At the Rainbow's End is about the lives of Jefferson and Mary Bright, plantation owners, about their struggles and the struggles of recently freed slaves to survive in a newly ordered society. Lurking in the background is the Ku Klux Klan, who kill and threaten all who would oppose them in a desperate effort to restore the old order, an insurgency that fosters, among other things, jealousy and murder, and events that threaten Jefferson and Mary with more than the loss of a way of life.