The opening pages of C. E. Morgan’s second novel, The Sport of Kings (2016), describe a young boy, Henry Forge, attempting to run away from his father and the punishment he can expect for having killed one of the neighbour’s bulls. When he is eventually caught by Filip Dunbar, a Black farmhand on the Forge estate, Henry’s father, John Henry, beats him with his belt having first tied him to an old whipping post for enslaved people – an early indication both that the Forge family had been enslavers, and that this racist history has a tangible ongoing presence on the estate. This opening scene takes place in Kentucky in 1954, but the novel as a whole, which is a complex, multigenerational exploration of slavery’s aftermaths, is set in both Kentucky and Ohio, and spans the period 1783 to 2006. As the novel develops, the focus remains for a time on Henry’s growing interest in breeding Thoroughbreds, as he transforms his father’s estate from corn production to a horse farm. By the 1980s, Henry is inculcating his daughter Henrietta with his own obsession with genetics and evolution; together they set about trying to breed the perfect racehorse. But the novel contains a parallel to this narrative of ambition and privilege: around a third of the way through the reader is introduced to Allmon Shaughnessy, the son of an absent white father and low-income Black mother, whose childhood and adolescence, roughly contemporaneous with Henrietta’s, is spent in the poorest parts of Cincinnati. When his mother’s sickness forces him out on to the streets to sell drugs for money, he is made to countenance the stark truth about his lack of choice in a time and space where structural racism catches him and his mother in a double bind. Following six years in prison and the death of his mother, Allmon trains as a horse groom, and the two narratives converge when he is hired on Forge Run Farm by Henrietta. But this is not the first time their stories have overlapped: Allmon’s ancestor is Scipio, a fugitive from slavery who was owned by Henrietta’s ancestor Edward Forge in the 1820s.