Narrator: Geraldine Brooks grew up in Australia and became a journalist with the Sydney Morning Herald.

Later she would join The Wall Street Journal.

In her book Horse, a novel, Brooks writes a spellbinding tale of art and science and our unfinished reckoning with racism as she explores the true story of the record-breaking Thoroughbred, Lexington.

Geraldine Brooks is joined in conversation with Jacki Lyden.

Jacki Lyden is a former award-winning NPR host and foreign correspondent.

She is the author of the bestselling memoir, Daughter of the Queen of Sheba and a 2018 Rosalynn Carter Mental Health Journalism Fellow.

Recorded at the University of Louisville, Kentucky Author Forum this is Great Conversations, Geraldine Brooks and Jacki Lyden.

[audience applauding] All right, well, talk about, we have to stop meeting like this.

This is incredible.

What a delight.

What a delight to be able to honor and examine this novel and your work generally.

And of course, we have known each other since it seems like the beginning of time when we were young journalists back in the Middle East.

And here's something that stands out to me as we are here in this wonderful Kentucky community of Louisville tonight, which is your eye for detail.

And I don't know if you recall this, but we were in Beirut, it was all crumpled.

It was all, remember there was no light.

The generators were the only thing that provided electricity.

And in your Wall Street Journal piece, you wrote, "As I approached the city, the ruined buildings looked like folds of crumpled linen."

I was so envious, not jealous, envious.

And so, the wonder is branching off, not branching leaving behind that kind of eye for detail and using it in these gorgeous novels.

Well, I don't think I'd be able to write the fiction if I hadn't had those years.

Where, as you know, you barge into people's lives at the worst possible moment.

It is war, it is civil uprising, it is famine, some bad news has befallen this place and you're trying to get in there while everybody else is trying to get out and you start asking people and you notice how people are changed by catastrophe and changed by hardship.

And I think when I'm writing my fiction, those real people who shared their experiences with me in those terrible times are very much at the front of my mind.

Well, I think the language that you bring to your books is similar to the language that you would have brought to the journal pieces but for me, of course, as a radio reporter, essentially the voice and the voices we hear in this piece, in this book, they resonate.

And one of the things that surprised me when you left journalism to start to write fiction, fiction of all things not nonfiction was when you lived in Waterford, Virginia, you didn't have a horse that didn't happen until later.

So, I want to know what the surprise is, when you had your first moment of this is an animal that I need to have in my life.

That moment of equine love, which I think this audience can really, even if you don't have a horse.

I mean, come on, you live in horse country, right?

-Equine love.

-[audience applauding] Give it up for that.

Did you have that kind of moment?

Yeah, I did have that kind of moment and I'll just backtrack a little bit.

I mean, I grew up in the city in Sydney and we didn't have any spare money.

So, horses were not a thing that I could even fantasize about.

I didn't even take pony club novels out of the library because I knew this was something that was not for me.

The only horse we ever saw was mounted police and they would ride by, and this was a mixed blessing because my mother would see this as a great opportunity to grab the dustpan and run out into the road and see if she could score some manure -from the rose bush... -Oh, my goodness.

That's like...

I think my grandmother did this but not my mother.

So, I always loved animals, but my main relationship was with dogs but then I think if you're going to become horse crazy, much better it should happen to you at five or 15.

It happened to me at 50.

I was at a writer's retreat, and it was being held on a ranch in Santa Fe and my room just happened to overlook the horse corrals and they're all these gorgeous appaloosas and paints and I was just admiring them.

And I guess one of the wranglers noticed that I was always there gazing at the horses, and he said, you have to come on a trail ride with us.

And I said, "I can't ride," and he said, "You can, these horses know their job they won't let you fall off."

And I believed him, and I went with him and we're riding through the incredible acacia centered arroyos and we're going along this cliff edge, and he says, "Now we're going to pick up a canter," and we did.

And I thought this is the greatest thing that's ever happened to me.

And then a week later, I'm back home on Martha's Vineyard and a young friend comes over and I'm telling her about this experience, and she says, "You've got some land you could have a horse.

In fact, I could give you my horse."

A free horse.

Yes, so free they live on air and wind sandwiches and clean up after themselves very nicely.

And this horse was not close by.

-This horse was in Mexico.

-Oh my God.

So, I learned a lot while I was waiting for this horse.

I learned how to arrange, how to transport a horse across the border.

I learned how to ride in that interregnum waiting for the horse.

And then the horse-- and I fenced half my property.

I converted the tool shed to stalls.

This free horse is getting pretty expensive, but I didn't care because she was beautiful.

