The moving story of love in a Cane River community bound by race and class. Famie is a mulatto girl whose ancestors-free blacks-rivaled the white planters in wealth and culture. But on a Louisiana plantation in the 1920s, she is an outcast. An illicit love affair with a white landowner leaves her with a son. She dreams her son will be accepted into white society, but in her struggle to transcend race and class Famie must sacrifice the last links to her past.