Opening
Desire, art, and history collide as the novel toggles between 2019 Washington, D.C., and antebellum racetracks. In the present, Jess and Theo fall into an intense intimacy that doubles as an intellectual partnership, while in the 1850s, Jarret Lewis steers the fate of the legendary racehorse Lexington through triumph, scandal, and a dangerous secret. Across both timelines, the chapters deepen the theme of Hidden Histories and Erased Narratives, linking a damaged skull in a modern lab to the peril and loyalty of the past.
What Happens
Chapter 31: Jess
In 2019 D.C., Jess and Theo wake in the afterglow of a day that begins at the American Art Museum and ends in Jess’s bed. Theo turns a museum tour into a lesson in seeing: he names the “Invisible Man effect,” using Bazille’s Young Woman with Peonies and Manet’s Olympia to show how Black figures disappear in white viewers’ eyes—a frame for the book’s inquiry into Hidden Histories and Erased Narratives. Their chemistry is equal parts physical and intellectual, the conversation sparking as naturally as their touch.
At Jess’s apartment, dinner turns into a playful but telling quarrel about John Berger, exposing class and confidence gaps between them. They recover easily, drawn back together by candor and attraction. The next day, Jess gives Theo a behind-the-scenes tour of the Smithsonian’s Natural History Museum, where bone rooms and drawers of specimens enthrall him. After he leaves, Jess, newly aware of how much she has missed this kind of connection, unwraps the horse skull she’s kept waiting. Under the left eye, the lacrimal bone rises in a lumpy knuckle—a healed trauma that marks the animal’s living pain and starts to knit the present to the past.
Chapter 32: Ten Broeck’s Jarret
In 1854 Metairie, Louisiana, the racetrack teems with twenty thousand spectators as Richard Ten Broeck stages the Great State Post Stakes. Jarret, anxious for both Lexington and his young jockey Henri Meichon, watches the first four-mile heat unfold against a field that includes Lexington’s half-brothers Lecompte and Arrow. Lexington leads early; in the stretch, Lecompte and jockey John surge, and Jarret murmurs encouragement as if the horse can hear. Lexington answers with a final, crushing drive to win by three lengths, a victory born of grit and the deep trust of The Human-Animal Bond.
The second heat tightens the drama. Pressed hard by Lecompte and Highlander, Lexington slips to third; Lecompte opens an eight-length gap that feels decisive. Then Highlander’s challenge lights Lexington’s competitive fuse. He reels Lecompte in, the pair thunder neck-and-neck, and Lexington explodes again to win by four lengths, securing Ten Broeck’s massive purse. Afterward, Ten Broeck offers Jarret a choice: a fifty-dollar purse, a month’s leave, or a tutor. Jarret chooses the tutor, claiming a shard of Freedom and Agency for himself. That night, Mary Barr Clay appears in his quarters, matured and urgent. She warns that rising political tensions endanger him and urges a return to Kentucky. Jarret refuses to leave Lexington or to trust her grandfather, staking his safety on the horse and his work.
Chapter 33: Thomas J. Scott
Thomas J. Scott slips into the role of chronicler. One week after the triumph, Ten Broeck—provoked by General Wells and lured by money—demands a rematch. His partner Willa Viley rails that Lexington is unfit, calling Ten Broeck a “blackleg” as their fight spills within earshot of Jarret. Ten Broeck buys Viley out, runs the rematch anyway, and Lexington, underprepared, loses decisively as Lecompte sets a world record. In the second heat Meichon momentarily pulls up, saying he heard someone tell him to stop. Ten Broeck fires him, rumors swirling that he bet against his own horse.
To repair Lexington’s reputation and craft spectacle, Ten Broeck proposes a “Race Against Time”: Lexington will run alone against the clock to beat Lecompte’s mark. He ships Jarret and the horse north in secret for summer conditioning, and Scott loses their trail. When they return in fall, Lexington gleams; Jarret, steadier, carries a new perspective. He describes living among free Black laborers in Saratoga and New York and nursing a friend of Ten Broeck through a fatal cholera bout. Asked what struck him about the North, Jarret answers with the essence of Race, Slavery, and Systemic Racism: their work—and their pay—belong to them.
Chapter 34: Theo
Back in 2019, Theo takes a call from his friend Daniel, who tries to lure him on a California hiking trip and teases out the news that Theo is “seeing” a white woman. Daniel’s shrug—“You won’t be the first brother to fall for a snow bunny”—doesn’t quiet Theo’s unease. On a run afterward, Theo sorts through feelings for Jess: delight in her wit and warmth mixed with hesitation.
