ALEXANDRA

LEAD (28-39)

"I'm trying to save the business. I think I've discovered something, though. Just tonight. I think I may know how to make a portrait ... of the moon."

Alexandra Brown grew up in her father’s portrait studio, an old barn with windows cut through the roof for the sunlight. She makes her first portrait, a magical image of her mother wreathed in dust and smoke as she stomps out a fire in the studio, at the age of nine.  Photography is in her blood.

Years of mercury fumes from the daguerreotypes wreak havoc on her father’s mind, and when Alexandra takes over the studio twenty years later they’re nearly bankrupt. One night, working alone in the studio, Alexandra sees glowing shapes move across the floor, streaming through her father’s telescope as it points at the moon. She realizes she can photograph the moon itself.  

The discovery awakens something in her she had never felt before. But the business is in trouble, so she continues to make portraits. One of an ex-slave, looking for land up north with Lincoln’s Homestead Act in his pocket, and another of an intriguing couple: a one-armed explorer with his adventurous wife.

Seeing her moon photographs, they offer her a thousand dollars to join an expedition to photograph a solar eclipse --- in the wild Dakota Territory. It would change everything. 

Alexandra is brilliant and fiercely independent. She doesn't know her own strengths - or her weaknesses.  Despite the fact that she misses the scientific caravan, she determines to set out across the frontier anyway. 

Before she gets far, she comes across Sterling, the ex-slave, still holding his pamphlet from Abraham Lincoln...

STERLING

LEAD (30-50)

"I don't take orders from nobody. I'm a free man. It's your wagon,but I'm a free man. And I want half that money now."

Sterling is headed north, armed with a pamphlet advertising Lincoln's Homestead Act, which allows anyone to make a claim of 160 acres on the frontier for eighteen dollars.  He's looking for a piece of land to claim, far away from the contentious south, where he can bring up his family and live in peace.  He makes his way through Ironton to buy supplies at Bambridge's General Store, and nervously pays three dollars to Alexandra for a portrait holding a copy of the Thirteenth Amendment.

But 1869 is not a good time for African-Americans, regardless of the fact that slavery is officially over.  Only a mile out of town, a group of local thugs overtakes him and burns his wagon with all of his supplies.

When Alexandra finds him the next morning, he is skeptical about the idea of traveling with a white woman, despite the fact that he needs a wagon, her money, and her supplies.  The reality of the situation wins out, and he reluctantly agrees to accompany her.

Sterling is wise if uneducated.  "Nobody let me go to school, Miss Brown. I'm as smart as you, but nobody ever taught me nothing."  His determination to find a homestead for his family equals Alexandra's determination to capture her portrait of the eclipse.  For a while, their purposes serve each other, and a friendship develops.  But Sterling never wavers from his path.

"I appreciate the work you're doing for me."

"I ain't doing this for you, Miss Brown. I got my own plan."