Catherine stepped up to the exhibit label on the plinth and drew out her reading glasses. “Horse!” she read. “I can’t believe it! I don’t suppose you people have the Mona Lisa stashed somewhere, labeled, Smiling Girl?” She ran a finger over the terse nameplate. “Not just Horse,” she said. “The horse. What you have here is the greatest racing stallion in American turf history.”
Based on what is known of Lexington (America’s “greatest racing stallion” and the most successful stud of his time), Horse returns to Geraldine Brooks’ familiar territory of mixing history, science, and art to tell a compelling story of the past, while using that history to make commentary on the present. The focus here is on rediscovering the stories of the enslaved Black horse handlers in the pre-Civil War South — and especially those known and imagined figures who bred and trained Lexington and other well-known racehorses of the day — and by having a Black man tracing those stories in the present, there’s opportunity for social commentary and an investigation into how far American society has changed (or not). The plot in each timeline truly was compelling — I equally wanted to know what would become of Lexington and his handlers in the past and what the characters in the present would learn about them — and while Brooks did a fine job of making me care about the characters, I had just the queasiest feeling that these weren’t, ultimately, her stories to tell. (And I honestly don’t know how to square that feeling: can’t a white Australian writer tell stories about enslaved Black people in the American South if the intention is to bring their history back to life? Even if her husband was a Civil War expert?) No full marks, but a very interesting and worthwhile read.
Dr. Warfield grimaced. “Four white feet and a white nose — throw him to the crows.” Then the doctor laughed. “Lot of old wives’ nonsense, judging a horse by the color of his socks.”
(Ah yes, Doctor: we wouldn’t want to judge a horse by its colour.) Lexington (initially named “Darley”) was foaled in 1850 at Dr. Warfield’s stud farm, The Meadows, and put into the care of his well-regarded trainer, Harry Lewis (a formerly enslaved Black man who had purchased his own freedom). As Brooks imagines it, and based on an actual lost painting described as “Lexington being led by black Jarret, his groom”, Harry Lewis has a young son named Jarret, whom he entrusts with the horse’s daily care and training. Jarret develops an unbreakable bond with Lexington, and as he is still an enslaved person himself, Jarret will find his fate tied up with the horse’s as Lexington’s racing career sees him sold up and down the river.
Obedience and docility: valued in a horse, valued in an enslaved human. Both should move only at the command of their owner. Loyalty, muscle, willingness — qualities for a horse, qualities for the enslaved. And while the horse had two names, the men had only one. Theo let the resentment rise inside him. Then, as he’d trained himself to do, he crushed it. Just as a lump of coal, under pressure, could become a diamond bit, Theo had learned to turn his anger into something he could use.
In the current day (2019), Theo is an art history grad student in Washington, D.C. who discovers an intriguing horse painting on a neighbour’s trash heap. Theo’s parents were in the foreign service — his father from California, his mother from Nigeria — and having been raised primarily in British boarding schools, despite being a Black man, he is absolutely disconnected from the African American experience (his last Black girlfriend dumped him for literally whistling Dixie.) When Theo goes to the Smithsonian in order to research pre-Civil War equine painting, he crosses paths with Jess: an Australian osteopath who now runs the bone lab for the Smithsonian, and who, coincidentally, has been approached by a British veterinarian who would like access to Lexington’s bones, which are in the museum’s collection. Theo and Jess work together discovering the stories behind the painting and the bones, but I found something rather distancing (no doubt by design) in the fact that the modern day characters are all non-Americans (is that how Brooks gets around the “Own Voices” issue? By not presuming to speak for an African American?) In the past, Jarret crosses paths with the painter Thomas Scott several times, and it would seem that every time, Jarret needs to explain to the painter that the white man doesn’t actually know anything about an enslaved Black person’s reality, as when Scott seems surprised that Jarret wouldn’t be jumping to enlist during the Civil War:
“Mr. Alexander commenced to pay us wages right after the president’s proclamation. What makes you think I’d give that up to take orders from some White officer, a stranger, who don’t care if I live or die? Just another massa, is all I see. We suffered enough on account of slavery already I don’t plan on laying my life down to end it. You folk who made this mess, I reckon you owe us to clean it up.”
In addition to these two timelines, there’s a third, lesser in my opinion, plotline tied in: In the 1950s, “pioneering gallerist” Martha Jackson (supporter of the avant garde, friend of Jackson Pollock) acquired a painting of Lexington which would ultimately stick out among the abstract works left to the Smithsonian upon her death, and Brooks imagines how it would have come into her hands. This bit felt tacked on, and even if Brooks found it to be an interesting part of Lexington’s story (or at least the story of paintings made of him), it didn’t add much to me. (And as Brooks gives a little bio at the end of the real figures in the story, she apparently showed restraint by not divulging within the novel that Dr. Warfield was the attending doctor at Mary Todd Lincoln’s birth; that seems a more interesting fact as the Civil War eventually affected Lexington’s, and Jarret’s, [and Warfield's!] fates.)
As I began to research Lexington’s life, it became clear to me that this novel could not merely be about a racehorse; it would also need to be about race. Horse farms like the Meadows and Woodburn prospered on the plundered work and extraordinary talent of Black grooms, trainers, and jockeys. Only recently has their central role in the wealth creation of the antebellum thoroughbred industry begun to be researched and fully acknowledged.
And that, from the afterword, is the point: Not only were the Black horsemen not acknowledged in their day, but after the Civil War and Reconstruction, they were harassed out of horse racing all together. (There’s a parallel made to Theo being bullied out of playing polo at Oxford, but again, that felt like an outsider tale with little relevance to the African American experience.) Still: beyond righting historical wrongs, horse racing itself is an exciting subject to read about — the pounding hooves and flying manes — and Lexington was a winning and magnificent race horse. Brooks makes it exciting, and the research into the painting and bones has the feel of solving the clues of a mystery; all compelling material that held my interest throughout.
