In the aftermath of the terrible Civil War which has devastated the South, Amanda America Dixon returns home to find she has become the sole heir to a vast cotton plantation. But the dreadful secret which has blighted her life threatens to deprive her of the birthright which her beloved father David had struggled for so long to create. Amanda was raised by her father and grandmother to be the perfect white Southern belle, but her mother was a black slave named Julia. Confronted with the forces of greed and bigotry, Amanda must face not only the hatred of a racist world, but the complex truth of a family whose lives have been built on a lie.