Opening
Parallel lives tighten into a braided narrative: a fragile new romance in 2019, a life-and-death struggle in 1853, and a catalytic art-world pivot in 1954. A single image of Lexington becomes the hinge—linking intimacy, survival, and ambition across centuries.
What Happens
Chapter 21: Jess (2019)
Jess meets Theo for lunch, where his dog, Clancy, unlocks instant warmth—Jess misses her own dog in Tasmania, and they swap stories of Australia. Jess’s anatomist’s eye drifts to Theo’s hand; she spots an old fracture and he shrugs it off as a polo injury from Oxford. When she asks why he quit a sport he clearly loves, he shuts down.
Inside, Theo revisits years of racist bullying at boarding school and Oxford: slurs that shrink him, a constant sense of unbelonging. His mother, Abiona, frames it as the price of boarding school; his father, Barry, urges him to weaponize others’ underestimation. The final straw comes when an opposing coach roars a racist command, and Theo responds with ferocious play, then resigns the next day. To Jess he offers only, “I guess I loved it more than it loved me,” while privately gauging her awareness of Race, Slavery, and Systemic Racism.
After lunch, they head to the museum. Jess blurts an awkwardly endearing observation about Theo’s “immense rotational flexibility,” and he laughs. At a crosswalk, he takes her hand and doesn’t release it—an unmistakable step from collegial to personal.
Chapter 22: Ten Broeck’s Jarret (1853)
Back at Fatherland, Jarret Lewis works the smithy until Henry summons him: Lexington is down with colic, having broken into the corn. The overseer Pryor has already bled the horse—a dangerous mistake that ignites Jarret’s anger. Drawing on everything his father, Harry Lewis, taught him, Jarret takes control, ordering linseed oil and laudanum.
He mixes the drench and, with authority Pryor lacks, coaxes Lexington to take it. The depth of The Human-Animal Bond is palpable as the suffering horse nuzzles Jarret. After a tense half hour of walking, Lexington passes manure—relief. When Pryor tells him to go back to the smithy, Jarret refuses. If he had been allowed to stay, this would not have happened, he says, and warns of the risk of founder. Calculating his own liability, Pryor lets Jarret remain. Jarret moves his things into Lexington’s stall, reclaiming his role as the horse’s keeper.
Chapter 23: Ten Broeck’s Jarret (1853)
With no other duties, Jarret gives Lexington round-the-clock care and, for the first time, tastes unscheduled hours. His thoughts return to William Johnson, the free Black barber in Natchez whose literacy grants him presence and power. Seizing a path toward Freedom and Agency, Jarret decides to learn to read.
Gem points him to Uncle Jack, a preacher, and Jarret finds welcome with Jack and his wife, Eveline. They begin with Job: a thunder-voiced horse forged in poetry and might. The line “Clothes his mane with thunder” lodges in Jarret’s chest. He practices letters, then words, and threads the cadence of scripture into Lexington’s gait, reciting aloud as he rides—healing horse and self together.
Chapter 24: Theo (2019)
At the American Art Museum, Jess and Theo study the large Lexington portrait by Thomas J. Scott. Theo admires the painterly control; Jess lights up at the anatomical clarity, which corroborates her suspicion that the Smithsonian mount is wrong—a triumph for Art, History, and Memory as evidence. In the file, they find a curveball: the painting enters the museum in 1980 as part of the “Martha Jackson Memorial Collection.”
Theo recognizes the name. Martha Jackson, a force in midcentury Manhattan, champions Abstract Expressionists like Pollock. Why would her bequest include a 19th-century equestrian portrait? The provenance complicates the puzzle just as Theo’s memories surface: his father’s sudden death, his mother’s distance, and a breakup with a Black woman who judged him “not Black enough.” Even with the risks of an interracial relationship, he’s drawn to Jess.
Chapter 25: Martha Jackson (1954)
Martha stands in Jackson Pollock’s Long Island studio as he careens through a violent, drunken session—hurling paint, shouting at Clement Greenberg, birthing what will become Blue Poles. He collapses, and Lee Krasner gathers him up. Martha slips out; business is impossible today.
Driving back to Manhattan, she reels through her friendship with Lee and the cost of orbiting a genius who burns down his own house. She remembers arriving in New York to paint and the brutal clarity that her work is competent, not great. Hans Hofmann names her true gift: a critic’s eye. She pivots, becomes a dealer, and learns to trust her own vision—carving out authority in a field that insists men define taste.
Character Development
The section turns private thresholds into public pivots: a hand held, a horse saved, an alphabet unlocked, a career reborn.
- Jess: Professional precision fuels personal courage; her anatomical read of Lexington validates her research and nudges her closer to Theo despite her social awkwardness.
- Theo: He carries the weight of elite spaces that bruise him; his guarded comment about polo masks deep wounds while his curiosity about Jess persists.
- Jarret Lewis: He steps into leadership, saving Lexington and staking his claim to learning—acts of self-definition within a system designed to erase him.
- Martha Jackson: She embraces curation over creation, transforming discernment into power and positioning herself at the center of modern art.
Themes & Symbols
The narrative maps how private agency contends with public systems. Theo’s inner landscape and Jarret’s daily struggle trace the continuum of racial harm—overt in bondage, insidious in prestige—and show the cost of surviving both. Literacy becomes Jarret’s lever, turning text into selfhood; his Bible is a tool, a refuge, and a key.
Art folds time. The Scott portrait functions as proof and portal, letting Jess read bones through paint and inviting Theo to reframe modernism’s mythos. The human-animal bond literalizes reciprocity and trust: Lexington survives because Jarret loves him with knowledge, and that knowledge leads Jarret to pursue his own freedom.
Key Quotes
“I guess I loved it more than it loved me.”
- Theo distills years of exclusion into one understated line, shielding pain while revealing its shape. The sentence carries the asymmetry of belonging—how institutions accept talent but deny personhood.
“Clothes his mane with thunder.”
- From Job, the line fuses divinity, power, and horseflesh. Jarret hears his own possibility in its cadence; the verse sanctifies Lexington and sanctifies learning, linking mastery of words to mastery of self.
“Smash that uppity black-faced fucker.”
- The coach’s slur is the moment of rupture for Theo: violence nakedly spoken in a space that pretends to civility. His response—play, then resignation—reclaims dignity on his terms.
A “critic’s eye.”
- Hofmann’s phrasing reframes failure as vocation. Martha’s authority is not in making the canvas, but in making meaning—an artistry of selection that shapes the canon.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
This stretch cements the novel’s hinge. In 2019, Jess and Theo move from curiosity to connection, and the Scott portrait’s Martha Jackson provenance opens the central mystery linking past to present. In 1853, Jarret proves indispensable to Lexington and to himself; saving the horse and learning to read are the twin acts that define his future. The 1954 shift to Martha adds a third timeline and repositions the story within the modern art ecosystem, showing how taste, power, and memory decide what endures—and why a racehorse’s image crosses centuries to matter now.