The Kentucky Derby
I’ve loved horses since I was a very little girl. When I was about nine, I read all the black stallion books by Walter Farley. Then I asked for books about horse breeds here and in Arabia. As puberty approached, I decided to be a horse–Smokey, the horse ridden by the Southern cowboy Tennessee Jed whose adventures I listened to on my little cream-colored radio. In my late teens, I was given a beautifully illustrated copy of Misty of Chincoteague by Margaret Henry with illustrations by Wesley Dennis . I dreamed of going to that little island off the Virginia coast and petting real versions of the fictional horse I knew so well. During my first serious job in Vicksburg, Mississippi, I rode horses every weekend in the Civil War Memorial Park where the girls’ school was located and where I taught all the English courses except for American Lit. Years later, I would read Susan Griffin’s Women and Nature which told me what it does to a horse’s skeletal structure to have somebody ride her/him with a saddle rather than bareback. All the added weight falls at the weakest point in the horse’s spine, explaining why I saw old swayback horses grazing in fields when we drove out into the country on Sunday afternoons. I have never gotten on a horse since. But I continued watching the big races on television until 2008 when I finally realized what they were doing to too many horses forced into the service of mostly white people who attended such festivities.
Yesterday was the 144th “running” of the Kentucky Derby, the quintessential example of horse racing in America. That means the first running was in 1875, just ten years after the war ended and President Lincoln freed the enslaved Africans. This putatively sporting event has never been interrupted or suspended, even during the Great Depression or World Wars I and II. Though the actual race lasts only two minutes, the happening goes on for the better part of an entire Saturday. Hundreds of thousands of people attend and hope to be shown on national television sipping their traditional mint juleps and showing off outlandish hats. Even a casual scan of the attendees confirms a singular fact: this iconic moment in American life is a virtual “white-out”; there simply are no colored faces–carefully made up ones and overly jovial ones are shown having a “swell ole time,” but don’t hope for a black or brown one unless the cameras catch some stable hand or drinks servant.
This cherished moment can be examined from the standpoint of the horses as well as the participants. A friend of mine who owns and adores horses, tells me what I’ve suspected for some time. For years, horses did not compete until they were three years old by which time their bones were fully formed and their musculature was well-developed. But owners began to dream of being the first to run a two-year old and win. Now almost all the horses we can watch straining their hearts and limbs and lungs to amuse us are only two. My friend tells me this is too young for the well-being of the animals. He also tells me that years of breeding for spectacle value have produced animals whose bodies are much too big for their legs and feet. This helps explain the all-too-frequent occurrence of horses collapsing on the track because their legs simply give out of them. The two most famous examples of this travesty came in 1975 and 2008. In 1975 at the Belmont Stakes race, Ruffian, who had won many previous races, broke two sesamoid bones in his right foreleg. The snap was audible on television. Surgery was performed but Ruffian was so traumatized that, upon waking, he thrashed around injuring other parts of his body until a vet gave him a lethal shot. In 2008 at the Kentucky Derby, Eight Belles who came from a long line of winners, was so severely injured–both her front ankles were horribly broken–that she had to be put down by a veterinarian right on site. In both instances, there was a brief outcry about animal cruelty, followed by many pronouncements from people associated with racing that claimed there may be more leg accidents in farm horses than from those on race tracks. (If this sounds familiarly akin to how this country responds to its latest mass shooting, so be it.)
So much for what high-stakes racing does to the animals used for staggering financial gains and a few moments of human entertainment. Now consider what one such race–the Kentucky Derby–is “about” in the context of a severely racialized America. A climactic moment comes when all gathered at Churchill Downs stop their individual conversations to sing “My Old Kentucky Home.” When written by Stephen Foster, this song was to be sung by an enslaved African (or a white singer wearing black face) expressing every enslaver’s fondest hope: ” ‘Tis summer, the darkies are gay.” This myth that lingers in many white people’s imaginations is perfidious in the extreme since it asserts that the enslaving of Africans had no ill effects on those enslaved. And when, in 1986, the Kentucky legislature passed a law changing “darkies” to “people,” that just made matters worse. Now people singing it in between drinks imagine that the old Kentucky home was a great place to be enslaved, since everybody living there is happy in the sunshine. Furthermore, no one singing about the old home thinks it refers to a poor white family’s shack or to the abysmal quarters where those enslaved Africans tried to build families and have some vestige of a life. It refers to the proverbial “big house” where Marse and Missus rule. So the whole ethos around the two minute race is shrouded in nostalgia for a gruesome period in our history that has lasted well over one-hundred years. I have to wonder why more protest doesn’t form around this sporting event that endangers a lot of innocent animals and enshrines a cultural atrocity.