But you know all of you have been given I'd say an arena side seat, if you will, to what makes Ms. Brooks, Geraldine the person who could, the reporter who was in Iraq and Kurdistan and Saudi Arabia and Jordan and all these places and someone who's going to get on a horse at a dune ranch, if you will, and ride for the first time, and it's courage and it's courage that gives yourself permission to engage in these marvelous adventures.

And one of the things you've said about from the very beginning when you were writing March and Year of Wonders is that you were looking for this scaffold of history to hang things upon.

And also, you did twig early on that horses captivate humans.

I was just trying to think of all the ways, the Centaur, the Muybridge's studies with movement, the Roman Fountains I mean these are creatures that give human beings agency and not only those who ride them as we would see in this novel, those who work on them, live with them, live for them.

So, give us a little of-- you're talking about articulation in this book, how we come into the notion that you're going to write about Lexington?

So, because I'm obsessed with this horse, I am not getting any actual work done.

It's tremendous amount, these are not... -Your horse.

-not inexpensive creatures.

And so, there's a lot of red ink flowing out and when m family is looking for me, they are not finding me because I'm either at a riding lesson or I'm mucking out the barn or I'm trail riding in the woods or I'm seeing my orthopedic surgeon.

But then I hear about Lexington, and I hear about Lexington quite by chance.

I'm at a lunch for donors at Plimoth Patuxet Museum which was a museum that was incredibly helpful to me when I was researching an earlier book.

And so, I'm talking to the donors about how great of a resource this museum is but also at the lunch and sitting down the table is a gentleman from the Smithsonian who has just delivered the skeleton of Lexington that had been gathering dust in an attic in the Natural History Museum to the International Museum of the horse.

Where he is the centrepiece of an exhibition of the history of the Thoroughbred industry in Kentucky because his progeny was so central to that.

But as he's telling the story of Lexington's racing career and then his amazing record as a stud sire and then he gets to the bit about what happened to the horse during the Civil War.

And my lunch is uneaten, and I am leaning across the table and my donors that I'm supposed to be talking to are not getting a scintilla of my attention because all I want to hear about is Lexington.

Boy, that's the pistol shot that goes off in the middle of the opera and becomes this.

I think a novelist, one of the things that distinguishes your novels is both the research and love of history.

A passion you shared with Tony Horwitz, your husband and another amazing journalist as well before he started writing books.

And then as we were saying, your sense of language, how people speak, what they're speaking about.

I did spend a moment since it's so fantastic that we're getting to do this in Louisville, Kentucky.

We're not sitting in Ohio or Alaska or Zanzibar-- but it would be fun in Zanzibar and probably in Alaska and Ohio.

But I've done stories here and we'll get to talking about Lexington and documenting the homeplaces around Lexington in a few minutes.

Why Kentucky becomes Kentucky in the sense of horses.

I remember the first time I was here in the spring, you know, that as a shimmer to the grass, this rippling like an ocean.

I'm from Wisconsin, unlike you I did ride early.

Yes, you were a cupcake girl in the rodeo, which I know from your wonderful memoir, Daughter of the Queen of Sheba.

That is true, you know, dear, I have to say that I left college, the last day of college and joined a travelling rodeo as a cupcake rider.

Explain to any...

I mean, this audience probably is well versed in cupcake rider.

Well, the first person who seemed to... -Steve was the first-person, -Steve Wilson.

To do irons.

So, a cupcake rider is basically a girl who doesn't know what she's doing.

I did grow up with horses.

I had two although my brother is a blacksmith.

I'm from rural Wisconsin.

I know I look and sound like I'm from rural Wisconsin and I love rural Wisconsin and we still have horses.

We don't ride them too much anymore and I wanted a great journalistic adventure.

I think that's why I respond to the fact that we've had them together and that you are having adventures in these books.

The books don't stay in a drawing room somewhere on the upper east side or that's all fine, that's all good.

And so, for me, I wanted to travel and write and take pictures and the idea that this carnivàle rodeo.

This is an exhibition rodeo, this isn't anything anyone's going to get a big purse for or go down in the rodeo halls of fame.

This is, I'm a carny, now you're a carny and you're going to come with me.

And very quickly, I had to swim to high ground on that.

I stayed with them four months and came to grief at the end in Nitro, West Virginia, but you can read that in Daughter of the Queen of Sheba.

Let's get back to Lexington and Horse.

Why Kentucky was my original question?

Why is Kentucky the center of the Thoroughbred?

Well, the people in this room... Will know but maybe some of the listeners won't, maybe they don't know.

Limestone apparently.

Limestone in the water, in the soil, the grass gives the horse strong bones.

And then it's like a critical mass of talent accumulates around doing this thing and I think Kentucky has proved through centuries that it is just the best at it.

