Opening Context
Geraldine Brooks’s Horse braids together lives separated by centuries but bound by one extraordinary Thoroughbred: Lexington. Across the antebellum South, the Civil War, midcentury New York, and present-day Washington, D.C., characters wrestle with race, power, art, science, and memory as they chase, preserve, or reinterpret Lexington’s legacy. Their intersecting stories expose hidden histories and the ongoing costs of systemic injustice.
Main Characters
Jarret Lewis
Jarret Lewis anchors the 19th-century narrative as Lexington’s enslaved groom and trainer, a role that reveals his intuitive horsemanship and quiet dignity. Born into bondage on Dr. Warfield’s farm, he builds a profound, life-defining bond with Lexington, even as racist turf rules rob his family of rightful ownership. Through relationships with his father Harry Lewis, the painter Thomas J. Scott, and the principled Mary Barr Clay, Jarret navigates a world that recognizes his talent but denies his humanity. His daring rescue of Lexington during the Civil War sets him on the road to freedom and reinvention in Canada, embodying a hidden history of Black excellence the novel restores to view.
Theo
Theo is a Nigerian-American art history PhD student whose discovery of a discarded Lexington painting ignites the contemporary storyline. Worldly, principled, and curious, he seeks the intersections of art, history, and memory, and he feels a deep kinship with Jarret as he uncovers erased narratives in equine art. Partnering with Jess merges his archival work with her scientific inquiry, and their romance becomes a shared pursuit of truth and repair. His fatal shooting by police while aiding a stranger forces the past into the present, starkly illuminating the persistence of systemic racism.
Jess
Jess is an Australian osteologist at the Smithsonian whose forensic study of Lexington’s skeleton connects modern science to the novel’s buried histories. Meticulous and solitary, she initially views bones as evidence rather than testimony, but her partnership with Theo opens her to the human stories embedded in material remains. Their bond reshapes both her work and her worldview, and after his death she resigns herself to grief’s hard clarity. Returning to Australia with Theo’s dog, Clancy, she becomes the keeper of his memory and their discoveries, her science permanently transformed by love and loss.
Supporting Characters
Harry Lewis
Harry Lewis is Jarret’s free Black father, a master horseman whose skill commands respect even within a slaveholding world. He breeds and trains with pragmatic pride, teaching Jarret craft and caution while striving to purchase his son’s freedom. Cheated out of rightful claims to Lexington, he embodies both the heights of expertise and the cruel limits of freedom and agency available to Black men in his era.
Thomas J. Scott
Thomas J. Scott is an itinerant painter of racehorses whose canvases become crucial historical records. A Northern “free labor man” reliant on Southern patrons, he befriends Jarret and—unusually—depicts him alongside Lexington, preserving what the culture tries to erase. His evolution from hustling artist to respected chronicler, and his grim Civil War service, frame him as the era’s flawed but vital witness.
Mary Barr Clay
Mary Barr Clay grows from inquisitive stable-yard observer to principled ally, inheriting her abolitionist father’s conscience while navigating her grandparents’ slaveholding household. Recognizing Jarret as a peer in horsemanship, she risks herself to aid his attempted escape, forging a pass that challenges the rules of her world. Her arc anticipates her real-life leadership in the women’s suffrage movement.
Richard Ten Broeck
Richard Ten Broeck is a suave Northern turfman who acquires Lexington—and with him, Jarret—treating both as instruments of profit and prestige. He can recognize excellence but not the personhood behind it, maintaining a veneer of professional “respect” while buying and selling lives. His maneuvers epitomize the racing world’s cold calculus.
Martha Jackson
Martha Jackson is a mid-20th-century New York gallerist whose eye for overlooked work and sympathy for underdogs lead her to purchase a Scott portrait of Lexington. Connected to artists like Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock, she bridges avant-garde circles and personal history with horses. Her bequest ultimately steers the painting to the Smithsonian, preserving the artifact Theo will later rediscover.
Minor Characters
- Dr. Elisha Warfield: Lexington’s breeder and Jarret’s enslaver, a paternalistic Kentucky doctor whose reliance on Harry and Jarret never overcomes the violence of ownership.
- Cassius “Cash” Clay: Mary Barr’s abolitionist father, a formidable, contradictory figure whose radical politics and volatility deeply shape his daughter’s conscience.
- Catherine Morgan: A British equine veterinarian whose collaboration with Jess advances the scientific study of Lexington’s skeleton.
- John Pryor: Fatherland’s imperious trainer whose refusal to heed Jarret precipitates Lexington’s near-fatal colic and Jarret’s urgent return.
- Willa Viley: A powerful turfman who exploits racist racing rules to force the sale of Lexington away from Harry’s claims.
- Annie Hawthorne: Martha Jackson’s young housekeeper, guardian of the Scott painting passed down through her family and determined to convert it into opportunity.
- William Quantrill: The Confederate guerrilla leader whose raid compels Jarret to flee with Lexington, catalyzing Jarret’s path to freedom.
Character Relationships & Dynamics
At the heart of the novel is the partnership between Jarret and Lexington—a rare human–animal bond built on patience, empathy, and technique. Jarret’s care enables Lexington’s greatness; in return, the horse anchors Jarret’s identity and becomes the vehicle through which Jarret navigates, and ultimately escapes, a violent system.
Jarret’s world is defined by unequal exchanges of power. Dr. Warfield’s paternalism, Richard Ten Broeck’s transactional ruthlessness, and Robert Alexander’s more “progressive” pragmatism form a spectrum of master–enslaver archetypes that still reduce Jarret to property. Against this, Harry’s instruction and steadfast love create a counter-realm of craft, dignity, and aspiration; Mary Barr Clay’s risk on Jarret’s behalf extends that counter-realm into fragile alliance across the color line. Thomas J. Scott, meanwhile, operates at the threshold—dependent on slaveholding patrons yet willing to center Jarret in art, his canvases becoming repositories of memory that outlast the era’s silences.
In the modern timeline, Theo and Jess mirror Scott and Jarret’s partnership in a different key: inquiry rather than racing, archives and bones rather than bridles and tracks. Theo’s research and Jess’s osteology converge on the same truth—that history lives in objects and bodies, and that who is allowed to be seen matters. Their interracial romance is tender and intellectually alive, yet Theo’s death exposes the limits of private love against public systems, binding his fate to Jarret’s across time.
The cast clusters into distinct but intersecting spheres: the antebellum turf (Warfield, Ten Broeck, Viley, Alexander) where profit trumps personhood; the witnesses and preservers (Scott, Martha Jackson, Annie Hawthorne) who archive what power tries to erase; and the seekers (Theo, Jess, Catherine Morgan) who interpret those remnants. Violence—whether Pryor’s arrogance in the stable or Quantrill’s raid in wartime—repeatedly forces choices that reveal character, catalyzing Jarret’s flight and, generations later, clarifying Jess’s moral direction. Through these bonds and fractures, Horse maps how compassion, craft, and memory resist the commodification of both humans and animals.