“Let sleeping dogs lie”
In a recent article in the Birmingham News, several white residents of Montgomery said, when asked their opinion about the newly opened National Memorial for Peace and Justice, some version of “let sleeping dogs lie.” A few even used that exact phrase. What they went on to say centered around their objection to the new structure and adjacent Legacy Museum: from Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, reminding the interviewer that “that was in the past; we don’t want to go back there, we want to move forward.” The more conservative responses doubted the veracity of the reported number of lynchings taking place in this country. They also said putting up the memorial could make “them” angry and that might cause new trouble, “who knows”?
Once I’d seen the old saw about not waking canines, I couldn’t shake a sense that this axiom needs to be examined in light of the current resurgence of white supremacists and acts of blatant racism against people of color. So here’s the etymology: In the early 14th century, the French coined a phrase “n’esveillez pas lou chien qui dort” or “do not wake the sleeping dog.” In his long poem Troilus and Criseyde, written late in the 14th century, Geoffrey Chaucer says this about his famous heterosexual lovers: “It is nought good a slepying hound to wake.” So people have been cautioning against stirring the pot for a long time. But when directed at black people, I think it takes on fresh significance. First of all, it’s yet one more animalistic reference leveled at blacks who have had similar epithets hurled at them by whites who needed to make them sub-human and therefore subject to any abuse by their “betters.” When Chaucer says “hound” rather than “dog,” he underscores the danger implicit in the saying–we don’t wake the sleeping dogs because we are worried that they might turn on us. And why would we fear retaliatory behavior unless we’d treated the dogs badly to begin with?
This putatively benign axiom, then, becomes just one more example of how hard we white people have worked and continue to work to erase history and elide truth whenever it touches on our explicit or implicit participation in the institution of slavery, Jim Crow law, and (currently) mass incarceration of (especially) young black men. So I want to applaud Bryan Stevenson for persevering with his idea to create a graphic memorial to all the lynchings that have taken place. He refused to be euphemistic or verbal. Rather he has installed tangible metal strips with specific names and dates etched on their clay-colored surfaces. He compels me/us to connect with the human beings who were so brutally tortured and killed and left hanging literally. What he’s done took courage; it will take courage for us whites to enter the space he has shaped. But the possible outcome is worth whatever pain and shame have to be met.
I cannot heal from some action, feeling, or thought unless and until I admit that I have committed that action or entertained that thought or had that unbidden emotion. Just saying I know there were lynchings and that was horrible isn’t enough and Mr. Stevenson cites Germany and South Africa as two cogent examples of what is possible for a country/culture if its members will face their past, name it tangibly, and then set about making reparations in whatever way possible. So I want all the dogs that are sleeping and, in this particular case, may well be haunted by very bad dreams, to wake up. And, once awake, I want them to go to any lengths to “stay woke.”
Just Show Up
In the last weeks of outpatient treatment for alcoholism, my counselor talked to us about what was coming next. She felt it imperative that we find a weekly AA meeting that we attended no matter what. So she enjoined us to “just show up.”. If we were having trouble with the “God” word, just show up. If somebody at a meeting set our teeth on edge, just show up. If we were exhausted from a day at work and wanted to curl up with a good book or TV show, just show up. Her theory was you never know when sitting in some place with a bunch of assorted people might give you exactly what you needed to move more fully into recovery and toward something resembling a life. So in the months and years after stopping drinking, I’ve remembered that mantra and said “yes” to invitations to do things and go places that didn’t immediately sound like me. And the rewards have been significant and generous.