And I have a little factoid for our audience, which is that since the last time I was here at the Kentucky Authors Forum, I learned that my great, great grandfather who I knew to be a blacksmith had actually come to Louisville and Lexington and got married in the Portland neighborhood in Louisville and- From Ireland.

From Ireland and I go back to Ireland every year and I can look at where the Lydens have their big old anvil in a museum in Clifton, Ireland.

Yeah, so that's my horse history in an anvil.

In this book, the first person we meet isn't a rider.

In fact, it's so interesting I thought to myself, the contemporary protagonist in the book really don't ride.

Theo doesn't ride -and Jess doesn't ride.

-Well, he doesn't ride anymore.

Jess does not ride because Jess like me grew up in an urban Sydney environment, so she didn't get a chance to.

Well, it's a love story in part between some of the protagonists we just mentioned, but also between a boy and a foal and a man and a horse.

I think that is utterly the most legitimate theme to explore.

That is the central relationship of this book.

So the thing that...

So I hear this story about this great horse and I'm thinking fantastic I've got an excuse to write about the thing that is obsessing me and that I love.

And so, I start to read what is known in the history of Lexington the horse.

And I immediately discover that his early success is built on the skills and plundered labor of enslaved Black horsemen and formerly enslaved that his first trainer was a freed slave a very notable trainer, Harry Lewis.

And that there is a groom that is mentioned in connection with Lexington many a times.

And once you get to know horses and bonds and how they work, you realize that the footstep that the horse recognize is, it's not the owner, it's not the jockey, it's the groom.

It's the person who is mucking out and bringing the grain in the morning and brushing and wrapping and cooling and treating the injuries and that's the relationship that matters.

So, I knew that the central relationship in this book was going to be between the horse and his groom.

And we know that he had a Black groom called Jarret because there's a missing painting by Thomas Scott and it is supposed to be the best painting that Thomas Scott ever did.

It's described as such as Lexington late in his life and it's supposed to be a very poignant portrait of the horse.

But the title is Lexington being led out by Black Jarret his groom.

So, that was what gave me the center of what is the historical spine of the novel.

Well, talk about articulation which you talk about in here in terms of what anthropologists and zoologists do with the spines of creatures and this book has that spine.

I just want to say this is a good place to pause for just a second and say, today we met some grooms who were at the wonderful Heritage Farm and by Steve and Laura Lee.

And that I came down here to do that story around Lexington.

I think it's one of the reasons the book extra resonated with me in 2010 because Sarah Hoskins, our friend who's in the audience tonight, the documentary photographer spent so much time documenting the descendants of people like Harry Lewis.

I mean, groomsmen, trainers who lived in the home places around Lexington.

And I thought my goodness, it still goes on and she's got all the pictures -to prove it.

-It goes on.

So, what happened was these men had tremendous expertise and you see how valued that was in the correspondence of the Thoroughbred owners who drew a lot of their prestige and social capital from owning these fast horses.

There's something very unusual in the documentation, the letters that they wrote to each other because you don't often see enslavers writing about their enslaved people with a great deal of deference and respect.

But you see it in the case of the horseman, they are saying, Hark says, I should do this, and you notice that this is a different kind of relationship.

So, it's a chance to explore the complexity of relationships in that period.

Absolutely, but you've made the point that the stunning thing is if you stop to think, yes, they're so respected and yes, they're actually living relatively well, but the animal and the person are owned by the same person.

And they have certain rights that no other enslaved person has.

They can travel freely into state because they're bringing the horses from one place to another.

They are allowed to accumulate property in their own right which is also not an opportunity extended to most enslaved people.

But on the other hand, they can be ripped away from their family and sent off to another horse farm at any time at the whim of their enslaver.

So, there's no agency there.

Right, the agency may come with when they ride if they do or working with that animal, but not in their own lives.

And you wrote Jarret in the book who starts out as War-- Warfield's Jarret.

Thank you, Warfield's Jarret and then later he's Ten Broeck and Alexander and I won't give the ending away, but he always has to worry about that this whole, I don't know if I should call it a career but that this whole trajectory he has It is a career... could be ripped away at any time.

and I think it's important.

One of my friends a very great writer who wrote an incredible story about slave uprising in the West Indies, Marlon James said, "I don't want to read another story about slavery that is just about immiseration -and brutality... -Subjugation, right.

because the story is also about resilience and about talent and about endurance and about love and people had real full lives within this system."

And so, he said that and that had a great influence on me and how I wrote this.

Well, Marlon James and honestly that's true from my own reporting with Sarah, around Lexington, the complications of the actual human relations were fascinating.

You have and, in some ways, sometimes surprising, surprisingly forbearing other times, and having that in there as part of it, I think is essential and it also is essential to the success of the enterprise.

You want well trained if you're going to be a racehorse owner and you want horses who love to race.

