Opening
Parallel timelines crest and collide: a 1956 art-world barter, an 1865 night of war and rescue, and a 2019 encounter that turns fatal. Freedom hard-won in one century is set against freedom denied in another, as art becomes the fragile bridge carrying memory across time.
What Happens
Chapter 46: Springs, Long Island, New York, 1956
Martha Jackson visits Lee Krasner, who packs for Paris in a fury of grief and resolve. Jackson Pollock’s affair and drinking break Lee’s last faith in “carrying” him, and she leaves to save her own work, acutely aware of the art world’s contempt for women.
Martha turns the talk to a deal: she trades her convertible to Pollock for two black enamel paintings from 1951. A week later, at her gallery, Pollock arrives drunk with a young lover and roars off in the car. Martha writes a $1,000 check to Annie Hawthorne—money Annie says her brother needs for medical school—confident she can cover it now that she holds two valuable Pollocks. Upstairs, she hangs the old portrait of the horse she bought from Annie on her bedroom wall, amused that someday people will puzzle over this traditional painting amid her modern collection.
Chapter 47: Woodburn Stock Farm, Woodburn, Kentucky, 1865
Jarret Lewis buys mules to send May and Robert Hawthorne safely north. A Union private arrives, gaunt and older by war; Jarret recognizes Thomas J. Scott, the artist, now on furlough and welcomed by Mr. Alexander. Scott congratulates Jarret on breeding Cincinnati, the mount of Grant and Lincoln, and Jarret proudly brings him to Lexington—magnificent, blind, and still commanding.
Scott decides to paint man and horse together. With Edward Troye’s supplies, he renders Lexington’s grandeur and vulnerability and Jarret’s poise, catching the current of trust between them. Jarret calls it Scott’s best work because it shows Lexington’s true self.
When Scott suggests Jarret enlist in a colored regiment to secure freedom, Jarret erupts. He insists he already holds Freedom and Agency: he earns wages and gives orders and refuses to swap one “massa” for another. White people built slavery, he says; white people must clean it up.
Chapter 48: Woodburn Stock Farm, Woodburn, Kentucky, 1865
Before dinner with Mr. Alexander and Dan Swigert, Scott thinks through the war. Captured Confederates’ bile convinces him their cause must be crushed; Alexander’s protective duplicity—playing both sides to save the farm—troubles him.
A kitchen girl’s scream shatters the evening: raiders in the barn. Swigert names them—Quantrill’s gang, the James brothers among them. Alexander arms himself; Scott slips out with a weapon and sees men in stolen Union uniforms, one wearing a necklace of scalps. Quantrill drops his pretense, reveals they’ve beaten and seized neighbor Willa Viley, and demands Lexington and the “boy” who can ride him.
As Alexander tries to stall, Scott moves to warn Jarret. The moment collapses: Alexander finds a raider assaulting Swigert’s wife; a pistol fires; the house is ransacked. The raiders capture Scott, slaughter a calf—blood splashes Scott—and, finding Lexington’s stall empty, rage outward with Viley and a dozen thoroughbreds. In the woods, Jarret—already gone with Lexington—watches and follows.
Chapter 49: Georgetown, Washington, DC, 2019
Theo and Jess spend a quiet Sunday admiring the newly cleaned portrait of young Lexington. A Kentucky buyer offers $15,000. Jess urges Theo to keep the money; Theo insists on returning both the painting and the payment to the elderly woman who discarded it. He asks Jess to come, saying the woman may be more comfortable with a white visitor—an acknowledgment of Race, Slavery, and Systemic Racism that angers Jess but doesn’t shake Theo’s resolve: “I can’t let it change what I am.”
Before dinner, Theo takes Clancy for a quick run in Rock Creek Park. Dusk falls; rain mists the air; the creek curves. Clancy freezes, staring down into a ravine where a woman lies unconscious. With no signal for 911, Theo checks her pulse—strong—and shifts her toward a recovery position.
A bright light explodes from the bridge. “Police! Freeze!” a voice bellows. Blinded, Theo raises his cell phone to shield his eyes. Clancy’s high, shearing howl splits the dark.
