As a Black cowgirl, Margey Givings spends the majority of her time tending to her land and her lineage while her one-year-old son chills in a baby carrier on her back.

Chores start at around 5:30 am on Givings and her fiancé’s 30-acre property in El Reno, Okla., where they also operate their own racing stable. Throughout the day, she cleans the stalls of their 13 horses, hauls feed, saddles and hay, and gets the horses ready to train. Laughter from her son Maverick lightens the load. When the chores are done and the horses are securely put away, the toddler gets a chance to explore the terrain of the same rural life that raised his mother.

Givings is intrigued by how Beyoncé’s “Cowboy Carter” album will shape the soundtrack of Black rancher life and tell their stories. As a woman whose musical tastes are old-school soul and R&B with a dash of country, “Texas Hold ‘Em” is a bit too pop for Givings. But the slow melody of “16 Carriages’’ is something she can gallop to. One of the new tracks dominating the airwaves is “Protector.” Beyoncé serenades her daughter Rumi with a lullaby. In the tune of Black motherhood, the songstress promises to always watch over Rumi and how there’s “a long line of hands carryin’ your name.”

When Givings became pregnant with Maverick, her time in the saddle came to a halt. She used to ride five to ten horses a day and tear up rodeo arenas in Oklahoma’s historic Black towns. But no accomplishment can top being a 28-year-old cowgirl raising a cowboy. She captures their bonding moments on Instagram and TikTok.

“I’m very thankful he was placed in my life when he was because I’m living such a beautiful life now,” Givings said. “Everything I do is for Maverick. Every morning, I wake up for him. He’s my whole purpose in life.”

The second-act of Beyoncé’s three-part, “Cowboy Carter” seeks to reclaim a Black culture that is often portrayed as white. The release of “Texas Hold ‘Em” led to Beyoncé’s historic rise to the top of Billboard’s country music chart, firing up the discourse on how Black genius shaped the sounds of the genre. The album’s cover art of Beyoncé, a Texan, side-saddling a white horse positions her like a rodeo queen dressed to the nines in red, white and blue. With an American flag in hand, she’s ushering in a reminder that Black people have always been in the arena. Smithsonian magazine reports one-in-four cowboys were Black, which wasn’t reflected or celebrated in the traditional media of the Wild West.

Beyoncé mentioned on Instagram that “Cowboy Carter’’ was inspired by an incident where she felt unwelcomed. While the singer didn’t discuss the occurrence in detail, fans are pointing to her 2016 debut in the country music space with her song “Daddy Lessons,” from her Lemonade album and the backlash she received during her Country Music Awards performance with The Chicks. Beyoncé’s experience mirrors the trials Black country singers and Black equestrians face in predominantly white spaces. She strives to alleviate this pain in “Blackbird.” A sisterhood of Black women country artists that included Tanner Adell and Reyna Roberts encourage each other to continue to fly despite their hardships.

Givings is also grabbing the reins of representation in her own way. She uses her professional photography skills to grow her brand Coffee Cowgirls, which celebrates all shades of women horse riders. Even when people talk about Black riders, the conversation tends to lean one way, Givings said. The legacies of Bill Pickett and Nat Love are becoming more well known – and rightfully so. But notable Black cowgirls such as Betty Jo Williams and Pam Buck don’t get the same spotlight.

“That’s another reason why I thank Beyoncé for what she’s doing,” Givings said. “A lot of it is mostly cowboys. Like, they only talk about the males in the industry. So I’d like to bring awareness to all the great things cowgirls do.”

From Givings point of view, Blackness could never be whitewashed from the fabric of American history. She comes from a horse loving family. Her fifth birthday present was a horse she named Alice N Wonderland. Her childhood weekends and summers were spent exploring 280-acres worth of family-owned land with five of her cousins in Boley, Okla. They would ride bareback to a creek where they would catch, gut and cook fish. She has competed in Oklahoma’s Black rodeos from the time she was about 10 to her mid-20s. After a barrel-racing, team-roping career, Givings made her mark in the Boley Rodeo in 2018 when she became the first Black woman to ride ranch bronc, which challenges riders to remain on a bucking horse for eight seconds. It’s a sport women rarely participate in due to its toll on the body, Givings said. After the Boley rodeo, Givings would go on and participate in eight more ranch bronc riding competitions.

When it comes to the predominantly white rodeos, Givings doesn’t venture out to places where her family won’t feel comfortable.

“I like to stay around loved and wanted,” Givings said. “If it’s gonna be my kind of vibe, then we’ll go, but not on a whim, especially because now I’m raising a Black son.”

