By Bridgett M. Davis
Angie’s earliest memory: she is at the track with her father and Ella. She is three, sitting atop a milk crate, wrapped in a warm blanket, the smell of coffee and manure and hay under her nose. She sits stock-still and watches as Ella rides a horse, Butterscotch, around the empty track, their father walking beside her, rubbing the chestnut gelding’s rump. She wants to be on a horse too, and she calls out to them, “I wanna ride! I wanna ride!” but her tiny voice gets lost in the treeless wind. Either that, or they ignore her.
She tried hiding, crawling under the bleachers, determined to make them think she’d gone missing. But they didn’t come looking for her and finally she left her hiding place, returned to her spot on the bleachers, and watched her big sister and daddy circle the track again and again, still hoping for a turn.
“You gotta squeeze tight,” their father said to Ella. “Until you feel her heartbeat in your own legs.”
Another day. More riding lessons. The giant saucer of a track stretched out in revolutions, kicked-up dust hazy in the early morning light. Butterscotch stood erect beside their father as he held the reins. The night before, the entire family had watched this horse race with elegant speed, lithe rider crouched above in a perfect arc, Butterscotch’s slim ankles a blur of motion. She came in third.
“You cannot show hesitation,” said their father. “You gotta show her that you trust her above all else. You trust her with your life. She’s trusting you with hers.”
Angie was in nursery school, too young to ride the horses. But she wanted to know that feeling her father described. Of pure trust. She watched in awe as he climbed onto the penny-colored horse and galloped off. He was the size of a jockey himself with his small frame, short stature. Angie wondered had he ever done that, raced horses rather than train them.
Just Angie, Ella and Daddy, together. Denise hated nearly everything about the racetrack. She hated the ever-shitting horses and their startling neighs, the harsh-looking grooms and exercise boys with their dirty dungarees and stinky stall smell. Their mother loved the races themselves, but beyond that didn’t need to see more, not at this point thank you.
When their father returned from his lap around the track, he climbed off Butterscotch and Ella climbed on. He studied her closely as she rode around. Angie envied her sister as she watched her lean in low, chest rubbing against the horse’s back. Ella hadn’t discovered the diet pills yet, and her wide, strong thighs spread across the sweat-stained saddle.
“You look good up there,” their father told Ella. “You look a little heavy on her, though. Gotta get some of that weight off.”
His words hanging there, Ella kicked the horse’s haunches and took off, bouncing up and down clumsily as Butterscotch ran around the inside track. Angie winced when Ella slapped harder at the horse’s rump.
Their father shook his head as she made her way around the first bend. “She has no patience,” he said. “She wants everything right away.” And when Ella rode back up, he put his hand out for her to climb down, and said, “Don’t try to tell her what to do. Guide her, but don’t try to control her.” He laughed. “You may be smart, girl, but you can’t outsmart a horse.”
For as long as she could remember, Angie spent her weekend days at the raceway alongside her father and Ella. Adele, the secretary in the front office, the exercise boys, the stable-hands, the jocks, the hangers-on, every-
one knew her father, each greeting him brightly as they passed by, “Hey, Mr. Mackenzie!” Angie could get whatever she wanted from the concession stand—hot chocolate and pizza and popcorn—and just say, “I’m Samson Mackenzie’s daughter,” and she paid for nothing. After he’d done his work, her father would walk them along the shed row, pointing out each horse’s potential and peculiarities. “This one here, Whisper, she’s a sweetheart.”
He stroked her nose. “But she needs a sugar cube every time to motivate her.” And at the next stall, “Now Shadowboxer, he’s a good one. Will do whatever you ask of him. Whatever.” He moved on to yet another stall. “And
Double or Nothing, she got the right name ‘cause she been all nothing. I’m waiting on the double.”
Angie held her father’s rough hand, and as he rubbed the horses behind their ears and patted them between the eyes, she felt his bliss. These were as much his children as she and Ella and Denise were. Swishing tails and soft snorts punctuated the quiet, and the sweet smell from straw beds and oats engulfed her. Behind every stall’s door was an enchanted little world for horse lovers. She wished her father the horseman was inside a children’s book, so she could share him with her friends.
But he needed a winner. He hadn’t had a horse pay a big purse since Thumbsucker. That horse was a mythical figure to Angie. He’d won the state’s version of the Kentucky Derby, the Michigan Mile, years before she was born. “A horse trainer is only as good as his winners,” Samson would say to Nanette, worry in his voice.