I was curious about, I like the idea of articulation and architecture in horse.

Articulation is the technical term for what they do at the Smithsonian.

If they're going to put a skeleton back together and put it on display, which they rarely do.

That's a very small part of the work of the osteo preparators.

And this was one of the great things about doing this book, which I knew that I was fascinated by the story of the horse, but I was also fascinated by the science at the Smithsonian.

And so, going there and seeing the actual work that is done and articulation is when you remake the animal as it was when it lived and ran and jumped or flew.

And so, my character who is an osteo preparator and a zoologist at the Smithsonian loves to do this work and she loves to get a certain exactitude.

And we do know that Lexington skeleton had been articulated incorrectly and we know this from a contemporary critic none other than the painter Thomas J. Scott who wrote a very angry letter to the articulator saying you've got the pasterns all wrong and he goes through everything that has been done that doesn't truly represent the horse in life.

So, I love that word for its many resonances certainly the articulation of the book.

Today, Geraldine bid someone goodbye and she said, "I'm deciduous, I have to leave."

Why did you decide to include these contemporary characters?

I thought that was really interesting.

I mean, you often have layered history -in your books.

-Well, I was fascinated by the science that was what drew me into it.

And so, I was thinking, how can I... initially, it was just going to be a framing device.

We would talk about the skeleton at the Smithsonian and its rediscovery of the significance of the horse because for a while Lexington was in the Hall of Mammals as a mammal.

Which is ridiculous when you consider who he was and what he represented.

Let's talk about just for a little bit about the Smithsonian in Suitland, Maryland.

-What is that called?

-The Museum Support Center.

So, you've probably been to the museums on the mall and that's not even the tip of the iceberg.

It's the tip of the tip of the iceberg.

So, 98% of the Smithsonian's collections is in a campus in Suitland, Maryland that goes over acres and all of human creativity is there.

The biodiversity of the earth is there.

Every kind of lab you can think of that explores the science of life or that does conservation on artwork is there.

And then there's a funky corner of it, which is the Osteo Prep Lab where there's all kinds of scientific equipment for preparing bones for scientific study of their DNA and what not but th center of it is the bug room.

And the bug room exists because we haven't come up with a better way to clean bones and preserve their scientific value intact without destroying any of the tissue.

It's a kind of beetle.

It's a beetle.

So, I was there, and they went and got a carcass that had been desiccating and they put it in the bug room, and it was just like buffet night with my son's football team.

These bugs just... [snarls] And for you you're like, "Oh magic, I'm so in the zone, yes."

So, I knew I was going to write about that but when I was there, looking into Osteo prep, a curator from the art side of the Smithsonian said, "We also have this oil painting of Lexington would you like to see it?"

Of course.

So, it wasn't on display, not on public display it was in the study center.

I went down and she showed it to me.

I said, "Did it come here with the skeleton?"

And she said, "No, it came much later, came in a later bequest."

This is very unusual she said.

Came in a bequest from Martha Jackson who is a famous avant-garde gallerist in New York City after World War II, famous for being one of the first supporters of Pollock and de Kooning and Bridget Riley and all the edgy movements that were redefining our aesthetic at that time.

And you give them all life here.

Every other painting that she bequeathed to the Smithsonian was edgy contemporary art except this one 19th century oil painting of a racehorse.

So, why did Martha Jackson have that painting?

Why was that important to her?

So, suddenly I've got this whole other tangent to the novel.

And so, you realize that this horse is racing through historical finish lines, not merely winning purses but hearts across generations.

I was going to come to Martha Jackson a little bit later, but since we've just hit upon her, and I do want to get to how did Lexington skeleton wind up in the attic?

Because that is -- let's just go with -- we'll get to Martha in a moment.

How does it wind up in the attic?

So, the horse was such a celebrity in his own time and to understand how big of a celebrity he was, you have to understand how big racing was compared with where it is today.

This was the national obsession.

This was bigger than NFL is today.

It's like NFL would be if we all had a helmet and pads in our closet and played football on Monday nights because everybody had a horse.

A mass stopwatch is invented to time the races.

To time him but 40,000 people, which was a tremendous number of people in those days.

It would be a tremendous number of people today would come to see these match races between the greatest Thoroughbreds.

And so, he's a celebrity at a time when this is the most important thing, most important pastime that pulls this country together.

There are three newspapers devoted entirely to covering these races and everything around these races and the personalities.

And this horse when he died, his obituary ran over six board sheet pages.

So, he is a very big deal, and he dies, and they build him a coffin.

And they enter his body on the hill overlooking the mayor's barn, which is so sweet given how many mares he bred.

Covered as the term is.

And then, the Smithsonian wants him and so they exhume him, and they sent him to the articulator and the skeleton is shipped and it's a centerpiece.

