"Horse" dramatizes the challenges both Jarrett and Theo face while navigating a white-dominated world. She, like Brooks, is a white woman from Australia. Another chance encounter sparks his affair with Jess, a specialist in vertebrate osteology at the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History. His chance discovery of a junked portrait of a horse leads him to undertake a project about enslaved figures depicted in equestrian art. Theo, a Black graduate student in art history, knows horses from his undergraduate days at Oxford where he excelled at polo. Jarrett’s present-day counterpart lives in Washington, D.C and he too inhabits a world limned by racism.
Like a great racehorse, these marvelous chapters seize the bit and take us on a thrilling run. Brooks has done her homework as always, mining diaries like " The Barber of Natchez," works of history like Katherine Mooney’s " Race Horse Men: How Slavery and Freedom Were Made at the Racetrack," Keeneland Library’s archival holdings, and a wealth of 19th-century sports newspapers.
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