A history making racehorse and the people around it a reimagined
in a new work of fiction dealing with obsession and justice Jeffrey
Brown talks to Pulitzer Prize winning author Geraldine Brooks about
her latest novel for Our Arts and Culture Series Canvas.
Geraldine Brooks took to riding just around 10 years ago. But she
quickly became in her words. Horse crazed, you suddenly are interested
in learning about
Horses acquiring a horse riding a horse carrying for a horse thinking
about the horse thinking about how to better care for the horse.
It really it is a consuming consuming interest. Busier,
aren't you beautiful? Barkley?
The 66 year old Australian born writer began her professional career
as a journalist. Come on, baby, My first job in journalism after
having got a double major and government and fine arts. They sent
me to the sports department to cover the racist, right.
She would make her name first as a foreign correspondent and then
build a second career as a writer of bestselling historical fiction
known for her rigorous research, including the Pulitzer Prize winning
March.
In her new novel horse, She's again looked to the past the antebellum
South.
Brooks joined us recently at Holly Hills Show Stable in Hanover,
Massachusetts. To find something on the historical record. That is
extraordinary. And if you made it up, that would be implausible.
It needs to be a story where you can some fascinating things, but
you can't find out everything. So I'm looking for those
Voids that imagination has to be deployed to fill. What what? Why
do you like it that it would be implausible, if well, you know, it's
what Mark Twain said. Um, fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities.
Truth is not
this time. The true history is centered on Lexington. Legendary racehorse
born in 18 50 in Lexington, Kentucky, celebrated in his day, including
in paintings.
For his victories on the track as well. As for siren. Numerous other
champion horses
comes out in the book, the importance for one thing, of course, racing
and the antebellum self. It was not just in the South. It was in
national obsession. I don't think that's an overstatement. The only
thing I can compare it to it was a passion like the NFL. If everybody
played football in those agrarian days in this country, everybody
had a horse or
As one generation away from having a horse. Lexington was a celebrity.
Absolutely. So I stick to writing my own map because we have an understanding
imagination was fired by a reference she read to a now lost painting,
in which Lexington is quote led by Black Jarrett, His groom, Jarrett
and other real life figures around the horse became characters in
her novel became most intrigued with the story of the black Horsemen.
Because I hadn't been at all aware that the thoroughbred industry
in this country was really built on the skills and the labor of this
black horsemen, many of whom were in slaved or formally enslaved
people. That is a fairly little known history. I believe this is
a history that is only now getting a lot of attention from historians.
And it really is a remarkable niche within the institution of slavery
because this was a class of men, and they were all men at that time.
Who had expertise that was so highly valued that it gave them a kind
of a special status. But yet there's still in this brutalizing system
where they don't have
Agency, and they can be ripped away from their occupation. They can
be sent to another
thoroughbred owner.
They can have their families torn apart, so it is replete with the
tragedy inherent in this system. Brooks also wanted to bring the
story into our own time. And she found another true life way in.
Lexington's bones had been stored largely forgotten in the attic
of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. In 2010,
the skeleton was restored and sent to the International Museum of
the Horse in Kentucky.
Brooks created fictional characters around these facts, including
a Georgetown university black art historian whose story weaves into
today's racial tensions and violence. It is abraded narrative because
I wanted to write about the science.
Around the skeleton of the horse at the Smithsonian because it really
is fascinating, and it's such an extraordinary place to go behind
the scenes and see the scientific research that's going on there.
So once I knew that the story was coming into the present time, I
couldn't leave the story of race back in the 18 fifties, as if this
was a story that's over and done because it's so clearly is not over
and done. You also then, right in the afterward to this novel, it
became clear that this novel could not merely be about a racehorse.
It would also need to be about race writing this at a time when there
is a lot of discussion and dialogue.
About who has the right
To tell the story so very aware of that discourse and of the responsibilities
inherent in that I could have written about the horse and the white
owners.
But that to me would be another unconscionable a ratio of the contributions
of the black horsemen, so I knew I was going to have to go there.
We are, in this time of very heated debates over cultural appropriation
who can tell the story?
You used the word responsibility. I think that you felt what does
that mean doing the work doing the work as best I could to get it
right came to the conclusion that it was better to make the honest
attempts than to leave the story. Untold and also, you know, I feel
like any attempt empathy.
No matter how imperfect it might be, shouldn't be despised because
we need more attempts at empathy, Not fewer.
The real life. Lexington won his last race in 18 55 and died 20 years
later. His story and the lives of those around him are reimagined
by Geraldine Brooks in the novel horse.
To help you for the PBS news hour. I'm Jeffrey Brown at Holly Hill