When Allmon is still young, the “world began to see a colored man in the body where a child still resided. Morgan shows how easily economic desperation can lead to petty crime, and how easily petty crime can lead, for a young black man, to incarceration. Allmon’s backstory - growing up with his single, sickly mother in a Cincinnati neighborhood that has “the look of a place that once had been” - is beautifully and painfully done. The novel’s other plotline concerns Allmon Shaughnessy, a black former convict from Cincinnati who comes to work at the Forge horse farm. This quest becomes a Faulknerian tale of obsession: The incestuously close father and daughter will master chance itself, creating through sheer force of will a horse of “propulsive, thundering, unbeatable speed.” Henry, in his own way just as brutal and domineering as his father, sets about breeding a Derby winner with the help of his daughter Henrietta. (Henry’s father, a Latin-intoning, race-obsessed force of nature, considers this a filial betrayal: “a horse farm is really a cheap attempt at dignity … a heap of goddamn rhinestones.”) The first centers on Henry Forge, the dynastic heir who feels the Forge past “residing in him, forming rings in his bones” and who decides, as a young man, to transform the family estate into a horse farm. “The Sport of Kings” follows two major plotlines.
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