The Sport of Kings by C. E. Morgan

Author:C. E. Morgan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374715175
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

INTERLUDE III

That man there is a blood man. He stands at the edge of the Kentucky hills where they slope to the prattling river, imagining his children and their children not with his mind, but with the will of his body inclined toward freedom. He has come from the heart of Kentucky, a place that boasts one slave for every white man, and he is one of those slaves, or so they tell him, though he won’t be for long.

He is an independent man and enterprising, though never formally educated, a man solitary and suspicious by nature, with no friends but his mother, who died in the spring of this very year, so the yoke of love has been lifted from him, his spirit now free to make his body free. Hate and desire bear him aloft from the outskirts of Paris like a seedling on fresh wind seeking fertile ground. He leaves his master’s farm on a Saturday with a pass to attend a dance at a farm in Winchester in the company of ten other bondsmen, but when they reach the fork in the road that turns south toward Clark County, he takes his leave without a word, slipping from their jovial pack and disappearing into the woods. He cinches sacks of crushed Indian turnip around his calfhide brogans to throw off the scent and then crashes deep into the undergrowth of shrubs and thorny bushes. He knows of the famed railroad—all but the most ignorant backwoods slaves know of it—but he long ago decided to seek no help, none at all, refusing to follow another, black or white of any political persuasion, because he will be a man who makes his own way.

His first night is pure and blinding panic, sure the bloodhounds have been loosed, sure there are white men behind every oak tree, every maple. He remembers a nursing woman he had known as a child, one who ran off only to be hounded against a tree where the dogs ripped the breasts from her body; she had lived long enough to be whipped with the tooth side of a handsaw. Now, in fear of patrollers, he steers clear of the road to Mason County and Maysville, and won’t travel as far east as the Lexington–Cincinnati road, and on that blessed day when he arrives in the Queen City, he won’t go knocking on the door of Mr. Coffin’s Grand Central Station. He considers himself unschooled but not reckless—he won’t seek the aid of a strange white man, no matter his reputation. No, he’ll go straight to Bucktown and throw his body and his soul down on the charity of the first black church he sees: there is no safe place in this world, but a black church is the closest thing. His mother taught him that.

He plunges into the nocturnal edge of the county, racing a desperate, diagonal line north, hoping, if chance and property lines favor him, to emerge at the river a full day’s walk to the east of the city, a good distance from the Lexington–Cincinnati road.

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