The third chapter, “Nothing But a Burning Light,” describes Allmon’s extremely difficult upbringing in Cincinnati, Ohio, one of the nearest major cities to Paris, Kentucky. One day, Henrietta conducts a charged job interview with Allmon Shaughnessy, a young black man who is deeply serious, and has a quiet confidence in his abilities with horses. After this, Henrietta expands her circle of casual sex to local bars, usually asking the first man she sees to sleep with her. In 1990, a horse from the Forge farm, Seconds Flat, places second in the Kentucky Derby, but Henry is still angry with the result, as he believes a truly perfect horse would easily finish first. As Henrietta grows into a young adult, she begins to have casual sex with the farm’s many male employees, in a cold and detached manner. Henrietta is deeply interested in science, and is taught by Henry how to run the horse-racing operation, as he intends to leave the farm in her hands when he passes away.
Henry was only married to Henrietta’s mother, Judith, for a brief time, before she ran off to Europe to be with another man. The second chapter, “The Spirit of Lesser Animals,” describes the upbringing of Henry’s daughter, Henrietta.
When John Henry dies in the 1960s, Henry inherits the farm and turns it into a breeding ground for racehorses. Filip is simply never seen again, and, after John Henry sends Lavinia away for a short time, brutally rapes her on her return home. As a teenager, Henry hears a rumor that the house’s black servant, Filip, has been having an affair with Lavinia, Henry’s mother and John Henry’s wife.
As Henry grows into a teenager, he becomes obsessed with horse racing, which John Henry strongly attempts to dissuade him from, believing it to be an interest of lower-class people who only fake being upper-class. When Henry lights a firecracker under a neighbor’s cattle, killing it, John Henry ties Henry to a whipping post and whips him brutally. The first chapter of the novel, “The Strange Family of Things,” describes the upbringing of Henry Forge, a young boy whose tyrannical father, John Henry Forge, proudly runs the family’s generations-old corn farm in rural Paris, Kentucky in the middle of the 20th century. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016. The following edition of this book was used to write this study guide: Morgan, C.E.
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