It's a huge point of interest.

But things changed, the Smithsonian changed.

It became less a cabinet of curiosities for things that had a particular history and a scientific research organization where Lexington is no longer interesting because he was a famous racehorse.

He's interesting because he's a mammal.

And meanwhile, his celebrity wanes over the time.

And so, he goes out of the Hall of Mammals to be in an exhibition on the history of time because as you said, they introduced the mass-produced stopwatch to clock his races.

And then after that exhibition, he's up in the attic and people here in Kentucky know who he is and they want him back and a huge many, many years long and right.

So, Bill Cooke at the International Museum of the Horse when I was doing my research had finally closed the deal that they would get Lexington skeleton on a long-term loan from the Smithsonian -and so here he is back home.

-Oh, that's excellent.

I have to get over and see that.

And you have a wonderful scene in the novel where Jess the articulator and the zoologist, the Osteo prep person is tasked with finding that skeleton and she has to walk in some skinny little... Well, that's where he was.

Had been up there.

It was crazy up there.

Do you make anything up?

I only make up... Come on this is supposed to be fiction.

I only make up the boring things.

Everything that is outlandish or unlikely is the true thing.

That's a really good line.

I might put that on a t-shirt.

Everything that is outlandish is the true thing.

Well, it's what Mark Twain said.

Fiction must be plausible, truth needn't be.

Very true.

Truth is actually mind bending at times.

Yes.

So, we get to Lexington back here to Kentucky to the Museum of the Horse in about 2010 but you are equally given another gift in your visit to the Smithsonian and that's the opportunity to view the painting.

I may get confused in just which one.

This is a painting of Lexington.

By Thomas Scott.

-By Thomas Scott.

-Yes, I know that name.

That belonged to Martha Jackson.

Right and was there a Black groom in that painting?

No, unfortunately that's not the one, but there are many depictions of the Black horsemen in the equestrian out of the time, which becomes really fascinating because these men are imbued with individuality and dignity in a way that's not typical -of 19th century.

-The time.

If you put a Black person in a painting, it was usually to aggrandize a White person.

So, it was somebody serving them or something, but these are men in their own right, doing this thing that they do exquisitely well.

And so, that's very interesting.

I let my art historian character become interested in that.

And the art historian character for those of you who have not yet read it is a Nigerian and American and he is studying for his PhD in art history at Georgetown.

And he gets very interested in this notion of Black equestrian representation in these paintings.

And of course, I hadn't realized not collecting these paintings how important Thomas Scott the painter, photography does exist around this time.

Not really, it doesn't really exist.

And you can't get a horse to stand still long enough for those wet plates.

It's not coming until really after the Civil War.

Right, and this is pre-Civil War time.

So, these itinerant animal painters, Scott is one of the most well-known.

Troy is another.

Right, before him and in the book, you have Scott studying with Troy.

Well, he did in real life.

He was Troy's... Well, come on, you've already mixed it up so much.

Forgive me if I, you know, I mean, I like to think I'm first source but I'm a little confused here.

No, I'm very grateful to Kentucky and Jenny Lisa who has done the definitive work on Scott and also wonderful work on Troy.

And she was very generous in sharing what she knew about them, and their art and it was actually a gentleman working at the university who found a thrown-out painting in his neighbors...

So, everything in the book is based on something that actually happened.

Well, I think we can forgive you.

No, it's wonderful and we start with that really.

Theo discovers this painting in his neighbor's trash-- giveaway.

Yeah, it's not really trash, but it's destined for trash if someone doesn't take it with you.

And I thought to myself, he realizes right away that there's something powerful in this, but I also thought to myself, why did owners want their horses painted?

They didn't have to.

Almost like people, why are they having them painted?

-I can understand people.

-It is commerce.

Commerce?

Yeah, so, it's advertising as well as fine art because they really want to show the virtues of their horse as a potential stud sire, as a potential broodmare or as a horse for sale.

And also, these paintings were then made into engravings for the newspapers which had incredibly high circulations and they needed content.

Right, and horses they're beautiful.

But these are very anatomically correct paintings.

True and they're often just standing, they're not usually at the canter, at the gallop or eating hay or whatever covering each other or other things, that horses do.

Now, I've just totally destroyed my train of thought here.

So, I do want to talk about as you have come to the history of, the architecture of the novel.

You are also realizing when you discover Harry Lewis who really was a trainer for-- I don't know if he was a trainer for Lexington-- he was a trainer for Lexington.

The original.

That you have to broaden it out beyond just talking about raising horses.

I mean, in other words, the race becomes entwined with racehorses.

Yeah, and this is a pretty fraught time for a White woman to be writing stories of Black lives and I'm very aware of the importance of this discourse around appropriation.

