never been around where they are much and don't know any better.
They're beautiful. There isn't anything so lovely and clean and full of
spunk and honest and everything as some race horses. On the big horse
farms that are all around our town Beckersville there are tracks and
the horses run in the early morning. More than a thousand times I've
got out of bed before daylight and walked two or three miles to the
tracks. Mother wouldn't of let me go but father always says, "Let him
alone." So I got some bread out of the bread box and some butter and
jam, gobbled it and lit out.

At the tracks you sit on the fence with men, whites and niggers, and
they chew tobacco and talk, and then the colts are brought out. It's
early and the grass is covered with shiny dew and in another field a
man is plowing and they are frying things in a shed where the track
niggers sleep, and you know how a nigger can giggle and laugh and say
things that make you laugh. A white man can't do it and some niggers
can't but a track nigger can every time.

And so the colts are brought out and some are just galloped by stable
boys, but almost every morning on a big track owned by a rich man who
lives maybe in New York, there are always, nearly every morning, a few
colts and some of the old race horses and geldings and mares that are
cut loose.

It brings a lump up into my throat when a horse runs. I don't mean all
horses but some. I can pick them nearly every time. It's in my blood
like in the blood of race track niggers and trainers. Even when they
just go slop-jogging along with a little nigger on their backs I can
tell a winner. If my throat hurts and it's hard for me to swallow,
that's him. He'll run like Sam Hill when you let him out. If he don't