When you go out with the horses there is one job that always takes a lot of time. In the late afternoon, after your horse has been in a race and after you have washed him and rubbed him out, he has to be walked slowly, sometimes for hours and hours, so he’ll cool out slowly and won’t get muscle-bound. I got so I did that job for both our horses and Burt did the more important things. It left him free to go talk or shoot dice with the other niggers and I didn’t mind. I rather liked it and after a hard race even the stallion, O My Man, was tame enough, even when there were mares about.
You walk and walk and walk, around a little circle, and your horse’s head is right by your shoulder, and all around you the life of the place you are in is going on, and in a queer way you get so you aren’t really a part of it at all. Perhaps no one ever gets as I was then, except boys that aren’t quite men yet and who like me have never been with girls or women—to really be with them, up to the hilt, I mean. I used to wonder if young girls got that way too before they married or did what we used to call “go on the town.”
If I remember it right though, I didn’t do much thinking then. Often I would have forgotten supper if Burt hadn’t shouted at me and reminded me, and sometimes he forgot and went off to town with one of the other niggers and I did forget.
There I was with the horse, going slow slow slow, around a circle that way. The people were leaving the fair grounds now, some afoot, some driving away to the farms in wagons and fords. Clouds of dust floated in the air and over to the west, where the town was, maybe the sun was going down, a red ball of fire through the dust. Only a few hours before the crowd had been all filled with excitement and everyone shouting. Let us suppose my horse had been in a race that afternoon and I had stood in front of the grandstand with my horse blanket over my shoulder, alongside of Burt perhaps, and when they came into the stretch my owner began to call, in that queer high voice of his that seemed to float over the top of all the shouting up in the grandstand. And his voice was saying over and over, “Go, Pick-it-boy, Pick-it-boy, Pick-it-boy,” the way he always did, and my heart was thumping so I could hardly breathe, and Burt was leaning over and snapping his fingers and muttering, “Come, little sweet. Come on home. Your Mama wants you. Come get your ’lasses and bread, little Pick-it-boy.”
Well, all that was over now and the voices of the people left around were all low. And Pick-it-boy—I was leading him slowly around the little ring, to cool him out slowly, as I’ve said,—he was different too. Maybe he had pretty nearly broken his heart trying to get down to the wire in front, or getting down there in front, and now everything inside him was quiet and tired, as it was nearly all the time those days in me, except in me tired but not quiet.
You remember I’ve told you we always walked in a circle, round and round and round. I guess something inside me got to going round and round and round too. The sun did sometimes and the trees and the clouds of dust. I had to think sometimes about putting down my feet so they went down in the right place and I didn’t get to staggering like a drunken man.
And a funny feeling came that it is going to be hard to describe. It had something to do with the life in the horse and in me. Sometimes, these late years, I’ve thought maybe negroes would understand what I’m trying to talk about now better than any white man ever will. I mean something about men and animals, something between them, something that can perhaps only happen to a white man when he has slipped off his base a little, as I suppose I had then. I think maybe a lot of horsey people feel it sometimes though. It’s something like this, maybe—do you suppose it could be that something we whites have got, and think such a lot of, and are so proud about, isn’t much of any good after all?
It’s something in us that wants to be big and grand and important maybe and won’t let us just be, like a horse or a dog or a bird can. Let’s say Pick-it-boy had won his race that day. He did that pretty often that summer. Well, he was neither proud, like I would have been in his place, or mean in one part of the inside of him either. He was just himself, doing something with a kind of simplicity. That’s what Pick-it-boy was like and I got to feeling it in him as I walked with him slowly in the gathering darkness. I got inside him in some way I can’t explain and he got inside me. Often we would stop walking for no cause and he would put his nose up against my face.
I wished he was a girl sometimes or that I was a girl and he was a man. It’s an odd thing to say but it’s a fact. Being with him that way, so long, and in such a quiet way, cured something in me a little. Often after an evening like that I slept all right and did not have the kind of dreams I’ve spoken about.
But I wasn’t cured for very long and couldn’t get cured. My body seemed all right and just as good as ever but there wasn’t no pep in me.