“You’re one of a handful of Negro trainers in the country,” Nanette would tell him. “That means something, Samson.”
He’d told the girls his story: Been in the horse life since he was in short pants. Skipped school to hang around horses at the state fairgrounds. Ran away from home at thirteen to be part of that life. Took off with a horseman who gave him his first job, cleaning horseshoes, shoveling shit. He spent many a year working as an exerciser, taking the horses out on the track, letting them stretch out. He was a man of thirty and still the men he worked for called him “boy.” “That there Niggra over there, now he’s my exercise boy. Hard worker.” Times when, running horses on southern tracks, places with no motels for coloreds, he slept in barns at night, bunching together the hay into straw pallets. Moved his family north, worked long hours at Hazel Park Raceway, got noticed for his intuition. Convinced a couple owners to trust him, got them decent wins, and finally hung out his shingle, “Samson Mackenzie Stables.”
It was a hard life. Staying up nights worrying about a sick horse, ever fearful of one dropping dead, tough conversations with irate owners. And a life on the road, one that Angie came to believe cost him, the way it kept him from his wife and girls. Six months at the track in Florida every year, then six months at Detroit’s track, with short stints to other tracks across the country. Keeping tabs, scouting, ever searching for the perfect Thoroughbred for his picky owners.
“You can do something else for a while,” their mother said.
“Like what? Set up in some factory, putting left doors on Mustangs or Cadillacs?” said Samson. “I’d rather die first.”
It was a hard life, and he would never give it up. He loved it.
Saturday morning, a sunny day not long after they’d pumped Ella’s stomach. She’s atop Nightshade, a dark brown horse with sandy-colored circles just above her haunches and white socks on her legs. They’re done for the day and Nightshade trots slowly off the track, Angie and their father walking beside her. A man stalks toward them, obviously an owner—tall, middle-aged, white, wearing his air of privilege and presumption like a tight vest.
“Samson, you and me need to talk.”
“How you doing, Mr. Jamison?” Samson asks, taking in the man’s body language. “Nightshade here is looking good,” he says, rubbing her nose.
“Not to me she ain’t, goddamnit.” He nods toward the horse. “I wanna know what’s up with the bitch? Coming in fourth in that last race, now what is that about? Might as well got claimed. I paid for a Thoroughbred, and you told me that’s what I got. You didn’t lie to me now, did you?”
“Ain’t nothing to lie about,” says Samson. “Only problem you got with her is you running her too much.”
“Hell, what I’m gon’ wait for, huh? I want my money’s worth. I bought her to run her.”
Their father nods. “She will do right by you if you let her rest up a bit. She don’t have the same stamina as these younger ones. She’s a good horse, ain’t peaked yet or nothing. She needs time to recover between races is all.”
“I don’t know, Samson. I trusted you, didn’t I? Friends say, ‘What you doing with a colored as your trainer?’ But I said, ‘Nah, this here is 1970; I believe he can handle it.’ Now I’m wondering.” He pauses. “You not one of them lying niggas, are you?”
At the sound of that word, Ella abruptly turns Nightshade back toward the track and takes off, startling Mr. Jamison. “What the—”
Nightshade and Ella glide around the half-mile track with precision, the horse’s graceful legs angled like a dancer’s. Their father’s look of worry shifts to elation. He whistles. “I will be damned!”
Ella takes the track with a confidence she’d never shown before. She grips the reins just so, leans in on the corners and rises up from the saddle at the stretch. Angie cheers her on in her head, Go, Go! One lap. Please do it right. Two laps. Don’t mess up! Third lap and Ella returns, hair blown back. Nightshade gallops up to them, stops at attention, proud. Yay!
“Mr. Jamison,” says Ella, out of breath. “You got an amazing racehorse here, and if you don’t want her anymore, let me know. I can think of a few people
who’d be happy to take her off your hands.”
Mr. Jamison shields his eyes from the sun as he looks up at her. “I’ll keep that in mind, young gal.” He turns to their father. “Let’s see how things go, Samson. I’m a set tight for a spell.” He nods his head toward Ella. “Look like you got you a jockey in the family.”
Mr. Jamison turns, walks off, his dress shoes crunching the gravel. Ella climbs off Nightshade and their father takes her into his arms, lifts her off her feet as he swings her around. He can’t stop grinning. “Unbelievable!” he gushes. He whistles again.