And when I realized that this was where the story was going, I'll be honest, I was a little scared.

-I was nervous.

-It doesn't surprise me.

And I thought, well, I could just center the book on the Thoroughbred owners, the White guys.

They're very interesting characters.

-Every single one of them.

-They are.

They are extraordinary people.

They're extremely interesting, but I thought that, that would be unforgivable because it would be erasing the contribution of the Black horseman again.

And for a long time, these men's contribution has not been for granted, and luckily, through the research and through work like Sarah's, the contribution of skilled Black horsemen is being recognized again and Bill Cooke has done an immense amount of work on this and continues to do so.

Finding out the details of these lives and we had started to talk about how things changed after the Civil War and not in a good way for these men because even though they were emancipated, it became impossible for them to pursue their careers at the same level.

And for jockeys, it became life threatening Black jockeys, even though I think it's like 12 of the first 13 Kentucky derbies, somebody here knows this were ridden by Black jockeys.

And then comes the reaction against reconstruction and suddenly you can't be a Black trainer.

You can work in the stables but great Black trainers, like Charles Stewart are relegated to keeping the carriage horses.

Great jockeys, if they want to pursue their career, they go to Paris to do it.

If they stay here, they risk just falling into penury.

This is all happening during when it should have been better, right?

This is after emancipation and reconstruction.

There's a tremendous reaction as we know and Jim Crow era but what you learn when you're writing about the racetrack in the 1850s is it was a very integrated space.

Everybody was there, everybody was there and they're rubbing shoulders with each other.

And yes, there was some fancy stands with fancy people, but everybody else was all in.

And then it becomes more segregated over time.

This is why I do think these pictures that Sarah has made are so important to show that it goes on and these generations come to these things.

Let's not leave Martha Jackson who has so much to do with resurrecting this.

There is a bit of a mystery, we didn't really say why she was so interested in horses.

She was a fine art abstract dealer you mentioned her connection, which is true.

Pollock... Yeah, no, I start out writing about a racehorse from the 1850s and I had no idea it was going to lead me directly to Jackson Pollock's car crash and yet it does.

Isn't it a good thing?

You have a whole book to put it down and you would like to have that on page one tomorrow.

Right.

But seriously, why did she love horses?

And why did she keep this painting?

I don't know why she kept the painting.

So, this is where I had to use the novelist imagination.

Unfortunately, her son who might have been able to shed some light on it, died just before I found out how to contact him.

So, that was disappointing, but I did learn that she and her mother were great equestrians.

Her mother was a champion jumper who won at Madison Square Garden and who died in a freak equestrian accident.

Like absolutely trivial fall after being a power jumper, she's just going along a road, and she slips off a horse and dies.

So, that was true.

And so, from there that's where I sort of spun my imaginative reasoning around why this painting mattered to Martha Jackson that she would keep it.

Did you ever say I'm just curious as a fellow writer, there are almost too many layers to this, there's almost too many moving parts?

There were too many layers.

Not that I-- just because it doesn't come out that way, but it's a formidable task.

Well, I can tell you that my beloved late husband Tony Horwitz thought Martha Jackson had to go.

I can hear him saying that, but he spent plenty of time in his own books talking to every police.

Well, I know, but I was just as tough on him, like, enough on that.

You're only putting that in because it fascinates you, nobody else cares.

Well, I think what it showed me is how you don't have to be someone who rides to be fascinated with the story of animals and their relationships with humans.

There's a reason National Velvet was as important a boo as it was of its time.

And not just that, I mean, horses are incredibly sensitive creatures, and you don't have to ride them to learn from them and to enjoy being in their company.

And one of the things that my horse and I have done which is one of the things I very much love is volunteer with children who have autism.

And some of these kids have incredibly challenging behaviors and they arrive at the barn sometimes and they're in a hot mess and then they get on that horse and there's some magical communication between the horse and the kid.

And I don't work in the other programs at this center but there's a program for veterans with PTSD being with the horses.

There's a program for adolescent girls to learn about social cues and who gets to be the boss mare.

So, a lot of incredibly interesting things happen, and you don't have to be mounted to experience this joy.

So, you're making me think of an anecdote almost as if we were just at dinner or something.

And it's in Sheba, Daughter of the Queen of Sheba and it's where my mother steals, not a racehorse but a very fast horse at a ranch.

Your mother is Bipolar.

I should say that.

Yes, thank you and has been since I was 12 years old and also loved horses even though she grew up in Milwaukee.

And she gets on this horse we don't even, I had stabled horses at the same ranch and basically takes off on it and is fearless.

Fearless at the gallop and she hadn't been riding like that and I couldn't catch her and somebody a wrangler from the ranch did.

