Opening
A discarded painting, a missing skeleton, and a newborn colt ignite three timelines that braid past and present into one story of art, race, and memory. In 2019 Washington, Theo and Jess stumble onto mysteries that point backward to 1850 Kentucky, where Jarret Lewis, an enslaved horseman, witnesses the birth of a champion. Together, these threads reveal how hidden histories surface through objects that refuse to be forgotten.
What Happens
Chapter 1: Theo
Georgetown, Washington, DC, 2019. Nigerian-American PhD student Theo battles an overly academic draft about Bill Traylor, an artist born into slavery, and pushes toward a more direct, human voice. Across the street, his recently widowed neighbor piles her dead husband’s belongings on the curb with a “FREE STUFF” sign. Theo remembers the man’s open hostility toward him as a Black neighbor and the week-earlier ambulance that took the body away. When Theo tries to offer a condolence meal, the widow returns a curt rebuff, underscoring his isolation and the neighborhood’s quiet racial tension.
Seeing the widow strain to move a recliner, Theo crosses to help. After they muscle it to the curb, she brusquely tells him to take something. Politeness compels him to look. Rifling a box of paperbacks, he uncovers a grimy painting of a horse in a splintered frame—discarded, anonymous, and instantly arresting. The fineness in the horse’s head cuts through the dirt, and Theo’s curiosity sparks.
Chapter 2: Jess
Smithsonian Museum Support Center, Maryland, 2019. Jess, an Australian osteologist, thrives in the Osteology Prep Lab, where she cleans and articulates skeletons so each specimen “tells its own story.” Her lifelong fascination with bones—tracing back to exhuming and articulating her childhood dog, Milo—has become a craft that merges Victorian artistry with modern science. As she packs for a trip to Woods Hole to collect a whale skull, a colleague calls in a panic: a researcher is flying in from England to study a specific 19th-century articulated horse skeleton, but the museum can’t find it. The piece has been off the books for decades.
Intrigued, Jess notes the accession number and searches her databases. If the skeleton exists, it may be buried in the support center’s vast holdings. Her quiet lab work suddenly opens into a larger pursuit, pointing toward one of the novel’s Hidden Histories and Erased Narratives.
Chapter 3: Warfield’s Jarret
The Meadows, Lexington, Kentucky, 1850. Thirteen-year-old enslaved groom Jarret Lewis possesses a preternatural fluency with horses—his “first language.” He works at The Meadows, the elite thoroughbred farm of Dr. Elisha Warfield. Jarret’s father, Harry Lewis, is a free Black head trainer who purchased his own freedom and persuaded Dr. Warfield to buy Jarret so they could live and work together. The chapter cements Jarret’s intuitive gift and the profound Human-Animal Bond that structures his world.
One spring night, Jarret notices the mare Alice Carneal uneasy with labor. The foal’s sire is Boston, a brutal, legendary stallion now dead. Jarret and Harry attend the birth of a bay colt with a white star and four white stockings. After Harry leaves, Jarret discovers Dr. Warfield’s eleven-year-old granddaughter, Mary Barr Clay, hiding in the hayloft, having snuck out to witness the foaling. Jarret recognizes her genuine love of horses and promises to keep her secret. The colt—soon to be Lexington—arrives as a moment of wonder and a pivot for their intertwined fates.
Chapter 4: Theo
Back in DC, Theo finally finds the voice he wants and finishes his Bill Traylor piece. He inspects the rescued horse painting: under the grime, the draftsmanship in the head signals a skilled hand. He decides to ask his Smithsonian magazine editor for a conservator referral. Memories surface—childhood rides with his father in Australia, then the alienation of an English boarding school after his parents’ divorce, where he found a niche in polo and a fascination with equestrian art.
The next day he bikes to the office, forgetting the painting entirely. The editor loves the Traylor article and immediately assigns him a profile of Mark Bradford, a career-making opportunity. Back home, swept up in spring cleaning and new work, Theo stashes the wrapped painting on a closet shelf. Sanitation crews clear the curbside “FREE STUFF,” and, without the daily reminder, Theo forgets the horse painting—an artifact slipping back into obscurity.
