The play was about a slave named Simon who was hired out to a horse owner. Simon then becomes a well-known, almost famous, jockey and wins a ton of races, all the while having his heart set on freedom and buying himself and his future wife, Caroline, from their owners, the Colonel and his wife. Once he bought Caroline’s freedom, he bought his own horse, and races both the Colonel’s horse and his own until he sustains an injury during one. Eventually the Civil War happens and Simon becomes a free man, but is no longer a jockey because of the injury, working in a hotel with very racialized rules as a bellhop. Colonel finds him again and they become friends and go back to the Colonel’s farm together to live.
This play was very controversial but representative of the times it was showing. It used the n-word, with a hard r, a lot and the maltreatment of African-Americans was very obvious in the language and tone utilized. It made me uncomfortable a lot because of these aspects of the play but I think it was also very eye-opening because the audience sees how degrading slave life was and how even though the Colonel and his wife treated Simon and Caroline well, both of the slaves still kind of despised them for owning them. I liked how it focused on a well-to-do, talented African-American because even though Simon was praised continuously throughout the play, you can still see how slavery and its entrapment of his entire life brought him and made him do things that seem unimaginable, like hitting his wife after buying her freedom because “she was his property”. It made the audience think that even though he suffered his whole life as property, the second he has his own, he abused it and demonstrated everything he hated about slavery.
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