When a fellow AA member invited me to be part of an early morning group that walked in a quiet woodsy area near a big cemetery in town and listen for birds, I showed up though I knew no bird calls and had no binoculars. The hour we spent doing that was quiet and I learned what cardinals sound like at 8:00 a.m. It’s forty-three years later and I still listen for their distinctive call especially as spring creeps up on us in Minnesota and the big red males advertise themselves to any available females. When a friend from work wondered if I’d like to attend a lecture series at the local Unitarian Church, I showed up and enjoyed what I heard about what the Enlightenment made of ideas like the Trinity. Because I had firmly accepted that “God” could become anything he [sic] chose, I wasn’t thrilled by the humanist speaker who debunked the need for a universal force to take on human characteristics. After all, Zeus was always turning into some other form in order to have sex with yet another pretty lady. And John Keats had written a beautiful long poem, “Endymion,” about a peasant who fell in love with the moon goddess who fell in love with him. So I didn’t go to the rest of that series, but showing up helped me clarify an aspect of my own faith system.
Recently, I was reminded all over again just how wise my chemical dependency counselor was. A local dance group comprised primarily of black dancers augmented by other dancers of color and a few white people was giving a performance. I immediately asked a friend who also admires and enjoys their work if we didn’t want to get tickets and she said yes. After I’d ordered the tickets we found out this was not the usual format of the dance company’s performing at a conventional concert venue. Rather it was a collaboration between them and a well-known rock band from a neighboring state. We agreed that if the “stretch” proved be too much, we could always politely slip out of the refurbished old movie house. The result of that showing up is one of the most stimulating and moving performances I’ve seen in quite some time. The rock band agreed to write some music that stretched them because it was softer, smoother, more contemplative than their usual fare. The dancers pushed themselves to be extra athletic in some of their patterns and to push for stark unity in places where the music demanded a concerted movement because the lyrics spoke of the power of solidarity. At first, I kept thinking “Couldn’t they just turn it down a little?” since the degree of amplification was more intense than I’ve ever experienced, not having attended a rock concert indoors. By the end, as the lead band member stood and chanted words about how Jim Crow had denied people freedom of movement and expression and the dancers showed us what those denials might look and feel like, I understood through my tears that the music had to be that loud because not enough people are listening presently to words that are fraying the very fabric of our democratic society. And, because I’d put myself in that unusual context, I got the huge reward of seeing a pas de deux unlike the usual fare performed by more traditional ballet troupes or even contemporary modern dance groups. The two dancers were veiled in pale blue cloths that reminded me of Muslim head wear except both the man and the woman were so hidden. The rock band played music that tore at my heart by its sheer melancholy and lithesome tones. Again, I found myself weeping quietly as I understood that the two people I was watching stood in a direct line back to famous pairs like Nureyev and Fonteyn or the earliest French couples dancing to Petipa’s creations. It’s how I felt when Bob Dylan was awarded a Nobel Prize in Literature and I so deeply disagreed with academics who inveighed about what this decision meant to the very nature of “poetry.” Or it’s how I reacted when I heard just a week or so ago that for the first time a rapper–Kendrick Lamar–had won a Pulitzer Prize for music. I don’t want to get frozen into what can and cannot be called an art form or a serious aspect of cultural reality. So I must keep showing up and being open to who and what is offered. I may not like it all, but the only way I can experience what I did with the dancers and rock band members is to be where they are and let what they do enter my consciousness.
Garden Artist
My mother was an artist but she died before I was old enough to recognize that. A primary location for her to practice her art was her garden. She and Daddy had bought a bigger house and the vacant lot attached, so Mamie (what most people called my mother) decided she had swatter’s rights to use it as she chose. During the last months of her pregnancy with me, she planted hundreds of iris corms and jonquil bulbs, sitting on an old pillow and sliding down the inclining slope of the yard. Her intention, which she carried out, was to turn that vacant lot into a magnificent garden of her own design.
At the very center of her garden stood a terra cotta bird bath. From that focal point fanned out a series of ever-widening circles made of rocks varying in size from near boulders to stones that could fit into her hand. Weeds were not allowed to grow around any of these border rocks. Within the first circle, surrounding that bird bath, were pinks that covered the entire ground area. The next circle was somewhat wider and contained special varieties of jonquils with multi-colored centers; these were spaced more openly to allow the best viewing and the best growing conditions for the bulbs. To maintain this spaciousness, Mamie had to dig up and discard bulbs every few years, a chore she never seemed to resent since the result of such tedium was the beauty she craved. Surrounding this middle bed was the largest circle completing the central bedding projects. Within it were planted gorgeous rose bushes in carnelian reds, egg yolk yellows and sunshine oranges.