Chapter 5: Thomas J. Scott
The Meadows, Lexington, Kentucky, 1850. In a diary voice, Thomas J. Scott—itinerant equestrian artist and journalist—travels from Cincinnati to Lexington, eyeing Kentucky’s contrasts: “slovenly little farms” set against the Bluegrass’s opulent estates, wealth built on enslaved labor. On the coach, passengers debate Cassius Clay, Dr. Warfield’s abolitionist son-in-law. Scott, a self-described “free labor man,” resolves to keep his anti-slavery views discreet to secure commissions from the planter class.
At The Meadows, Dr. and Mrs. Warfield greet him as a guest, not a servant. Mrs. Warfield hints at matchmaking; Scott, wry and practical, says his profession is too precarious for marriage. He resolves to keep a daily diary of his work—placing the artist who will immortalize the horse at the center of the 1850s strand.
Character Development
Across five chapters, the novel seeds arcs that will converge around a single horse and the people who shape, study, and remember him.
- Theo: A solitary, hyper-schooled writer learning to shed academic distance. The found painting rekindles his equestrian past and nudges him toward a story that bridges art and buried history.
- Jess: A meticulous lab manager whose craft turns bones into narratives. The missing skeleton pushes her out of routine and into detective work with national stakes for museum memory.
- Jarret Lewis: A gifted, enslaved groom whose empathy with horses grants him purpose and agency within brutal constraints. His secret bond with Mary foreshadows fragile alliances across rigid racial lines.
- Harry Lewis: A free Black trainer and devoted father who carves out dignity and expertise within a racist order. His protection and mentorship of Jarret embody tenuous Freedom and Agency under slavery’s shadow.
- Thomas J. Scott: A keen-eyed outsider who balances conscience with survival. His diary frames the antebellum world’s hypocrisies while securing the commission that will carry the horse into posterity.
Themes & Symbols
The narrative links past and present to track how power structures persist and how objects preserve what people try to erase. Through Theo’s neighbor, Jarret’s enslavement, and Scott’s guarded pragmatism, the book maps the continuum of Race, Slavery, and Systemic Racism. The 2019 microaggressions echo the 1850 legal horrors, suggesting different eras, same root.
The story also meditates on Art, History, and Memory: a painting, a skeleton, and a diary carry truths that outlast their makers. Jess’s lab work and Scott’s portraiture reveal how science and art collaborate—and sometimes collude—to shape what survives. Jarret’s rapport with the colt embodies the Human-Animal Bond as a refuge and a form of knowing unavailable in human hierarchies. Meanwhile, the lost skeleton and curbside painting stage the novel’s project of recovering hidden histories.
- Symbols:
- The Horse Painting: A beautiful thing disguised by grime—an emblem of buried stories waiting to be seen.
- The Skeleton: A body turned archive; articulating it becomes a metaphor for reconstructing a fractured past.
Key Quotes
His first language had been the subtle gestures and sounds of horses. He’d been slow to master human speech, but he could interpret the horses: their moods, their alliances, their simple wants, their many fears. He came to believe that horses lived with a world of fear, and when you grasped that, you had a clear idea how to be with them.
Jarret’s “first language” reframes expertise as empathy. Reading a world of fear—horses’ and his own—teaches him a humane ethic of care that counters the cruelty surrounding him. This sensibility makes him indispensable to the colt’s future and exposes how the most “refined” results in racing depend on the labor and intuition of the enslaved.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
These chapters establish the novel’s architecture: present-day investigations (Theo’s painting, Jess’s missing skeleton) interlock with the 1850 birth of Lexington. Two artifacts—a canvas and a set of bones—become conduits through which erased lives and labors demand recognition. By juxtaposing timelines, the book binds the plantation past to modern institutions and neighborhoods, demonstrating how memory is curated, misfiled, or tossed to the curb. The colt’s arrival anchors the saga; the contemporary mysteries supply the engine that will uncover who made Lexington great—and who history tried to forget.