CROSSING THE LINE

From a Philadelphia neighborhood beset by poverty and violence to the head of the first all-Black interscholastic polo championship team.

Rosser was one of a cohort of young men who might have been steered into a gang given other circumstances. Instead, he and his brothers took a wrong turn on a back road and found themselves at a riding stable whose cash-strapped owner took them under her wing and taught them about horses—and, in time, the game of polo, ordinarily the province of the rich, condescending White boys they played. In time, after some humiliating defeats, the preteens pulled themselves together, and Rosser so distinguished himself that he was given a full scholarship to a military academy. The rigid discipline there stood in sharp contrast to a home life bounded by violence and addiction. “She’d bring strangers and friends into the house at night,” he writes of his mother, “and we’d wake up to the thick skunky smell of last night’s weed in the air, empty crack vials strewn on the kitchen table, tipped over beer bottles dripping their last dregs onto the floor.” Both polo and school pulled him out of that life, he writes, even as members of his own family and close friends were murdered, imprisoned, and lost in an indifferent system. Affectingly, the author writes that the sight of an African American on a horse was not unknown even in “The Bottom,” where he lived, with “a history of horses and horsemanship…that goes back a century or more.” What was unusual was “a bunch of scrawny-ass Black kids galloping some second-hand horses around a soccer field, mallets in hand,” a pleasing vision that one hopes to see more often, just as one celebrates Rosser’s poetically spun tale of championship: “We never missed a step. We were young kings. We were brothers.”

Rosser’s aspirational tale, though full of sorrow and hardship, is one that readers will cheer.