The Last Derby: A Novel of Jimmy Winkfield

Louisville, 1961. An old man sits on the edge of a hotel bed and reads an invitation propped against the lamp. Sports Illustrated requests the honor. He has read it eleven times. He is eighty years old, and he is going back to Churchill Downs for the first time since the century turned.

Book One of The Winkfield Trilogy.

Jimmy Winkfield won the Kentucky Derby in 1901 and again in 1902. He remains the last Black jockey to have won it, and the last rider of any colour to win it twice in a row. More than a century has passed and nobody has matched either record.

The novel moves in three movements.

CHILESBURG AND LATONIA. A farm in Bourbon County, the seventeenth child of parents born into slavery, and horses learned before almost anything else. Lexington, where a boy sleeps above a stable on Warnock Street and watches Isaac Murphy's funeral fill the streets. Latonia, where a seventeen-year-old rides his first race, causes a four-horse pile-up, and is set down for a year.

THE TWO DERBIES. The circuit, the gangsters' ovals outside Chicago, and a rider learning the crouch that will make him famous. A marriage to Sallie. His Eminence and the 1901 Derby, led wire to wire. One hundred and sixty-one wins in a single year. Then two colts, a deception, and the rail strip at Churchill Downs on May 3, 1902, where he does it again.

THE CLOSING DOOR. This is the part the record keeps quietest. A handshake with John Madden at Saratoga. Three thousand dollars and the Futurity at Sheepshead Bay. And then the calls stop coming. No rule is written. No announcement is made. Owners simply stop engaging him, and the sport that Black riders built quietly empties them out of its saddles.

It ends at the graves in Chilesburg, a letter from Warsaw, and a gangplank in New York harbour in April 1904. He is twenty-three years old and he is leaving the country for good.

Thirty chapters, each anchored to a place and a year, opening with a note on the record that sets out plainly what is documented and what is reconstructed. This is narrative history that does not pretend to know more than it does.

Continues in The Tsar's Jockey, and concludes in The Long Way Home.

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