreal, like the closest thing to flying. Though the Rez had its own stables, they didn’t give English-style lessons, and there were no English categories like hunting or dressage at the Seminole rodeos. As Grandma Hannah realized I wouldn’t be barrel racing, our rodeo outings became less regular until she eventually stopped bringing me at all.

  Though he was never consistently in my life, my dad’s absence from our home was a palpable sore made raw over and over again by Grandma Hannah’s dwindling visits and the prying questions from neighbors and classmates. The specifics of this period are a painful blur, an amnesia that, when revisited, allows only feelings of loneliness, immense anxiety, and sadness. A hardening resentment toward my dad took root; I was too young to understand the complexities of his illness and instead interpreted his drinking as a betrayal. How could he do this to me? Soon enough, I realized that when I was on a horse, synced to its gait in the arena, my grief became so distant I barely recognized it.

  Summers in rural Québec, far away from the humid stench of Hollywood and the fighting between my parents, were an escape into a simpler world. My mom’s parents, Grandmaman Jeanine and Grandpapa Gabriel, lived in a trailer-turned-house on 2.5 acres that seemed to extend infinitely into the woods and dirt roads of the surrounding farmland. It was located in a small town called Saint-Isidore, a cool forty-minute drive outside of Québec City. We called it the Canada house.

  I can close my eyes and still see every inch of the Canada house and its property. The front porch overlooked a small, man-made pond and waterfall that Grandmaman decorated with flowers and stones collected from the Chaudière River a few miles west. The yard was a cluster of evergreens and birch trees, some with branches swollen around the rope of multiple swings that Grandpapa fastened with sturdy chunks of wood as seats. Behind the house, a stretch of wooden fence contained a pasture of rolling grass and dirt. To the right side of the house, there was a small barn painted white and green. Throughout its days, that barn housed chickens, rabbits, mini goats, and horses.

  Despite their years of owning and managing motels in South Florida, neither Grandmaman nor Grandpapa spoke fluent English. This was due in part to the nature of their business, which consisted entirely of Québécois snowbirds, who escaped the harsh winters of Canada en masse to the beaches of Hollywood, Dania Beach, and Fort Lauderdale. Though French was my first language, my mother spoke to me exclusively in English once I started pre-K, and my proficiency never really evolved past that of a child. Simple phrases like “je voudrais” and “est-ce que je peaux” carried my siblings and me through most interactions with our grandparents, which revolved around daily activities like family meals, watching TV, and, most importantly, Grandpapa’s horses.

  He owned three. There were two retired racing Quarter Horses, the well-behaved Storm and the sweet but sometimes mischievous La Fille Fille. Their sleek, brown coats and elongated features distinguished them as the twin beauties of the barn. But it was Petit Prince, a stocky, temperamental pony with an unruly black mane, who was the star of the show. He was almost half the size of Storm and La Fille Fille, but he was staunchly the alpha. One of Petit Prince’s favorite power moves was pushing the poor Quarter Horses aside with bites and kicks to the rear whenever sugary treats were within reach.

  Storm, La Fille Fille, and Petit Prince were always Grandpapa’s favorite pets, always his most prized. He grew up poor in a small Québécois village where he worked odd jobs and rode local unbroken horses for fun. Horses were a luxury, unobtainable despite his love for them. After years of manual labor and driving semitrucks, he was able to start his own business and move to the States. In his retirement, decades after he first fell in love with horses, he was finally able to possess his own.

  The annual summer Blais family reunion was highly anticipated, yet complicated. Much like at gatherings on my Seminole side, I was constantly being introduced to a handful of new cousins I’d somehow never met before. But even more so than on the Rez, my siblings and I were undoubtedly the outsiders. Well-meaning family members would compliment our thick, dark “indien” hair, our “chinois” eyes, how brown our shoulders and cheeks turned in the sun. Once, I overheard an aunt explain to another that the reason I was able to run through the birches barefooted was because of my Seminole blood. Laughing about it was my best defense against the discomfort. The second-best defense was trying not to think about my Nativeness, drawing as little attention to that part of myself as possible. I knew that these people cared for and loved me deeply—that’s what made it so hard to identify the wound that their casual othering left behind.

