![]() ![]() 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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