Black Maestro: The Epic Life of an American Legend » (Reprint)

Joe Drape is a reporter for the New York Times. He has won numerous national awards for news and sports writing, including the Eclipse Award for outstanding achievement in horse racing writing. He is the author of The Race for the Triple Crown. He lives in New York City.

In Black Maestro, Joe Drape meticulously brings to life the drama, adventures, romances, and heartbreaks of an unlikely participant in the greatest historical events of the twentieth century. It is a breathtaking narrative that takes you from pastoral Kentucky to Mob-controlled Chicago, from the horse country of Poland to the chaos of Red Square, and from freewheeling Paris to the hard-luck American South of the Depression. It is also a story that returns Jimmy Winkfield to his rightful place as an original American hero.

In 1919, at the age of thirty-seven, as Bolshevik cannon fire thundered above, the already epic life of Jimmy Winkfield turned into an odyssey. With a ragtag band of Russian nobility and Polish soldiers, the son of a black sharecropper from Chilesburg, Kentucky, was entrusted with saving more than 250 of the most royal but fragile thoroughbreds left in crumbling Csarist Russia. They trekked 1,100 miles from Odessa to Warsaw for nearly three months amid the bloodiest part of Russian Revolution, surviving gunfire and starvation. . . .

Winkfield had arrived in the Land of the Czars fifteen years earlier, after Jim Crow laws ran him out of his beloved Kentucky bluegrass despite the fact that his preternatural skills as a jockey had twice taken him to the winners' circle of America's most famous race, the Kentucky Derby, in 1901 and 1902. The same combination of dignity and street smarts that had endeared Winkfield to outlaws such as Frank James and legendary gamblers such as Big Ed Corrigan and Pittsburgh Phil in early-twentieth-century America, however, made him the toast of the Russian Empire.

Winkfield spoke Russian and Polish fluently, lived in Moscow's mostluxurious hotel, employed a white valet, and earned the nickname "Black Maestro" by winning the most prestigious horse races through eastern Europe. As World War I raged, Winkfield -- barely five feet tall and one hundred pounds -- waltzed across ballrooms alongside Czar Nicholas, seduced White Russian beauties, and was the trusted rider and friend for two of the richest oilmen in the world.

While fate had dealt Winkfield an extraordinary hand by taking him from racism to Russia, it was hardly through with him. He delivered the thoroughbred horses safely to Warsaw and earned a revered place in Polish history, but at the cost of his family and fortune. Winkfield rebuilt his life in Paris, first as a jockey, then as a successful trainer, only to endure the death of a son and the tragic madness of the true love of his life. In 1941, after Nazi troops requisitioned his estate and stables in the French countryside, Winkfield returned to America, where his social status, as a black man, had hardly changed: he was a second-class citizen who could not walk through a front door.

Jimmy Winkfield not only persevered but prospered by turning broken-down thoroughbreds into money-making racehorses on the same southern circuit that had chased him from America forty years earlier. Black Maestro is the incredible story of an ordinary man who lived a life beyond his dreams.

Publishers Weekly

New York Times writer Drape (The Race for the Triple Crown) illuminates a little-known figure in the history of American sports: Jimmy Winkfield, the last black jockey to win the Kentucky Derby. Like that of more well-known black performers Paul Robeson and Josephine Baker, Winkfield s successwas a mixed blessing: racism and injustice ultimately force Winkfield to flee his native country for Russia, where he witnesses the revolution and lands in Paris with other Russians. The youngest of 17 children in a Kentucky sharecropping family, Winkfield s passion for horses sets in early, and his slight stature bolsters his desire to be a jockey, where blacks and whites rubbed shoulders without cross words or a stinging backhand to upset the harmony. Black jockeys such as the legendary slave jockey Simon who helped drive General Andrew Jackson from the racing game and Isaac Murphy, who was so successful, he built himself a $10,000 house before the turn of the 20th century. While Drape s attempts at novel-esque narrative occasionally read cliche, this well-researched biography of Jimmy Winkfield and the larger chapter of America his life highlights is a valuable and entertaining read. 16 page b&w photo insert. (May) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.