THE DARK LINE
Three Heroic Women of the Antebellum Border Country
"The Dark Line," a historical novel by Don Morrison, chronicles the adventures of three women who lived in the turbulent borderland of northern Kentucky and southern Indiana during the period just prior to the Civil War.
Each of the women, Rachel Cunningham, Ivy Mays and Liz Cunningham, Rachel's daughter, leads the reader into her world of abuse, hardships, and resilience in the face of daunting challenges to achieve her dream of freedom for herself and those she loves. Each of the three, in her own way, moves against the grain of the Victorian customs of her times.
Rachel, an abolitionist, whose early life is detailed in "Sugar Branch," the prequel to "The Dark Line," has been forced to marry her abuser, the hard-bitten slavecatcher, Sam Cunningham, who keeps her pregnant and living in poverty. But working with younger brother Sylvester Morrison, Rachel manages to warn fugitive slaves of danger and to lend them assistance, after observing the signs that her husband and his cohorts are about to strike.
Two young fugitive slaves for whom Rachel and Sylvester intercede, Ivy Mays and Jacob Brown, had been living under the light-handed ownership of John Binford, Ivy's white grandfather, on the Binford Plantation near Pleasant Hill, Kentucky. When elderly, ailing John deeds the plantation to his sole heir and nephew, Tate Binford, Ivy suddenly finds herself struggling through a nightmare of sexual abuse toward a a mystifying realization of common purpose with her rapist. The betrayal that follows sends Ivy and Jacob fleeing for their lives on a steamboat down the Kentucky River.
After trouble with Sam, her widowed father, Liz Cunningham goes to live with her Morrison grandparents, John Wesley and Fanny, as a domestic servant. She is startled one morning to find James Hackney, a black conductor of runaway slaves, tending the breakfast fire. He has been forced to leave his home near Madison, Indiana, due to raids on black communities by disgruntled whites from Kentucky. The elder Morrisons offer lodging and protection for Hackney while he pursues his nocturnal missions. Liz and Hack become friends, and one night Quaker activists ask Hackney to guide a family of slaves with small children from the Ohio River to a place of safety a few miles through rough country to the north. Over their objections, Liz convinces Hack and her grandparents that she must go with him to help with the children. Things go very wrong, and Liz and Hack soon find they must flee northward toward freedom as fugitives themselves.
More danger looms as the three parts of "The Dark Line" intertwine near the end of the story.