Marveling at her father’s joy, Angie is suddenly furious. Why wasn’t he hugging her, swinging her around?
“You look damn good out there, girl!” He shakes his head, still grinning. “Looking like a jockey if I ever seen one!”
They lead Nightshade back to her stall, reward her with water, extra oats. But suddenly Ella grabs on to her father. “I feel like I’m gonna—”
She faints, tumbling onto the hay. Their father runs to the first aid kit he keeps in his cluttered cubbyhole office and grabs smelling salts, puts it under her nose. As she watches Ella regain consciousness, four-year-old Angie feels a fresh pang of guilt over her jealousy.
No one would know for years, but Ella had fasted for three days, living on water and a daily carrot she shared every morning with Nightshade. She was determined to keep the figure her father had praised her for.
“Wait ‘til you see her!” Samson told his wife later, bedroom door flung open for all to hear. “She’s got it. She’s got that thing that a jockey’s gotta have. I’m telling you, she can do this. Long as she don’t get much taller, and she stays the same size, she can do this.”
“I want her to do something respectable with her life,” said Nanette. “Something clean and upstanding. I don’t want her to spend her days at one dirty racetrack after another, all kinds of men lurking about. And I certainly don’t want her getting run over by a horse, lose her life in some freak accident.”
“Do you hear what I’m saying?” Samson was exasperated. “The girl has a gift! She could be the first colored female jockey! That’s as respectable as they come.”
“She’s got a brilliant mind,” said Nanette. “I want her to use it.”
“You don’t think it takes brilliance to ride a horse to victory? You don’t think that requires a high level of intelligence?”
“You know what I mean, Samson. Don’t try to mix up my words.”
“Imagine it! She’ll be in Ebony, a whole spread, her posing on top of a fine-looking horse, trophy in hand. Can’t you see that?” He paused, looking at the imaginary magazine feature. “I see it clear as day.”
“I’m just worried about you pushing her into it,” said Nanette.
“That’s because you haven’t seen her ride! Going at it like she got a hunger she can’t satisfy. And I know all about that, how you get them horses up inside you and you just can’t stay away. She loves it, Nan. She downright loves it.”
“What she loves is pleasing you,” said their mother. “And I’m here to tell you Samson, that’s not the same thing.”
Angie and Denise grew up hearing family lore about Ella: how she walked at eight months, talked in full sentences by her first birthday, and could read a book by age three. Those facts made Angie feel that whatever she did, she couldn’t compete, could never catch up, had already blown it before she was out of toddlerhood.
When Nanette took Ella to be tested, the psychologist said she had the highest IQ he’d ever seen in a Negro girl. Each time she told the story years later, burnishing it over time, their mother shook her head, as if marveling anew at the mind of her oldest daughter. But anyone who listened knew she was really bragging. She was proud of Ella, certain she’d be a first. She’d be the first one in the family to go to college, the first to have a professional career. Maybe the first Afro-American female in Michigan to become a psychiatrist, a judge, or a US congresswoman, like Shirley Chisholm. Who could say? She’d be living proof that migrating north had been worth it, that given the opportunity, a child of two southern blacks with slight education could achieve greatness. She’d make every indignity her mother and father faced at the hands of a hostile white world worth it.
And then there were the tales of Ella’s bottomless hunger, her insatiable appetite for something once she fixated on it. How she ate oatmeal every day for one year, refusing to eat anything else. How she discovered Nancy Drew mysteries in third grade, and devoured them so steadily, reading them through the night, that her mother had to talk to the librarian at the local branch, ask her not to loan any more of the series to Ella, who’d developed dark circles under her eyes. How she became obsessed with her first two-wheeler, had to ride it to school daily, threw a tantrum when their mother wouldn’t let her ride it in four-feet-high snow.
The aunties, her father’s sisters, had some of the best family tales about Ella. The aunties had taken care of their brother’s child from the time she was five until she was seven. They called her Daughter. They’d ply her with a heaping of butter beans or fried chicken or smothered cabbage and watch her eat. Every time they dumped more food on her plate, she ate it all. “Had enough?” they’d ask, in unison. “Had enough?” And on cue Ella always said, “Not even!” which just tickled her aunties to death.
