Arts
By Maria Browning
Beautiful Jim Key: The lost history of a horse and a man who changed the world
By Mim Eichler Rivas (William Morrow, 334 pp., $25.95)
History is always full of irony and contradiction. Every heroic image or treasured archetype carries within it elements of weakness, greed, cruelty or deceit. Every heartwarming saga has a chilling backstory. The secret to loving history is learning to embrace this paradox, and realize that the past, though ultimately unknowable, offers endless opportunities for us to spy on ourselves; to see the good, the bad and the ugly from the safe side of the peephole.
The author reads from her book, 6 p.m. Feb. 24 at Davis-Kidd.
The story of wonder horse Jim Key, and his owner Dr. William Key, is a perfect case in point. In her book, Beautiful Jim Key, Mim Eichler Rivas serves up a well-researched account of these two forgotten Tennessee celebrities that is sweet, earnest and frankly intended to uplift the reader. On this level, the book is a classic heroic animal tale and would probably delight any bright, horse-mad 13-year-old on your gift list. But Rivas also provides such a rich historical context for the story that she invites the reader to look past the romance to the complex tragedy of American race relations, and the way in which it both shaped the Jim Key phenomenon and helped erase it from our collective memory.
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William Key was born a slave in 1833, the property of a Shelbyville tanner who apparently treated him with some decency, allowing him to be educated along with the family's two sons. Key's remarkable talent for handling animals served as a partial shield against the worst abuses of slavery, and by the time he was a young man he had won considerable fame as a trainer and veterinarian, as well as a folk doctor. He was already in his sixties and had made a fortune selling patent medicine when he acquired a broken-down Arabian mare (supposedly once world-famous as "Lauretta, Queen of Horses") and had her bred in hopes of producing a winner for his Bedford county racetrack.
The foal, Jim (whose birth ultimately killed his dam), turned out to be a sick, misshapen creature. Rivas' account of how the little horse's defects set the stage for his brilliant career is standard anthropomorphic melodrama, but anybody who loves animals will find it irresistible. The constant ministrations of Dr. Key, who ignored repeated advice to put Jim down, left the colt with a profound attachment to humans. Employing the special genius of the companion animal, he learned that he could use his weakness to manipulate those around him. Rivas writes that he became "...the barnyard jester. Without being taught, the still sickly Jim had found his usefulness as a source of amusement. Comic relief. In time it became apparent to William Key that the lame wobble was no longer physiological; Jim was feigning it for the human laughter and the animal attention and distraction that the funny walk brought him."
As Jim grew into robust health, Dr. Key realized that his failed racehorse could make him a fortune as a performer. He trained Jim to show off an astounding array of skills, including reading, writing, spelling and arithmetic. The horse was also a fine actor, equally accomplished at flirting with pretty women and insulting politicians. The press bestowed the "Beautiful" moniker, and he was billed as "The Most Wonderful Horse in the World." Key established a partnership with a white East Coast promoter named Albert Rogers, and they exhibited Jim at fairs and theaters across the U.S. President McKinley was a fan, as was Teddy Roosevelt's daughter Alice. Both Key and Rogers were avid supporters of the anti-cruelty movement which had begun in the years after the Civil War, and they used Jim's performances and the surrounding publicity to promote the cause. Rivas gives an exhaustive but mostly entertaining account of Jim's career, which wound to a close as both Keys succumbed to age and illness. They were buried at home in Bedford County, and promptly forgotten by all but a few until Rivas got hold of their story.
Which brings us back to history: By weaving her saga into the fabric of its historical era, Rivas makes Beautiful Jim Key more than a charming fairy tale. The decade of Jim Key's great fame (1897-1907) falls right in the middle of the worst period of racial violence since the end of slavery. This was the so-called "nadir" in American race relations, when lynchings were happening at the rate of several a week, and not just in the South. Rivas points out that Key had to have felt uneasy in his fame. "When recent [ca. 1901] race riots exploded in New York, the white mobs went on a rampage, some with the express purpose of killing black celebrities and entertainers...."
White audiences generally loved Dr. Key as much as they did his horse, but he and Rogers felt it necessary to present the white man as Jim's owner, and early publicity referred to Key as Jim's "aging Negro valet." Part of Jim Key's appeal lay in the (false) nostalgia many people were already experiencing for the agrarian past. One of the attractions Rogers was promoting when he met Key was an "Old Plantation" exhibit, complete with a cotton field and make-believe slaves.
Key was highly regarded among African Americans in his day, but his willingness to endure a certain amount of indignity to fulfill his ambitions may explain in part why he has been so entirely forgotten. Modern sensibility prefers the martyr to the successful pragmatist. Key was a little too human for hero status. Even Rivas' rather starry-eyed portrait of him can't quite disguise that he must have been a complicated character—a brilliant healer, teacher and gentle soul, but also a gambler, a shrewd businessman, a practitioner of folk magic, and probably something of a fabulist. Spending a portion of the Civil War as the favorite groom of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, as Key supposedly did, is likewise not the quickest way into the pantheon of African American history.
Rivas struggles at times to create a shapely narrative from a wealth of detail, but her emotional grasp on the story is very sure. Beautiful Jim Key is a window into a lost world that is right in our backyard. You can't ask for much more from a horse tale than that.