Two ghosts press on him. He imagines his Nigerian mother, Abiona, rejecting the relationship; more deeply, he feels the absence of his father, Barry, whose counsel about being a Black man in America he never got to hear. Theo shakes off the ache and reaches for a compass of his own. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s voice surfaces—“Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string”—and Theo decides to claim his judgment and move forward. He asks Jess to watch his dog, Clancy, while he’s away, opening the door to greater trust.
Chapter 35: Ten Broeck’s Jarret
By 1855, preparations for the Race Against Time intensify. Ten Broeck hires Gil Patrick—“the Punisher,” a notorious veteran—to ride Lexington. In their first workout, Patrick, all nerves and instinct, senses a wrong note beneath the horse’s brilliance and confronts Jarret about his habit of talking to the animal.
Pressed, Jarret reveals the truth he has concealed for months: Lexington is going blind. He fears that if Ten Broeck learns it, he’ll wager against Lexington or even tip the race. Patrick recalls the cloud over Meichon’s rematch and understands the risk. He agrees to keep the secret—for this one race—forming a fragile alliance with Jarret to safeguard the horse, even against their employer.
Character Development
These chapters sharpen loyalties, test moral cores, and widen inner lives.
- Jarret Lewis: Chooses a tutor over cash or leisure, insists on staying with Lexington despite danger, and forges a covert pact with Patrick to protect a vulnerable horse. A summer among free Black workers reframes “freedom” as ownership of labor and self.
- Theo: Names his ambivalence about interracial love, measures it against his mother’s imagined disapproval and his father’s absence, and chooses self-reliance, taking a concrete step toward intimacy with Jess.
- Jess: Moves from clinical focus to personal investment, bonding with Theo and uncovering a healed injury in the skull that stitches her research to Lexington’s lived story.
- Richard Ten Broeck: Reveals ruthless opportunism—defying partner Viley, risking an unfit horse, and manipulating narrative with the Race Against Time.
- Mary Barr Clay: Returns as a bolder, abolition-minded young woman whose urgency for Jarret’s safety is undercut by naiveté about the peril she invites.
- Thomas J. Scott: Serves as a clear-eyed reporter whose account distances and clarifies, distilling scandal, strategy, and Jarret’s evolving philosophy.
Themes & Symbols
The book’s excavation of forgotten lives crystallizes as Theo coins the “Invisible Man effect,” a vocabulary for how art and history erase Black presence. That insight ricochets through both timelines: Jess’s forensic attention restores an individual horse’s suffering to the record; Jarret’s voice, often silenced by the systems around him, asserts purpose and knowledge. The past is not inert—it presses into the present through objects, images, and the stories people choose to tell or ignore.
Freedom and Agency expand beyond legality into lived ownership of body and labor. Jarret’s choice of education, refusal to flee on someone else’s terms, and definition of free work make “freedom” concrete. The Human-Animal Bond becomes moral and strategic: Jarret leverages secret knowledge of Lexington’s blindness to shield the horse, upending the power dynamic with his enslaver. As a symbol, Lexington’s blindness concentrates the book’s concerns—hidden vulnerability, the ethics of care under oppression, and the counter-power of seeing what others either cannot or will not.
Key Quotes
“You won’t be the first brother to fall for a snow bunny.”
Daniel’s flippant line names the social pressures shadowing Theo’s desire. It exposes the quick judgments attached to interracial relationships and helps clarify that Theo’s hesitation is about community expectations as much as personal fear.
“Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.”
Emerson’s exhortation becomes Theo’s internal pivot from ambivalence to action. The quote reframes love and identity as ethical choices grounded in self-knowledge, not inherited scripts.
Viley calls Ten Broeck a “blackleg.”
This accusation—cheat, swindler—condenses the moral rot of profit-first racing. It foreshadows Ten Broeck’s willingness to exploit horse, jockey, and narrative alike, even at the cost of Lexington’s health and honor.
“Their hands is their own. And that dollar that get put in those hands, that’s their own dollar.”
Jarret’s definition of freedom is physical, economic, and immediate. It shifts abstract politics into lived experience, puncturing any romanticization of bondage and anchoring the theme of labor ownership.
“Race Against Time.”
The phrase brands Ten Broeck’s gambit as spectacle and myth-making. It also reveals how reputation can be engineered against the clock and against truth, turning a horse into a narrative instrument.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
These chapters lock the timelines together: Jess’s discovery of the lacrimal “knuckle” points back to the blows and risks Jarret navigates; Theo’s art-anchored lens teaches readers how to see what the archive muffles. On the track, Lexington’s victories and the engineered rematch expose the sport’s corruption, while Jarret’s growing authority—and his secret about the horse’s blindness—reorients loyalty away from the enslaver toward a relational ethic of care. In the present, Theo’s choice to “trust thyself” strengthens the partnership through which the novel interrogates race, art, and memory. The stakes are now personal, historical, and ethical—every decision from here reverberates across both centuries.