A second bordering system, made up of long, rectangular beds in which annuals were grown from seed, ran parallel along the foundation of our house and lot line for the adjacent house. Mamie objected to buying bedded plants, I suspect not to save money but because she loved to watch seeds send up tiny shoots that she eventually separated with her own hands. Her pride of birthing and mothering was involved in this process. In one of her last letters to me, she wrote about her love for all the little grammar school children she taught when their regular teachers were sick. In that letter, she said “Wish I could have had more children–However I don’t believe my love for eleven would or could have been less intense than my love for two.”
In any event, these two long edges of her garden were quite a show at the height of summer. Seemingly at random but actually meticulously placed, every imaginable flower was in full bloom: tough zinnias with their scratchy stems; brilliant marigolds smelling acrid even before they were cut and taken inside; cosmos, dahlias, daisies of every variety; smaller things like sweet william and alyssum, baby’s breath, ageratum, dwarf marigolds, tiny zinnias, blue phlox, button chrysanthemums. At the end of the bed that ran the length of the yard along our property line grew the strangest and most wonderful of all Mamie’s flowers–or so they seemed to me. They were called spider lilies. They had no leaves and the blossom was at the top of a very tall single stalk. It was deep fuchia and oriental in appearance, with long slender tendrils, each quite distinct from the other. At the center were tiny stamen with fuzzy black ends. I was fascinated by them, partly because they had no leaves and partly because they were so airy. After I left Alabama for Minnesota, I looked unsuccessfully at every nursery in Minneapolis and found no such species of lily. Salespeople tried to convince me that there was no such variety, that I had learned a regional name for some major lily. I never believed them and was delighted to find, while touring the Duke University Gardens on a visit to my sister, spider lilies in full bloom. Their spell over me was rekindled and I felt a painful twinge remembering my mother, kneeling beside her bed of them, cultivating the dirt around them to prolong their blooming period and to make them feel more loved.
Our back yard had its own blueprint for larger bushes that also bloomed: hydrangeas in ice blue against the entire width of our house; bridal wreath along the lot line; crepe myrtle at the alley, filled to overflowing with magenta blossoms encased in tight little green pods until just the moment before springing open. Another of my favorite flowers grew in the back gardens. Around the biggest oak tree, Mamie planted snowdrop bulbs. She said they hardly ever did well for her, but a few survived the damp winters and numerous squirrels who loved the taste of their young pale green leaves. They bloomed in February as the true harbingers of spring. I watched for them all through January, going out back and turning over a few leaves my mother scrupulously kept over them both to hide them from the squirrels and to keep them warm. Finally the day would come when I’d see the first tip peeping up from the earth. When that day came, Mamie always let me be the one to remove the leaves and put the first water lovingly on the ground from a kitchen milk pitcher. When they were in full bloom, I would sit for long stretches, drawn to the perfectly-marked drop of green in the center of each scallop of each bloom. I think they felt special because they were the only flower we grew that was green and also because the flowers hung their heads in what I deemed to be shyness.
As soon as I knew about saving money, I began to reserve portions of my small allowance. Then, two months before Mamie’s birthday on September 17th, I’d look through the fancy iris catalogue, choose one specimen variety and proudly send off my seven or eight dollars to buy a single corm. She’d never bred iris until I began to give them to her. The hundreds that lived all down our hillside were plain whites, deep purples, sky blues, and lemon yellows fringed in brown. They may have been the only things I ever gave my mother that entirely pleased her. Each year my single specimen was planted immediately with full attention in a bed made specially for the collection that began with a jet black variety called “ebony night.”
In the course of growing up and coming to terms with myself as a separate person from my mother, I rejected many customs and objects dear to her. My rebellion never forced me, however, to turn away from gardening or to dampen my deep love for flowers growing in the ground. I have always put something into dirt in the summers in Minnesota, if only into large pots on an apartment porch or in a particularly sunny window. Currently, I own my own home, the front yard of which has not a single blade of grass. It’s just annuals and perennials. The back yard is all garden except for a small swatch of grass my realtor told me I needed to keep for the time when I or my executor must sell the house. Mostly my garden is untidy; I tend to put things where the spirit moves me. But when I’m on my knees with my hands in the soil, I often think of my mother and feel a preternatural connection with her because of our need to be close to flowers. And one perenniaI favor out front is spurge with its faint green blooms that come before it becomes just feathery green leaves that last till heavy frost.