Her success with and love for horses is why Givings has to balance her excitement for “Cowboy Carter” with a tad bit of apprehension concerning how the album’s popularity is already affecting the Black equestrian space. The publicity is beautiful, she said. But she wants to make sure the appreciation is authentic. She recalls a collaboration she did with a baby carrier brand. The content was captured about six months ago, but Givings said the footage wasn’t posted until after Beyoncé released new music. Now Givings is a regular face on the baby carrier’s page.

“To me it feels like the world is playing dress up and everybody wants to be a part of it,” She said. “I’m anxious to see if it’s going to boost our culture and have more people want to join and be more hands on the black agriculture life, or is it just a phase?”

Some people can take phases too far. In Oklahoma, Givings said there’s already a problem of cowboys buying horses just to impress the cowgirls at the rodeo. Since they don’t know anything about taking care of a horse, the animals would come to the rodeos malnourished.

“I see it every year, and that’s my issue with people who want to join the culture and don’t know nothing about the culture,” Givings said. “They just want to jump right in and then it’s usually the horse that has to pay the price.”

This doesn’t stop Givings’ heart from getting full anytime new spectators packing the stands at the rodeo. But for those who want to become a Black equestrian, her suggestion is to do so respectfully by starting from the bottom by finding a horse trainer and cleaning out stalls. After getting their hands dirty, they can then work their way up to learning how to groom, feed and ride a horse. Some trainers will trade riding lessons for work, Givings said. This tactic isn’t just for new riders. Whenever Givings wants to learn something new about horses, she will go and find an expert in that field and work under them.

“You can do this for 150 years and still not know everything. Every single day, I learn something new,” Givings said. “I tell people all the time that the internet could shut down today, and I have to still wake up and go do what I have to do with my horses. It’s not going to stop for us.”

Not with Maverick around. Watching him interact with animals and nature just like Givings did during her childhood has led to many treasured moments. The family’s horses tower over Maverick, but they treat the toddler with gentleness. One of their female horses allows Maverick to feed her one blade of grass at a time. Maverick’s first racehorse runs so fast Givings can’t catch it. But whenever it hears the child coming out to the pasture yelling, the yearling will saunter towards him, answering Maverick’s call.

Growing up rural taught Givings survival and tenacity. She hopes her son’s upbringing will bless him with his own lessons.

“The number one [lesson] is patience,” Givings said. “If you can learn to communicate with an animal that doesn’t  speak the same kind of language as you, you will then have the patience to do just about anything in life.”

Givings celebrates all her wins with Maverick by her side. When she collaborates with brands on social media or when she’s contacted for a photoshoot or video about equestrian life, Maverick – with his big smile and even bigger belt buckle – gets his time to shine too. It’s important to celebrate their authenticity in front of the camera lens so people can get a genuine look at Black horse riders and their lives.

“A lot of the world don’t even know that we exist,” Givings said. “It’s non-horse people who are coming in and telling our story and it’s still not even being written right.”

When it comes to the foundations of the Black rodeo, Boley is ancestral ground. Givings is proud of her time there. It’s the largest and most recognizable of the more than 50 Oklahoma towns established by the formerly enslaved of the Five Tribes following the Civil War’s end. These freedmen and women built Boley into a model of Black progress. Just eight years after its founding in 1903, the town was bustling with an estimated population of 4,000 people, two colleges, an electrical generating plant, two banks, three cotton gins and a weekly newspaper. Booker T. Washington called Boley “the most enterprising and in many ways the most interesting of the Negro towns in the United States.” Many Black southerners fled to Boley to escape the horrors of Jim Crow.

Only 13 of these Black townships remain in Oklahoma, now. Racist practices that stifled Black migration into the state and the economic downturn of the Great Depression caused populations and businesses to dwindle. But Boley’s revitalization efforts are ongoing and the Boley Rodeo remains its pride and joy every Memorial Day weekend. At 130 years old, it’s the longest-running community-based African American rodeo in the country. Givings said tens of thousands of Black riders from across the country gather for an event that fosters camaraderie amongst the competition.

“It’s like a big cookout with the people you’ve been rodeoing with since you were a little kid,” Givings said. “Everybody just watches everybody grow up and the accomplishments that we all made together. It’s just a different kind of love.”

And Givings is keeping the legacy of that love alive by raising Maverick in this space. As a Black-boy mom, she knows she can’t protect him from all the different modalities of oppression Black men face in their lifetime. But down at the stables with his horses and down at the racetracks and rodeos, he’s safe and surrounded by Black love.

“I just want them to be successful,” she said with Maverick giggling in the background. “I want him to be able to handle whatever life throws at him. I want him to be the next legend…to break records and set bars that nobody else has set in life.”