THE SPORT OF KINGS
By C.E. Morgan
Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
545 pp., $27
‘The Sport of Kings’’ is a novel about breeding Kentucky livestock, both animal and human. In the latter dimension it inevitably draws in race, racism, and the legacy of slavery; in its aspect of generational saga, it covers the experience of slavery directly. Stated this way, the concept of the book might sound effective but crude, but the magnificence of C.E. Morgan’s writing makes it something else altogether.
It is a work of baroque complexity, but its main story lines follow the convergence of two families, one white, one black, down scores of decades of lineage. The Forges are original white settlers of Kentucky, evolving into wealthy corn-planter aristocrats; by the 1960s, young Henry Forge can trace his line back seven generations or have it spelled out for him by his father, alongside lectures on Greco-Roman classics and pseudo-scientific racism out of the 19th century; boy Henry also has the honor of being whipped by his father at a post once used for the punishment of Forge family slaves. Henry’s radical act of rebellion is to convert the plantation to the breeding of thoroughbred racehorses (having studied the general subject of horses by reading Xenophon in the original Greek).
For his horses, Henry follows the usual system of inbreeding of strong bloodlines; he is more unusual in attempting to extend the practice to his own family by committing incest with his only daughter, Henrietta. Nicknamed Ruffian by her father (after the filly who famously shattered her leg in a match race at Belmont Park in 1975), Henrietta, “broke the mold, and Henry knew it. She didn’t like the commonality of school, she didn’t like to mix. Her spirit didn’t rhyme with the spirit of lesser animals.’’ Despite her aristocratic aloofness, Henrietta as a young woman becomes a voracious sexual predator, finally settling her appetite on Allmon Shaughnessy, a black groom in the Forge barn.
Born and raised in black middle-class Cincinnati, Allmon gets his surname from an absentee Irish father. His mother is a hapless victim of the tightening slipknot American society has devised for the black working class. She has a job but can’t quite earn enough to support herself and her son. Failure to report a junk car as an asset causes her to lose food stamps, then her home. Allmon is talented, both scholastically and athletically, but doesn’t have resources to stick with either program. He ends up running crack for local gangbangers to make ends meet, eventually ending up in prison, where he enters a training program that teaches him how to work with horses.
Like Henrietta, Allmon has a lineage, his going back to Scipio, a fugitive slave who swims the Ohio River from Kentucky to freedom, but finally hangs himself in Cincinnati, unable to free his mind from slavery’s wounds. Allmon’s grandfather, an evangelical pastor dedicated to running a Cincinnati homeless refuge, is a powerful figure in Allmon’s childhood, till he dies relatively young of a heart attack. Allmon’s inheritance is the haunting of these ghosts, plus the lupus which finally kills his mother. Still Henrietta is magnetized to him by his breeding: “the epithelium, dark with melanin, stretched taut over the soft architecture of muscles, striated and smooth, the fine wiring of the nervous system firing north and south, east and west, it was all that living bone.’’ Allmon becomes groom to Hellsmouth, the Forges’s exquisitely inbred racing filly; his sperm cells beat Henry’s to the fathering of the son who will kill Henrietta in childbirth.
Like the child he intended to breed with his own daughter, Henry sees his filly as the expression of centuries of aristocratic lineage — “entitled to exist in its own flesh, because of its history,’’ as he angrily explains to Allmon. Louise, the contemplative veterinarian who tends the Forge stock, sees a horse as “just four legs and a will to die’’ — a view fulfilled by the novel’s apocalyptic conclusion.
Louisa would be a walk-on in most other books; no reader of this one will ever forget her. Morgan’s storytelling abilities match her deep characterization — part of which is that she’s a writer of real virtuosity, and the narrative includes some of her set-piece “lessons,’’ mock interviews, synthetic parables, and a retelling of the Eden myth in the style of Uncle Remus. Her concerns are Faulknerian in scope, or maybe even larger; while she shares Faulkner’s sense of property (human and other) as a sin afflicting the region, she also does not hesitate to delve into geological time, as well as mining the deep veins of human history, and all of it dovetails with the main saga. “There are tales that are remembered and tales that are forgotten, but all tales are born to be told,’’ Morgan writes, in a voice reminiscent of a Homeric bard’s. “They demand it; the dead become tales in order to live. Their eternal life is in your mouth.’’
THE SPORT OF KINGS
By C.E. Morgan
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 545 pp., $27
Madison Smartt Bell, the author of more than a dozen novels, teaches at Goucher College and can be reached at mbell@goucher.edu
