NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE ).- It was the first few days of the new school year in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, when Allan Harris walked to the front of his fifth-grade classroom. He read his essay about how he had spent his summer: riding horses on his grandfather’s 600-acre ranch in Pennsylvania. The year was 1966.
His classmates laughed; the nun teaching the class stopped him.
“She told me to go down to the principal’s office for lying,” Harris, now 63 years old, recalled. “I was admonished by my teachers and peers alike; they would say, ‘No, a cowboy can’t be black.’”
The contribution of black people to the taming of the American West has long been whitewashed from history. From Hollywood depictions to textbooks, black people — who made up one-quarter of all cowboys — have been largely erased from the frontier narrative.
For Harris, a jazz musician and composer who is originally from Brooklyn and whose extended family were cattle ranchers, the omission felt personal.
That early experience at St. Matthew Catholic elementary school led Harris to create “Cross That River,” his blues-and-jazz-inflected musical that dramatizes the story of one black cowboy. It will be performed for a single night in Harlem on Jan. 13, its first return to the city since a five-week run in 2017 at 59E59 Theaters.
The show tells the fictional story of Blue, a man formerly enslaved on a Louisiana plantation who fled to ride the range, a common story among black people who made a life out West. There, black people were often key pioneer players, such as Bass Reeves, who escaped enslavement to become a U.S. deputy marshal, and Bill Pickett, who invented the rodeo sport of bulldogging, or wrestling a steer with bare hands.
But Harris hopes his musical does something more elemental: simply telling the story of a black cowboy at all.
Audiences “are inundated with images of gangsters and thugs and disenfranchisement from slavery, the disenfranchisement from downtroddenness,” said Harris, who created the show in 1999 and workshopped it for years in friends’ living rooms across the city. “No one talks upon the hundreds of thousands who went west to build fences and tame mustangs and basically carve the way.”
New York City has long been home to a small but committed group of people who share Harris’ mission in resurrecting a history erased — according to scholar William Loren Katz — by racism. The West was integrated compared to places east of the Appalachian Mountains, from which many black people had fled, Katz said in an interview before he died at age 92 in October; in the untamed West, life was simply too hard to keep up such barriers.
“For African Americans, even more was riding on their march west,” Katz wrote in his book, “The Black West” (Katz was white and grew up in Greenwich Village). “More than Europeans, pioneers of color pined for a home of their own, a place to educate children, protect women, and nail down elusive dreams.”
But the number of black cowboys in the city has dwindled since its heyday in the 1980s, when New York was home to the Black World Championship Rodeo, a festival of bucking horses and steer roping. The event took place in both Harlem, at Col. Charles Young Park (named after an early 20th-century African American cavalry officer) and at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn.
In 2016, the Federation of Black Cowboys, a group dedicated to teaching cowboy history, lost the stable it had run since 1994 in Howard Beach, Queens. The New York City Parks Department awarded the operating contract for the facility to a therapeutic riding organization after several horses died in 2013 under the federation’s care.
Today, staking their claim in the American story has become more essential than even riding or roping. “It’s sad, but we still exist; we still go to schools and educate the youth on the legacy,” said Kesha Morse, the federation president, who added that the organization still keeps four horses stabled privately in Queens. “The mission was not to just have horses and ride horses; it was to educate.”
Nationwide there have been small steps to correct the record, particularly in popular culture. The celebrated “Watchmen” HBO series opens with frontier lawman Bass Reeves, who is the inspiration of one of the show’s heroes, and a wild West aesthetic called the Yee-Haw Agenda has caught on among some young black influencers. In 2016 the Studio Museum in Harlem ran a photo exhibition on the subject; the following year the Museum of the Black Cowboy opened in Rosenberg, Texas.
One of the last practicing New York City cowboys is George Blair, who each summer teaches rodeo arts and black western history with his wife, Ann Blair, at their New York City Riding Academy, which they have run since 1988 from a small barn on Randalls Island in the middle of the Harlem River. He was a founder of the city’s black rodeo, inviting black horsemen from around the country to compete and even paying for their airfare.
“Folks said there were no black cowboys,” Blair recalled recently. “And I said, ‘Well, let’s just see about that. I am not going to only show you black cowboys, I’m going to show you rodeo.’”
Blair, a retired deputy chancellor of the New York State University system, is 88 years old; his wife is 84. They plan to return to the island this summer, but the couple is unsure about who will carry on their legacy. If the city loses black cowboys, “we lose the same thing that they lose when anything that disappears,” Blair said. “The city and the world is at a loss. The cowboys add a lot to the world.”
Today Harris, composer of “Cross That River,” keeps his cowboy hats in the Sugar Hill neighborhood of Harlem, where he has an apartment. The family ranch in Graysville, Pennsylvania, is down to 200 acres from its original 600. Since 2008, he’s shown his musical around the country, he said, and every time, black audiences seem to get a jolt: “It’s like, ‘Wow, we are a part of this thing that John Wayne was part of?’” Harris said.
“Everyone attributes the white horse, the white hat, the white face to the American West,” Harris added. “But we all slept under the same stars.”
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“Cross That River” will be performed at the Faison Firehouse Theater, 6 Hancock Place, in Harlem, on Jan. 13 at 7 p.m. For more information, visit www.crossthatriver.com.
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