MOUNTED

Riding toward freedom.

As a young equestrian, Kalli spent their youth deeply connected to horses. Drawn in through popular “pony books,” novels that depict girls who build their lives around horses and each other, Kalli found a community of riders that more or less matched up to their novels—and where they were a solitary Black person in a predominately white space. Yet, as Kalli describes in these interconnected essays, the history of Black people in the United States and the history of horses are deeply intertwined. From the early days of American plantations, enslaved people were categorized with horses and other animals as “assets and living engines of the plantation economy,” dehumanized in the process. Although horses were their companions in labor, at times they enforced their oppression. Kalli explores how horses have been and continue to be used against Black people by police forces and, in earlier times, slave catchers. There is space for joy in these pages, too, as Kalli follows the ways in which horses have trodden a path for liberation in symbolizing freedom—with runaway enslaved people on their backs, as part of Jamaican cowboy culture, in the Afro-Cuban modernist Wifredo Lam’s horse-headed women, and in Beyonce’s album Cowboy Carter. In recent years, there has been a reclamation of the Western genre by Black artists. Kalli’s contribution brings a new voice to the table, one that is smart, well articulated, and bighearted. Combining critical thought and little-known history, Kalli reminds us “of the slippery boundaries between ‘animal’ and ‘human,’ the ways the figure of the beast haunts our intimate lives.”

Essays on Blackness and horses, at turns funny and poignant.