Tales of the turf — Text and Context

Racetrack Vernacular and Social Range

The excerpts show a writer attentive to the speech and social texture of the racetrack world. In 'Hardshell' Gaines, the title character is introduced through his nickname, derived from a religious distinction between 'Hardshell Baptists' and 'Washfoots.' The story 'Toutin’ Mistah Fox' opens with a detailed description of Prosias Trimble, a Black tout reduced to working in a Turkish bath after the New Orleans meeting ends. Fullerton renders Trimble's dejection through his 'protuberant lower lip' and 'russet shoes, rapier-pointed,' and the narrative voice shifts to match the character's perspective. The track is called 'the only pure democracy of the world' in the preface, and the stories bear this out: characters range from a dying tout nicknamed 'Jaundice' to a little rector who learns to talk about 'handicaps and weights.' The language is specific to the milieu—'pulling chasers,' 'carryin’ too much weight,' 'writing your own ticket'—and Fullerton uses it to build a world where moral questions are framed in betting terms.

Gameness as a Moral Category

The preface states that 'the gameness, the courage, the fighting spirit of the thoroughbred' arouses 'the finest instincts' in man, and the dedication to Morvich praises the horse's 'heart' over 'straight stifles' and 'weight cloths.' This idea recurs in the story of Jaundice, a tout who confesses to pulling horses and cheating. In the hospital, he tells the narrator that a little rector assured him 'the Judges don’t set a guy down forever if he is sorry.' Jaundice's final speech—'I always was sorry when I pulled one of them bum chasers when he was trying. It wasn’t square to the horse'—makes the horse the moral center. The rector's funeral sermon uses racing language: 'handicaps and weights, and keeping on trying all the time.' Fullerton does not present a systematic theology; instead, he lets the track's own vocabulary carry the weight of redemption. The dying man's last bet is on mercy, and the story ends with the rector offering odds that Jaundice 'cashes that last bet.'

Setting and Economic Detail

Fullerton grounds his stories in precise, often overlooked settings. 'Toutin’ Mistah Fox' takes place in the St. Charles Hotel Turkish baths in New Orleans, where 'sixty fat men snoring in sixty keys' fill the rooms. The story explains that the winter meeting at the Fair Grounds has ended, and the 'army of men and horses' has moved north, leaving Prosias Trimble behind. His fall from strutting in 'pearl-colored spats' and a 'four-carat near-diamond' to working as a rubber is measured in the loss of his 'vanities vain.' The economic rhythms of the racing circuit dictate the characters' lives: when the horses leave, the touts become bathhouse workers. In 'Hardshell' Gaines, the old trainer's farm in Tennessee and his baggy garments 'which carried the odor of horses' place him in a specific, hardscrabble world. The stories do not romanticize the track; they show it as a place of constant movement, where a man's worth is measured by his knowledge of horses and his ability to keep trying under weight.

Readers coming to Tales of the Turf from the catalog subjects should expect less action on the track and more talk in the paddock, the bathhouse, and the hospital bed. Fullerton is less interested in race results than in the code of gameness that binds his characters to horses and to each other. The stories reward attention to dialect, to the economic pressures of the racing circuit, and to the way moral arguments are made in the language of odds and handicaps. The preface's claim that the track is 'the only pure democracy' is tested in every tale.

Reading Fullerton’s racetrack stories, I kept thinking about that old anthology, Atlantic Narratives: Modern Short Stories; Second Series — Context and Discussion. Both carry that same patient hush—waiting by the rail, studying a horse’s eye, knowing luck turns quietly. They feel like voices from another century, unhurried, in no hurry to prove anything. Just people trying their best, honestly told.