at this woman. Corrine Quinn was out of another time. She spurned the ostentation of the parade, the garments that, in their great extravagance, in their defiance, testified to the dying soil, the tasking families divided, the diminishing tobacco, the fall that was all around. She stood in the stands, in calico and gloves, talking to one of the other ladies, while Maynard watched with scornful eye. Then he shook his head and walked off to take his place, not among the gentlemen, but in the motley of low white men, a class whose position in this society of ours always amazed me. The low whites, men such as our own Harlan, were tolerated publicly by the Quality, but spurned in private; their names were spat out at banquets, their children mocked in the parlors, their wives and daughters seduced and discarded. They were a degraded and downtrodden nation enduring the boot of the Quality, solely for the right to put a boot of their own to the Tasked.
My place was among the coloreds, some Tasked, some free, seated on the waist-high wooden fencing, just off from the stables, where still other colored men tended to the racehorses, feeding them and looking after their health. I knew a few of them—including Corrine’s man, Hawkins, whom I saw sitting on the fence with some of the others. I nodded in greeting. He nodded back, but did not smile. That was his way, this Hawkins. There was something cold and distant about him. He perpetually wore the look of a man who suffered no fools, but felt himself surrounded by them. He scared me. There was something hard about him, and I knew just by his manner that he had endured some terrible, unspeakable portion of the Task. I looked over and watched as the other colored men along the fence shouted and laughed with still others working the stables. And watching this silently, as was my way, I marveled at the bonds between us—the way we shortened our words, or spoke, sometimes, with no words at all, the shared memories of corn-shuckings, of hurricanes, of heroes who did not live in books, but in our talk; an entire world of our own, hidden away from them, and to be part of that world, I felt even then, was to be in on a secret, a secret that was in you. There were neither Quality nor Low among us, no jockey clubs to be ejected from, and this was its own America, was its own grandeur—one that defied Maynard, who must forever carp about his place in the order.
It was early afternoon now, cloudless still, and the races were about to begin. But when the first flight of horses galloped off, I was not watching them, I was watching Maynard, who had, it seemed, forgotten all the insults and slights and was now laughing and boasting with the low whites, and it seemed that Maynard had, in spite of himself, found his people. Or they’d found him. The prospect of a high-born Walker frolicking among them allowed these low whites, too, to bask in the glamour of the day. This esteem only increased itself when Maynard’s time came and his own horse, Diamond, running among the other horses in a great cloud of brown and black, everything noses and legs, emerged from it all, taking a clear lead from the cloud, and holding this lead all the way to the finish. Maynard exploded. He screamed and hugged everyone around him, threw his arms into the air, and then pointed up in the box, toward the jockey club, and yelled something haughty and rude. And then sighting his Corrine in the ladies’ box, he did the same. The men in the jockey club stood there stoic, their lovely sport having been desecrated by this oaf who was born among them, but whose every win lowered the entire game.
After the last race, I met him back off Market Street. I had never seen Maynard more happy in all of his brief life. He looked at me with a huge smile, and said, “Hot damn, Hiram, I told you, didn’t I? It was my day, I said it.”
I nodded and said, “You did call it.”
“I told them,” he said, climbing into the buggy. “I told them all!”
“You did,” I said.
And then, mindful of my father’s admonition, I turned the chaise back out of the town toward home.