Aunt Bea loved to tell the story of Ella joining her parents in Detroit. “The day Daughter left for up North, Oh my Lord, that was some sad day. But not for her. No ma’am. She said, ‘Auntie Bea, I got to go, so don’t you cry. Mama
and Daddy are waiting for me and I been waiting for them.’ She was not afraid of riding the train alone neither. She was itching to get on it. ‘I’m not gonna shut my eyes the whole ride,’ she said. And you know that girl could do whatever she put her mind to. When that locomotive pulled out of the station, you talking about tears, oh I cried me a little river. But Daughter was dry eyed. I waved goodbye till I couldn’t see her no more, and I thought, She is going far in life. That’s what come to me. I could tell right then and there, she was gonna be something. ‘Cause I’m here to tell you, that child was
fearless.”
Another apocryphal Ella tale: Samson letting her ride his pony, Bill, around the little inside track, and Ella always wanting to go faster, faster, until running beside them, her father couldn’t keep up, let her go, and one day she lost her grip on Bill and fell off, flying before hitting the hard dirt. Ella lay there, in pain; her arm broken.
Their mother hadn’t been there, had been at five-year-old Denise’s birthday party, amid the cacophony of celebratory girls, already pregnant with Angie. When they walked into the house, Ella upstaging the party with her bright, white cast, their mother gasped, “What happened?”
As soon as he explained, she lit into her husband right in front of the kindergartners. “How the hell did you let that happen, Samson?”
“She kept saying, ‘Faster, faster!’” he said, in defense. “And I asked her over and over, ‘Had enough?’ And she kept saying, ‘Not even.’ That’s what she said, God do hear me say, she said, ‘Not even!’”
“She’s nine!” her mother screamed.
“But I wanted to do it,” said Ella.
“You broke your arm,” her mother pointed out.
“It was worth it.”
Angie remembered so little, really, of her father: His curly yet wild salt-and-pepper hair, those saddle-rough hands, the way he’d give her piggyback rides as he made his rounds at the horses’ stalls. Those practice sessions on the track.
His smell was an intoxicating mixture of the outdoors and aftershave. Early mornings in the car, headed to the track, sun just peeling away the darkness, she’d scoot close and inhale him deeply as they sat three abreast in the front seat, cool jazz spilling from the radio. He was on the road so much that his presence was like a holiday. Everything felt special—eating pancakes together in the morning, watching him repair things around the house, greedily eyeing him and their mother as they slipped behind the closing bedroom door. As a family, they’d go to all the races running his horses. Angie loved the crowds, the whooping yells, the starting bell, the discarded tickets scattered across the ground like over-sized confetti. And when one of his horses placed—not first, but often third, sometimes second even—she
loved going down to the winner’s circle and standing with her sisters and parents and her father’s horse. She remembered warm summer nights, cicadas singing out, the family posing as the photographer snapped, his gi-
ant cone of a flash blinding them briefly. And then her father’s racetrack family would take over, crowding them out. They’d whisk him off for some post-race chatter and another hour would go by. Their mother knew the drill, like the girlfriend of a musician after the gig, so she drove her own car to the track. Angie and Denise rode with her to the Chinese restaurant where they always had dinner afterward. But Ella stayed with their father. “You want
to hang out with me a bit?” he’d say to her. And she always did, even though she had to be hungry, or tired, or just ready to go. Or maybe not. Her needs or desires could never compete with his need to show her off, his daughter, the soon-to-be jockey.
Afterward, they’d all sit at a big round table at China Delight, passing plates of pepper steak and egg foo young and shrimp fried rice. Sometimes, by the time her father and Ella joined them, Angie was already asleep in her mother’s lap. And sometimes Denise would try to gain her father’s attention, telling him about a book report she’d done on racehorses, or a math project that determined the probability of winning. Once, she showed him a sketch she’d drawn of a horse, a pen and ink done in her art class. She’d filled it in with watercolor, giving the horse a sandy brown hue. She was clearly talented.
“Which horse is that?” asked their father.
“It’s just one I made up,” she said.
“See, if you’d learn to ride a horse, you’d know what one really looks like,” he said, chuckling. “That there is a nice picture, but it don’t look like a real horse.”
Denise said nothing. Why didn’t you just draw Bill, Daddy’s pony? Angie thought. Silly! Throughout the rest of the meal, Denise poked at her food until the gravy on her egg foo young congealed. Later, Angie found the deft, delicate watercolor tossed in the trash. She felt sorry for Denise, but she left it there.