Chapter 50: Road to Midway, Kentucky, 1865 & Georgetown, Washington, DC, 2019
In 1865, Jarret tracks Quantrill’s column on Lexington and finds Willa Viley, thrown, bleeding, and abandoned. Viley gasps that the raiders ride toward Judge Sayers, a sympathizer, then confesses that he and Richard Ten Broeck cheated Jarret’s father, Harry Lewis, out of rightful ownership of Lexington. Jarret delivers Viley to a neighboring farm, then shadows the raiders’ camp, overhearing plans to trade Scott for Confederate prisoners. He waits, kills two guards in silence, frees Scott, and looses five stolen Woodburn horses. He puts Scott on Asteroid, the fastest, to fetch Union reinforcements. “Where are you going?” Scott asks. “North,” Jarret says, and vanishes into the dark with the remaining horses.
In 2019, Jess grows uneasy as Theo’s “short run” stretches on. She calls; a homicide detective with a flat Baltimore accent answers. There has been a “police-involved shooting” after an “interrupted assault.” The “assailant,” he says, is Theo. Stunned, Jess lets the detective and a female officer in. Their questions drip with suspicion—about Theo’s race, his parents’ international background—while the detective’s gaze hardens at the book-lined apartment. Jess, shaking with grief and rage, throws them out, then chases them into the rain, crying, “Wait! Where’s Clancy? What happened to his dog?”
Character Development
In these chapters, characters define themselves under pressure—by art, by war, by moral choice—and the consequences are irreversible.
- Jarret Lewis: Claims his own path to liberation. He refuses enlistment as the only route to freedom, rescues Scott, outwits murderers, and rides “North,” choosing his fate without permission.
- Theo Northam: Acts from integrity even when it costs him. He insists on restitution and sees racial dynamics clearly, yet refuses to let them deform his character; his last choice is to help.
- Thomas J. Scott: War-worn yet morally sharpened, he paints the truest Lexington and learns from Jarret’s refusal the limits of his own perspective; his capture reveals his dependence, his rescue Jarret’s power.
- Jess: Moves from warmth and ease to raw grief and fury. The system’s suspicion—aimed at Theo even in death—forces her from abstract awareness to lived confrontation.
Themes & Symbols
The novel binds 1865 and 2019 to show that the architecture of Race, Slavery, and Systemic Racism persists. Jarret combats overt, extralegal violence and wins his liberty; Theo meets institutional authority and loses his life. The juxtaposition argues that while slavery ends, its logic mutates into modern systems that misread, endanger, and erase.
Freedom and Agency appears not as a paper status but as self-definition. Jarret rejects emancipation-by-enlistment and asserts freedom through action—strategy, risk, and responsibility. His “North” is a compass point and a credo.
Art, history, and memory entwine. Scott’s second portrait captures a bond official records ignore; decades later, Martha preserves that history—perhaps unknowingly—by hanging the “wrong” painting in a modernist home. Art survives as testimony when institutions fail.
The cell phone becomes a lethal symbol: a tool for help, seen as threat. In the white glare of a flashlight, perception collapses; bias arms imagination; an everyday object turns deadly.
Key Quotes
“Carry him.” Lee’s phrase distills the invisible labor expected of women—emotional, professional, reputational. Refusing to “carry” Pollock, she chooses survival over martyrdom, mirroring Jarret’s refusal to carry another system on his back.
“I refuse to trade one ‘massa’ for another.” Jarret rejects a narrow script of freedom. Enlistment, to him, replicates hierarchy; true agency is earned in deeds he defines, not permissions granted by the state.
“I can’t let it change what I am.” Theo names a moral stance: he will act rightly in a world that codes him as threat. The line foreshadows tragedy by setting principle against a system that refuses to see his humanity.
“Police! Freeze!” The command signals state power entering the scene. In a heartbeat, Theo’s aid becomes “assault” in the officer’s reading, revealing the speed at which bias can author a fatal narrative.
“North.” One word carries lineage and longing—direction as destiny. Jarret’s answer makes the map a manifesto and completes his transformation from captive to self-liberated man.
“What happened to his dog?” Jess’s question cuts through euphemism (“assailant,” “police-involved”) to a concrete, human loss. The detail insists on tenderness amid institutional coldness and makes the abstract horror intimate.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
These chapters deliver the novel’s emotional and thematic apex. Jarret’s daring escape resolves the historical arc—freedom seized, not granted—while Theo’s death creates the contemporary tragedy that proves the book’s argument: the afterlife of slavery lives inside modern systems. Art threads the eras, carrying a buried story from barn to bedroom to museum, even as a single night in the park exposes how fragile safety remains. The past’s victory and the present’s loss meet here, forcing a reckoning with continuity, not coincidence.