“The diving tank gave way. Right in the middle of a dive. The girl, the horse, and the water swooshed into the ground. Some bleachers nearly slid in, but they held.”
Two Feathers falls from the sky aboard her beloved celebrated diving horse, Ocher. The leap is from a height of forty feet into a pool of water specifically crafted for the stunt. But there is a problem with the pool at the Glendale Park Zoo. It was constructed on a sinkhole which is basically a soft piece of earth without a strong underlying structural foundation that may or may not just suddenly give way and—as per the name—swallow everything nearby into the hole created by the earth literally sinking into the abyss of unseen caverns below. It’s a real thing and can be quite devastating and that’s when you can see it coming. Neither Two Feather nor Ocher ever saw it coming. But did Duncan Shelton, the groundskeeper?
She thought over Crawford’s predicament. Wished he could bring Bonita to the park. It wasn’t totally segregated. Negros worked all over it at tasks they’d always been allowed (or forced) to do—hard labor, food, entertainment, and animal tending. And they also commonly escorted and cared for small white children. They could even, if well-behaved and accompanied by a white, ride the rides. The park was liberal that way.
After the tragic and devastating accident which caused the loss of her horse, Two Feathers is pretty much lost. Rather than heading back home to try to get her life back in order, she sticks around the zoo, becoming especially close to Crawford. For the record—for any reader who has had cause to celebrate not being forced to learn all that critical race theory “stuff—the narrator is being sharply ironic with that last observation. The term “well-behaved” when applied to a black person in this era was just a nicer synonym for “not acting like an uppity” you-know-what and instead “knowing their place.” So, yeah, racism is a theme going on here. For those bothered by the fact that another writer is suggesting there is racism in American history, be aware there is another perfectly nice horse story called Black Beauty and despite sporting a title which got the novel banned in South Africa, it features not a single uppity Negro. (Though some have accused the horse of not knowing its place.)
He was on the path to getting what he wanted, which was . . . He couldn’t say exactly. But it had to do with sex with Two. Having her at his disposal. Keeping her as his own. His only pleasures came from feeling in control and pulling things over on people. He liked lording over animals. And sex with an inferior race didn’t put him off at all.
Not everyone around the zoo is exactly worthy of Two’s respect and friendship. Jack is another worker, but young and white and so immediately given the benefit of the doubt of his behavior. Which, as it turns out, is a mistake on the part of those with a surplus of beneficent doubt. In addition to being young and white, Jack is also a southerner. As a son of Dixie, he grows up with certain expectations of privileges and rights and expectations thereof and therein. Such as, for example, an adherence to the “Southern custom” sex with inferior races. Since Two Feathers is an Indian rather than black, he can even entertain the possibility of marriage if his sexual pleasures should happen to produce offspring. Well, he can entertain the possibility at least until he works up enough interest to check out whether marrying an Indian is as illegal for whites as marrying a black person. Not the latter circumstance would ever even reach the level of entertaining diversion in what passes for Jack’s thoughts.
