The Story of the Quarter Horse: An End of Life Transmission
On Stolen Power, Inherited Memory, and the Stories We Carry Forward
Kim was a woman who was dying of cancer. She wasn’t entirely convinced that she had cancer, and she wasn’t entirely convinced she was dying. Nevertheless, there she was in hospice, and I was coming to give her a massage.
At first, she did not want any of the team inside the house. She did not want her family’s privacy invaded. While the weather was good, I gave her shoulder, neck and back massage while she sat in a patio chair. As autumn approached and the mercury began to dip, she allowed me into the living room.
Kim was a Black woman who did not hide her skepticism. She would pose questions about current events to parse out what kind of a white lady was standing in her home: completely understandable, and not personal.
Eventually I said something about how the law doesn’t serve anyone but the rich and powerful. I told her I was aware of the history of labor organizing, civil disobedience, and the necessity of rebellion to change unjust systems. I said we Americans hero-worship outlaws like Robin Hood and Bonnie and Clyde.
Kim got a faraway look in her eyes and told me that her granddad used to tell her the same story over and over again. Back then, her family lived in Texas. Her grandfather had an exceptional Quarter Horse, smart and versatile and carefully conditioned.
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In those days, a horse was transportation, labor, companionship, everything. One day, some white people came onto his property. Kim’s grandfather noticed they had brought a saddle with them, and he knew what was going to happen. They looked him straight in the eye and said, “We want to try out this saddle on your horse. We’ll take him for a little ride and bring him back.”
He was a Black man in Texas in the 1930s. He was not going to refuse these white people. They saddled the horse, rode away, and that was that. He never saw his horse again.
“And do you know who those people were?” Kim said. “They were Bonnie and Clyde.”
Kim’s eyes were still full of faraway times. She said, “I used to wonder why my granddad would tell me that story over and over again. It took me years to understand, but now I know why: be careful who your heroes are.”
This was one of those moments when understanding arrives, rippling outward, followed by reverence. Identity became eternity and I knew that Kim had given me a great gift. She was her grandfather, and her grandfather was speaking to me. She pulled back a curtain, and I saw a world I could not possibly have known or imagined.
She trusted me with what had been taken from her ancestor, and with the story that carried that loss forward, she placed something precious in my care.
She entrusted me with a story that did not belong to me and trusted me not to misuse it.
The story of the Quarter Horse is not only a lesson about racial cruelty. It is a lesson about how power takes without asking and how memory, even when wounded, refuses to be taken.
