The Marshall service has tracked Jackdaw this far and believes that he is under the protection of Father Barton, a white pastor who rumor says is tied into the Underground Airline, a network of secretive cells who hide, transport, and free slaves. We first meet Victor as he is acting his role – that of a mild mannered African American man in Indianapolis who has bought his freedom and is searching to rescue his wife from the Hard Four.
Why are the Marshall’s withholding so much information in this case? What lies unsaid, between the redacted lines of official reports and the hissing of phone call static? Who is this Jackdaw and what does he know?
His latest case tracking an exceptional slave named Jackdaw, however, is slowly eroding his protective “just following orders” barrier.
In this persona, he’s became a nameless entity, an actor who salves his conscious with the eventual promise of what is most precious – his freedom. His job is to infiltrate slavery rescue operations, capture missing slaves, and help the South to reclaim them – think the Runaway Slave Law with national backing and the all seeing eye of technology. Marshall Service as an underground agent, a tracking device implanted in his spine. A fine oiled machine that churns out cheap merchandise and death.Įnter Victor, as he is now named, a former slave whose escape left him with something worse than death, worse than being cast as a bloodied example. The Hard Four is pitted with plantations that function as efficiently secured industry towns, high-tech observance commingled with primitive brainwashing and brutal punishment. Yet the industry continues, grows, thrives.
The rest of the states self-righteously follow the “Clean Hands” law, refusing to purchase goods made from slave labor. It’s a modern alternate America – Lincoln was assassinated, the Civil war never happened, and a compromise between north and south has allowed slavery to exist, protected in the “Hard Four” – Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and a unified Carolina.
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