The US horse racing industry was built on the backs of Black grooms, trainers, and jockeys whose identities are lost. In Horse, Geraldine Brooks imagines the story of an enslaved Black trainer, Jarret, and the real-life horse Lexington. In the 1850s Lexington broke records on race tracks and then sired hundreds of foals.
Horse moves between the antebellum South and early 21st-century Washington, DC, where two scholars are interested in Lexington. Theo, a Nigerian graduate student in art history, is fascinated by a discarded old painting of a magnificent white-footed horse with his groom, "Black Jarret." The horse was Lexington. Jess, an Australian zoologist working at the Smithsonian, is examining Lexington's skeleton.
Weaving the three stories together, Brooks investigates race in America then and now. As an enslaved man, Jarret's ability to stay with Lexington was threatened more than once, and he was able to keep training the horse only because no one else could do it better. A shocking modern event at the end of the book makes the point that in some ways, we haven't come very far.
The 19th-century sections are the strongest, calling attention to Black contributions to horse racing that were kept out of the record books. Brooks said in an interview, "It became clear to me that this novel could not merely be about a racehorse, it would also need to be about race."
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