I WANT TO KNOW WHY
by Sherwood Anderson, 1921

"I Want to Know Why," published in the collection The Triumph of the Egg: A Book of Impressions of American Life in Tales and Poems (1921), the fifth book by Sherwood Anderson, reflects the many menial jobs in his youth that familiarized him with the people and procedures of livery and racehorse stables. He enjoyed companionship with jockeys, grooms, and trainers. In concert with the roving freedom of the young men of this story, his dominant interests and his many jobs prevented his completing high school, articulated here and in other works in a groping search for meaning among fragmented experiences.

A variation of a journey of initiation, "I Want to Know Why" presents a boy of 15 years teetering on the verge of sexual discovery, suffering a shock to his innocence, and a year later—though he speaks of maturity—being still mystified. The theme, however, is a betrayal of standards rather than a sexual awakening.

The call to adventure is a horse race at Saratoga in upstate New York. With all the markings of a boy's adventure, the narrator steals away without telling his parents, leaving Kentucky with three friends, hopping freight cars, and following—in his mind—not adventure but something much more important, his love of horses. The black man Bildad, doing odd chores at livery barns in the winter and working as a cook at racetracks in the summer, serves in the role of guide and protector. Saratoga is the "Eastern track," the land of beginnings where initiations occur on the important "first day in the East."

The narrator's sense of values soon emerges from his self-confession. His faith resides in two standards, about which he has absolute opinions: "niggers" and horses. He wishes he were a black with the freedom to hang around livery barns, and his kinship with a quality horse enables him to interpret the horse's thoughts. Regarding blacks, he feels, "You can trust them." Regarding horses, he says, "There isn't anything so lovely and clean and full of spunk and honest and everything as some race horses." Ultimately, however, the quality of a person, in the boy's judgment, depends on that person's appreciation of horses.

At the difficult age between childhood and maturity, the narrator no longer expects his lawyer father to buy him things. Maturing, he earns his own money and wants to be a man and to think straight. Yet he knows that he cannot be a stable boy, because his father won't let him, and he risks being caught and sent home for viewing the horses in the paddocks before races.

The boy expresses self-confidence, but uncertainties intrude and foreshadow his climactic befuddlement. A horse the narrator picks will win unless "they've got him in a pocket behind another or he was pulled or got off bad at the post or something." By the same reasoning a trainer will be admired unless the boy observes the trainer violating what he thinks are their common standards.

The sexual element remains suppressed throughout. The narrator recognizes two winners: Middlestride, a gelding; and Sunstreak, a stallion who is "like a girl you think about sometimes but never see" and who is "hard all over and lovely too. When you look at his head you want to kiss him." Good breeding means that a thoroughbred "sired right and out of a good mare" and trained right can run; the narrator makes no assessment of stud purposes but knows a horse to serve only one of two purposes, running in races or pulling a plow.

Between the absolutes of the narrator's talent for picking reliable blacks and winning horses resides the trainer, and the trainer, Jerry Tillford, causes the bewilderment stated in the title. Knowledge occupies the realm of the metaphysical, far beyond the physical qualities of speed and appearance; and a touch of mysticism that enables the narrator to see inside a horse provides the emotional connection with Tillford, in whose eyes he finds a shared knowledge about Sunstreak's success. At a glance "I loved the man as much as I did the horse because he knew what I knew." The narrator knows that the trainer's pride is like that of a mother for her child, and he likes the trainer even more than he likes his own father.

After the race, desiring to be near the trainer and without knowing why, the boy walks in the direction he had seen an automobile travel and arrives at a ramshackle farmhouse in which Tillford and other white men from home flirt with prostitutes. While he spies on them, the shameful talk and behavior and the barnyard odor fill him with disgust and challenge his standards: "A nigger wouldn't go into such a place." The boy had decided that he would not be a gambler, but the professional gambler Rieback ("a nice man and generous") is the only white man from home who refuses to enter the brothel.

At crisis is the narrator's democratic social consciousness; he judges people and horses on their own merits. Other boys' fathers discourage association with a gambler like Henry Rieback's father, but the narrator doesn't see "what it's got to do with Henry or with horses either." At a younger age he wanted to be a jockey or a stable boy. At this time he wants to be an owner or a trainer. Blacks can make you laugh, whereas whites cannot; blacks "won't squeal on you" and are "squarer with kids." He dislikes Henry Hellinfinger, who is "too lazy to work."

In general the boy favors blacks and trainers because, as with them, picking a winner is in his blood. At the crucial scene in the farmhouse he overhears the trainer Tillford brag as Sunstreak never would; nor would a proud mother claim credit due her child. Tillford claims that he rather than Sunstreak won the race. But most disappointing of all, Tillford looks at the prostitute with his eyes shining just as they had shone when he looked at Sunstreak, and then he kisses her. The narrator's love for Tillford turns to hatred.

With the same touch of mysticism that provides knowledge without words, and a sense that more is to be revealed, the narrator keeps secret his observation and his disappointment. A year later a new colt frolics with Sunstreak and Middlestride, but the former pleasures are spoiled; beauty has been betrayed. The narrator has not found a means to change his standards; women and horses still belong in a special category, and Tillford should have been selective of both. Democracy tempered by nearness to horses has not encouraged a removal of trainers from the special category they occupied earlier, and the boy remains puzzled.

The story seems to scrape the surface of a profound meaning that resides in the narrator's fine sense of tuning regarding women and horses. When the sexual awakening occurs, he will not bestow his attentions on just any female as Tillford did but only on a thoroughbred.

—Grace Eckley