She wasn't hurt but I thought at the time, well, there is her dream.

It's a dream of freedom and this horse enables it.

I want to talk about that particular notion because Jarret without giving away the story, he has to navigate-- he has one escape.

I don't know if it should be called an escape attempt, but he has one desperate moment where he's afraid that this horse is going to be taken from him and basically sold on the river the way enslaved people often were.

He's willing to lay down his life for the horse.

There's an amazing scene where Quantrill's Raiders appear and that was also historically true, right?

Yes.

They tried to steal prize horses from stud farms and Thoroughbred farms.

And Alexander's farm was raided twice by some of the most blood thirsty killers that were rampaging through the border states at that time.

And they did steal, they stole Lexington's son Aristides who was only retrieved by some very brave actions but, yeah, the raid was true.

I have taken some liberties with it in putting Jarret's role because we don't know.

Well, thank you for doing that.

What do we examine with Theo as he-- what complicated feelings does he have studying lives of these grooms-people and trainers?

I mean, this is a Black representation.

At first, he thinks that they're going to be caricaturized or stereotyped.

Stereotypical.

I almost wanted to use the word orientalized, but that's probably not the right word but thinking of the time, but he's refreshed to see that no, they are individuals.

What else goes on in his mind?

So, Theo as a character came into being because I realized that if I was going to be deep in the weeds of the racial history of this country in the 19th century, I couldn't leave that story there and then have a contemporary story that did not resonate with that because clearly this is not a story that's over, it's still going on.

And so, I wanted to-- You're talking now about reckoning with race.

Reckoning with, as I was writing this book, we were in a huge period of racial reckoning.

And as I was writing this book, tragedies were occurring one after the other with Ahmaud Arbery, with Breonna Taylor, with George Floyd and one after the other, one after the other.

So, I realized that this has to resonate in the contemporary strand of the novel.

And so, that I felt a huge responsibility about and wanted to get it right but I'm lucky that I live on Martha's Vineyard, which has had a Black community for 150 years.

And I'm lucky that I've got a lot of friends in that community and they're incredibly generous with me and sharing their lived experience.

And as you know, it's a pretty affluent, prosperous community but what I've learned from my Black friends in that community is that no amount of wealth or celebrity or education is protective.

And every single one of my friends has a story of fear or humiliation at the hands of White authority.

I think everybody here might remember one which is Professor Henry Louis Gates was hauled off the porch of his own house for the crime of being a Black man trying to open his own front door.

Everybody has got these stories.

My friend who's a very celebrated screenwriter tells of being pulled out of her nice car and made to sit in the filthy gutter because a racist cop didn't believe a Black woman could have a nice car like that.

It's staggering and sobering to think that whatever one may understand about horses and raising them, that the racism aspect is as vivid today perhaps in different ways, but as vivid as it would have been in Jarret's time and it's sad.

Well, it's different.

It's different, I mean, there's other avenues, but still.

It's so much less of a-- but it's still a reality.

Just being an Australian a bit of a stand in for you and her inquisitiveness, I thought.

And her blockheaded-ness.

Is that where she's a stand in for you?

Well, you come here and you're very naive.

I came here as a graduate student, and I was very naive.

You feel like the country is very familiar to you because you've seen a lot of American TV.

And it seems like on the surface it's not very different from your home country, but it's actually very different in its founding narratives, in its mythologies and that leads to a society that works quite a different way.

But anyway, so, yes, she is naive, she's clumsy, she says the wrong thing, and yeah, she's me.

Well, unlike you, she writes herself exceptionally well.

The British, I think, she's a zoologist forgive me I'm not... No, she's a vet.

Katherine, she's a vet and she herself has been a rider in the past and then she had an accident, and she couldn't ride any longer.

She's interested in doing something.

I don't know this may be arcane but with the bones to make horses race stronger.

Well, this is a real vet.

She's in Canada now but she was working in England when I was trying to figure out something about the-- I don't want to spoil it for people who haven't read the book, but there's a medical issue with Lexington.

And let me just say her asking for that skeleton is what causes Jess to find the skeleton.

Yeah, but that's not really what was going on.

I know but I am trying to toggle between life and book.

For novelistic purposes, but I was talking to lots of vets.

I talked to vets who specialize in horse maxillofacial surgery who knew that was a thing.

I talked to all kinds of, and I found this woman who is fascinating, and she was telling me about how she had devoted her life to figuring out how to make racehorses stronger, so they don't break down.

And we know everybody in this room knows that we are in an unsustainable situation with contemporary racing.

We cannot go on with 21 horses dying every week in this country.

My first job in journalism was assisting the racing writers at the Sydney Morning Herald.

