Bringing Real Horsepower to the Hood

So inseparable is the image of the cowboy on horseback from the fables of the American West that anthropologists of a far-off future or faraway galaxy may reasonably conclude that John Wayne and the Marlboro Man were a short-lived species of centaur, man and horse united in one creature.

In the here and now, the rites of manhood are so thoroughly imbued with horseflesh--a boy and his horse, the imagined solitary sojourner to isolated places--that every kid in my family at some point in his young life decked himself out with chaps and boots and plastic spurs, even though the only horse he rode was circling counterclockwise on a carousel.

Absent real horses, we also climbed astride the broad, bony backs of our dairy cows, who only moved fast en route to the feeder. I was thankful for this experience years later, when I found myself next to Princess Anne at some event, for I had only to mention it and she was off on a happy monologue about bull-riding in France and other equestrian esoterica.

I knew that story wouldn’t cut it with Kathy Kusner, who rode in the Olympics three times to Princess Anne’s one. Thankfully, I didn’t need horsy small talk with Kusner; she took the discussion by the reins and led it right where she wanted it to go, to her project, her dream, her goal: an inner-city riding program she calls Horses in the Hood.

*

They meet at Jordan’s, a soul food restaurant in Watts, white people who have worked with million-dollar horses and black people who may never have seen a horse, much less anything worth a million dollars. There are no horses yet, no barn, no training arena, no bleachers for cheering friends, but there is a plan, and the unflagging conviction that it’s a good one: teaching inner-city kids and adults the skills of horsemanship, and those other skills that come along with them: “respect, discipline, patience,” says Kusner, and the sentient pleasure that “unlike a basketball, a horse can receive affection.”

Kusner, who believes unswervingly in the English aphorism that nothing is as good for the inside of a man as the outside of a horse, led ponies around a ring at age 7 in exchange for riding lessons. As a teenager in the 1950s, she traveled with other people’s horses as a rider and groom to shows along the Eastern seaboard, to towns where the black grooms were not allowed into restaurants, and it was Kusner who went in and bought them food. Then, in 1968, after her own talent as a rider of show jumpers had been well established, a Maryland judge forced the state racing commission to license her as the first American woman jockey.

She contrived Horses in the Hood after Psycho Joe, another member of the Renaissance Runners group to which she belongs, asked her why there were no African American competitors in the Olympic equestrian events he had just watched. “This was not a question,” she recalls, “this was a statement.”

South-Central is not entirely devoid of horses. In Willowbrook, some people still keep pleasure horses, and a small stable operates nearby, with another riding program in Compton, where Junior Posse teaches equestrian skills to as many as 20 kids at a time. Horses in the Hood will be even bigger, Kusner promises, and for kids and grownups alike.

She has sought out support--dollars if you have them, moral support if you don’t--and found her own stable of officers. Her “community rep” is Kartoon, an ex-Blood OG whose boast, before he went straight and clean, was that he had spent time in every prison in California. Her board president is Dorothy Lyman, a horsewoman and TV director who for years appeared on a daytime soap opera; on Lyman’s first timid trip to Watts, women in the housing projects recognized her instantly, hailing her by her character’s name, Opal.

Kusner has a sheaf of “you go, girl!” letters, from the U.S. Equestrian Team, the National Horse Show Assn., an offer from Kaiser Permanente to provide crews to build the facility, and, from the irrepressible Cecil L. Murray, pastor of First AME Church, where Kusner sings in a choir, a letter addressing her by his nickname for her, “Snow White,” and saying, “Who can resist the lure of a horse? Only an ass (wild laughter).”

And she has her eye on a five-acre piece of land in Watts, if someone or several someones can pony up the money to buy it for her project. There is an artist’s conception of Horses in the Hood, but in Kusner’s mind she can already see it up and running, lessons costing little or nothing in exchange for a few hours with a broom or a currycomb, show-and-tell sessions with blacksmiths and veterinarians, kids and parents watching each other learn. “This,” she says, living her wish in present tense, “is everybody’s riding school.”

And maybe, just maybe, Horses in the Hood can do for minorities and horsemanship what Tiger Woods did for minorities and golf, and perhaps one day it’ll be a kid from Watts standing up there in riding boots and helmet in front of those five Olympic rings.

Horses in the Hood Los Angeles, (213) 564-7669.