  But the unpleasantness dissolved when the evening wound down and my favorite part began: the Petit Prince–drawn carriage. After dinner, Grandpapa would disappear into the barn and, around fifteen minutes later, Petit Prince emerged from its garage door, clacking his hooves on the gravel and towing a little red carriage. If I was lucky, Grandpapa would choose me to sit on his lap and man the long leathery reins that Petit Prince reluctantly obeyed. Year after year, from the time I was four years old to my senior year in high school, every family barbecue or fondue feast on the lawn ended with cake and rides around the property.

  Simply put, our childhood in Québec revolved around horses. As the middle sibling, Tia was old enough to accompany me, the oldest, on secret missions into the fenced-in range where Storm, La Fille Fille, and Petit Prince trotted freely. We shadowed their every move like a team of heavy-breathing zoologists. Making sure my mom or Grandmaman couldn’t see us from the windows, Tia and I scaled the splintery barricade and worked our way slowly toward the horses so as not to spook them. Their pasture was over an acre, so some days we made a game of standing over manure piles and deep hoof marks in secret search of our specimen. We took turns stroking Storm’s flank as he shook off flies and lazily grazed, seeing how far up his tall hide we could reach our fingers.

  Eventually, baby Dante was old enough to be left unattended in my care, which meant I brought them along on these daily equine excursions. I soon regretted this, though, the time Petit Prince bucked and galloped aggravated circles around our bare feet in the mud. High-strung and huddled together, the three of us overwhelmed the pony, triggering his brat behavior. Dante cried as we each took turns making a run for the gate under my nervous direction.

  As unpredictable as this little herd was, we kept showing up. Not even the next-door neighbor’s mares were safe from our outstretched palms and incessant clucking. Every juicy handful of grass and wildflowers, and every apple yanked from the yard’s apple tree, became an offering to our four-legged best friends.

  When I was seven, my mom sent me to horse camp in Breakeyville, a small town fifteen minutes north of the Canada house. There, I was the only English speaker and the only nonwhite person amongst the ten or so campers. It was similar to my experience at the barn I rode at in South Florida, where most of my peers were also white. But in Québec, I grew as a rider. As a kid who was painfully self-conscious of my shitty French accent and what I learned were my obvious “indien” features, the only person I really interacted with was my favorite instructor, Marie.

  One morning, Marie and I spent hours in a one-on-one lesson because I was the only advanced camper who showed up that day. Determined to impress her, I repeated her show jumping exercises over and over again, sweating into my helmet as she raised the poles, my horse fly
ing higher and higher at my command. When I inevitably had my first major fall and ripped a hole in the crotch of my jeans, we just laughed. “It happen to all of us,” she assured me with her thick French Canadian accent and toothy smile. Later, eating limp ham-and-cheese sandwiches with everyone in the tack-turned-lunchroom, I wasn’t even embarrassed by my visible underwear; I was proud to have something to show for my dedication.

  Marie made me a better rider, but Davie’s Fox Run Ranch back in Florida was where I was introduced to a wider equestrian world. Sprawling and slightly run-down, the land sprouted with green overgrowth while white, chalky sand paved the trails and pens. My siblings and I spent most of our time in the covered, rodeo-size arena where we took group lessons and, during horse camp, painted our ponies’ hides with horse-safe glitter and bobbed for apples. Inside jokes were formed with other eager campers and dream ponies were discussed as we groomed our assigned steers from the stable. In Davie, the Blais-Billies weren’t unintelligible foreigners—like at school, we were once again those Seminole kids from Hollywood, familiar but still other.

  At shows, there was occasionally another rider of color from another barn. Still, I couldn’t ignore the chronic suspicion that I didn’t belong or deserve to be there. I was competing against girls with purebreds, shiny new saddles, and pristine uniforms—their wealth rolled off their shoulders in the form of innate self-assurance. Even at our barn, I found myself dodging questions from white riders like, “Which neighborhood do you live in?” or, “What does your dad do?” I was never in the mood to explain what a reservation was or that my dad was an alcoholic who disappeared on benders for weeks at a time. We shared a bond over horses, but we never became close. Distance was my friend when it came to protecting myself from shame or rejection.