Which was a weird job for somebody who'd majored in fine arts and government, but I saw a lot of terrible, terrible accidents and if you love horses, it's very, very hard.

But we have bred I mean, if you look at the skeletons of racehorses like Man o' War, they're dense burned.

Lexington is dense burned.

Current Thoroughbreds are not.

What is the legacy of this magnificent Thoroughbred?

I mean, it's huge not only the numbers, let's just talk about that.

There's a real legacy here.

Even if you'd never written this book, I'd say.

Well, every great racehorse has some Lexington blood.

Every racehorse you have heard of.

You have to go back a very long way now to find it but if you take the trouble, you will almost certainly find it.

But certainly, in all the horses that we know that are celebrated.

But in his own lifetime, it was an extraordinary, I mean, General Grant's horse was the son of Lexington Cincinnati.

And the only person that Grant would let ride Cincinnati was Abraham Lincoln.

Aristides the winner of the first Kentucky Derby trained and ridden by Black men, was the son of Lexington and on, and on.

And there would have been even more notable progeny except many of them went off to the Civil War, of course, and were cavalry horses and never raced.

When I was working with Sarah Hoskins, we met a man in the Lexington area who used the middle name-- Thomas Millward, said the name later, but he was the son of a groomer and as a boy had sat on the horse's back and told me on tape-- it's beautiful in the story-- that's a 14 min 20 sec piece by the way, that you can look up on YouTube or the internet or on NPR's website.

I'm the only man alive who's ever sat on Man o' War's back.

And I think I might have known even then that he was a descendant of Lexington, which is just remarkable.

You have this wonderful scene where Harry, who is real, the trainer who is the father of Jarret, He had to be at gap to get and they are doing that.

They're kind of doing that, mythology that is real.

They've memorized the lineage because enslaved people were not legally allowed to learn to read.

So, everything was memory, and I did read about extraordinary horsemen who could do the lineages back to the Byerley Turk and the Darley Arabian, the foundational sires of Thoroughbreds and they had memorized every horse in the lineage.

That's incredible.

How many horses are we talking about with something like that?

Oh gosh, a lot.

Dozen scores?

Scores of horses.

Do people still talk like that today?

Do they still memorize those lineages?

No, because you've got stud books and you can just and probably you've got it online.

Yes, you probably have it in your iPhone.

So the idea-- where do you think have-- Have you heard from many people who own Thoroughbreds?

No, but you know what has been wonderful as I've been travelling around the country with this book, I've met many descendants of the Black horseman.

I met a descendant of Hark recently which was extraordinary.

He was one of the most notable trainers and she is doing research into his life.

And then just last week in Aspen I met a descendant of Doctor Warfield.

Oh, my goodness.

Wow.

Well, there aren't many women in this book unfortunately because it was a very male business at the time.

The barns were blokey places, but I couldn't resist including Mary Barr Clay because she's a fascinating, she's the granddaughter of Doctor Warfield but her father Cassius Clay, of course-- everybody here will know-- was the famous emancipationist and he had a newspaper called The True American, which argued for the emancipation of slaves.

Which I must say went over like a bit of a lead balloon.

He survived three assassination attempts and he was an extraordinary guy but it's beyond the scope of my novel that he went off to Russia as ambassador for President Lincoln and was credited with securing Russia's support for the North in the Civil War.

But while he was there, he made off with a ballerina.

Well, you do have that in the novel.

No, but he comes back, and he and his wife get a divorce and his wife, Doctor Warfield's daughter is left with nothing which radicalizes her daughter, Mary Barr who then becomes a leading advocate for the women's right to vote.

Well, I think I wanted to put that in, and I talk about articulation architecture at the very beginning because there's a genealogy to people, what they learn about themselves and each other that is parallel to this.

In other words, I thought there's an ocular parallel here.

Jess is looking at that skeleton from the inside and Theo is looking at the horse from the outside and this is together where they come to realize that in a way it's all greater than about the two of them.

And it is about, and I think that's where this novel has had such agency internationally and here at home is that there's something greater than just story of...

It's like the story of us, it's how we came to be and in fact we...

It's an ongoing story.

It's not over, the story is not over either in terms of the history of race or the history of racing.

And I think we all probably agree in this room that we have to do better with the welfare of horses in the racing business.

I was reading something about bones discovered I think in Ireland and Celtic areas when people would have first jumped on the back of one of those amazing animals.

Yeah, now they're putting it way back now.

They've just revised it.

And they figured it would have been young people who would have recovered from a fall.

Well, I think there only were young people in those days.

Well, I hope that horse continues to race to finish after finish line not for four miles, but what a delight to be back here with you my friend and explore this marvelous territory we both love so much.

Congratulations to you and to the Kentucky Author Forum, thank you for having us.

[audience applauding]

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