Black Beauty

There are some books I remember reading. Then there are books I remember loving. Black Beauty belongs in the second category.

I don't remember exactly when I first read it, but I believe it was sometime in the late 1970s. I was young, and I read it again and again—probably fifteen times. At that age, I didn't necessarily understand everything Anna Sewell was doing with the story. I knew I loved Black Beauty. I cared about what happened to him. I felt the injustice when people treated him cruelly, and the relief when someone treated him kindly.

But the book was doing more than telling me about a horse. Black Beauty was a witness. He saw people at their best and their worst. He experienced kindness, cruelty, neglect, pride, greed, and compassion. He couldn't change the world around him, but he remembered what happened. Through his eyes, ordinary human behavior became important. The way someone handled a horse revealed something about that person.

I think that idea stayed with me. Years later, I began thinking about mystery and suspense differently. A person doesn't have to understand everything that happens around them for them to notice it. A witness can remember a voice, a smell, a gesture, a habit, a particular way someone moves. Something that seems insignificant at the time can become important years later.

Perhaps that is one reason Black Beauty still feels relevant to me as a writer.

Then, in the early 1980s, Nickelodeon began showing the British television series The Adventures of Black Beauty. That became another part of the memory. The book had given me Black Beauty's inner world; the television series gave me landscapes, people, adventures, and a living world surrounding the horse.

And, of course, there was Kevin Gordon. I was completely in love with Roderick Shaw.

Those childhood attachments are funny things. They can seem insignificant when we're young, but decades later we discover that they are still tucked away somewhere inside us. A book, a television character, a particular landscape, even the sound of a familiar name can open a door to a version of ourselves we haven't visited in years.

That may be one of the reasons old books interest me so much now.

When I look back at the stories I loved as a child, I sometimes discover the beginnings of the writer I would eventually become. I loved mysteries, strange places, complicated people, secrets, danger, and stories where something beneath the ordinary surface mattered.

Black Beauty isn't a mystery novel. It isn't Gothic fiction or psychological suspense. And yet there is something in it that feels connected to the kinds of stories I want to tell now.

It understands that stories are often about what people reveal without realizing it. It understands that the vulnerable see things the powerful overlook. And it understands that remembering matters.

Maybe that's why I read Black Beauty so many times. I wasn't just reading about a horse. I was learning how much a story can make you care about a life that isn't your own.