Notes for Feature Film Script Crossing the Line

Crossing The Line is fiction. It is also a love story, a love story between two people from totally different backgrounds. I pieced it together from family stories I’d heard since I was old enough to remember, and if it wasn’t my Grandma Strawder telling me those stories, then it was my Uncle Bill. Stories about a tall white man named Tom Patterson who lived in Blarsville, Pennsylvania, which was where my grandmother grew up.

I have very vague memories of visiting my Great Aunt’s house in Blarsville, where everybody in my family would stay, back when I was a kid. My mother and her eight brothers and sisters had spent their summers there when they were little. I must have been nine or ten when they tore down Aunt Celly’s. All I remember was that it was this big old wooden house that my sisters and cousins and I would always say was haunted. I guess that’s because by the time we came around, it was so old and dilapidated it looked like the house from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.

Now Blarsville was Tom Patterson’s home originally too. You see, my grandmother lived ninety years but she never lost her mental faculties, and her stories about Tom Patterson, who was her grandfather, were very vivid. She described him as a very tall white man with a long ponytail. He wore knee-high leather boots and a big hat. Grandma and Uncle Bill would always tell me he carried a long whip. (I don’t think Uncle Bill ever met or even saw Tom Patterson, just that he too had grown up with stories about him.) They told me Tom Patterson would help bring slaves up to the North on one of the Underground Railroad trails. Pennsylvania was the location of the famous Mason-Dixon Line separating the North from the South (and hence the title of this story), and Tom Patterson owned a farm outside of Blarsville, which is about fifty miles north of Pittsburgh. On one of his journeys he took a liking to one of the female slaves, and he eventually married her. Now, if Grandma told me her name I don’t remember it, so I have given her the name of Spring here. The reason Tom would carry that long whip is to keep trespassers and agents off his property.

Please note that there is violence in this script. I have tried not to make it gratuitous or exploitative. However, these characters - the agents - did exist in American history and they did things as I describe to real people. There is a scene in this script in which the agents disembowel a pregnant slave woman in front of her son. I do believe showing such horror is justified in the context of this story.

The agents were bounty hunters hired by wealthy landowners in the South after the Civil War to bring back their slaves. As the slaves were considered nothing more than property, this Southern aristocracy wanted their property back. It did not matter that they had lost the war. This illegal kidnapping of former slaves went on for twenty or thirty years after the South surrendered. The characters of Buford and Willie Nixon in my script are agents. Grandma used to tell me how her family would hide the former slaves under the beds and in the cellar when the agents would come to the house in Blarsville.

The story tells of how the character Spring and her two eight-year-old sisters are escaping to the North after the Civil War. Faunsworth T. Woods, the wealthy owner of the plantation they left, and the adulterous father of the two little girls, is determined to have the girls killed so his wife will never know of their existence. Woods has hired the brutal agents Buford Nixon and his brother Willie to track down Spring and her sisters.

Tom Patterson, who knows the trails from his years with the Underground Railroad, leads the runaway slaves. The group encounters an Irishman, Fattie Oshley, who lets them sleep in his hotel for one night and is in return tortured and killed by the pursuing agents. Two Native Americans, who are sympathetic to their cause and join in the climactic gunfight, also assist the runaways. Miss Josephine is the strong-willed woman who runs the rest house for the Underground Railroad. We meet her at the beginning of the script, and she becomes Tom Patterson’s partner on the run North, as Tom has no choice but to kill Buford Nixon in her house, forcing Josephine to become one of the runners too. Josephine has a comic side, but in reality she’s a deadly serious woman in a deadly serious game. (While Josephine does in some ways resemble the real-life historical figure Harriet Tubman, who worked with the Underground Railroad, she is not intended to be Harriet. Tubman.) The characters of Spring and Miss Josephine are very strong black females, providing an extra contemporary kick to this script.

Crossing The Line climaxes in the town of Salisbury, Maryland, right on the Mason-Dixon line, the border of Pennsylvania and Maryland. A shoot-out between the runaways led by Tom Patterson, and Faunsworth Woods, Willie Nixon and the agents, occurs at the center of the town. Faunsworth surprises Spring and her sisters by a campfire and threatens them. Spring musters up the courage to pull a gun on her former owner. Tom intercedes and shoots Faunsworth. When the smoke clears, the runaways and their companions continue across the Mason-Dixon Line, though more are dead than alive from the battle. Tom and Spring have fallen in love and he takes Spring and the girls to his farm in Blarsville, and marries her.

Crossing The Line is based on the many little stories and vignettes that were passed down to me through three generations of my family, and on a tape-recorded interview I did with her two years before she passed away. By the time they got to me this oral history had its own little twists and turns to make it more exciting, but my Grandma’s memory was as sharp as it could be, and it’s a powerful story.

Hassan Jamal

WGA Registered