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The Epic Life of an American Legend
William Morrow
May 2006
288 pages
ISBN: 0060537299
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction | Non-Fiction Biography
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 most luxurious 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.
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