![]() ![]() Horse moves between Lexington’s record-breaking life and his cultural afterlife between Jarret’s world and Theo’s. The equestrian art of the antebellum south often includes Black stablemen, and Theo is writing his PhD on the dehumanising equivalences these paintings make between man and beast – the gilt-edged boast of ownership. It’s salvaged by Theo, a graduate student with an equine fixation. More than 160 years later, an oil painting of a white-socked horse is dumped on the roadside in Washington DC. “A racehorse is a mirror,” the painter tells Jarret, “and a man sees his own reflection there.” ![]() ![]() It is the last defiant decade of US slavery, and the boy and the horse will be bought and sold together. Watching him paint is Jarret, an enslaved groom who will tend to the horse until its dying breath. In green-pastured Kentucky in the early 1850s, an itinerant artist – a painter of rich men’s horses – is struck by the beauty of a white-socked foal, and captures the animal on canvas. “It would also need to be about race.” It’s the kind of solemn and virtuous statement that can make a reader wary that unmistakable whiff of good intentions. ![]() “As I began to research Lexington’s life, it became clear to me that this novel could not merely be about a racehorse,” Brooks explains in her afterword. But underneath the romance lies a dark inevitability: antebellum horseracing was an industry of white prestige built on the plundered labour of Black horsemen. ![]()
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