Melinda Kregg comes from a privileged Virginia family, but after her father, ruined by the Depression, kills himself so that his family can live on his insurance money, she knows that the debutante's life that her mother has planned for her will be a sham. Her conscience stirred, she volunteers for the Red Cross, and at the tender age of twenty becomes embroiled in a bloody Kentucky coal miners' strike.

Acting out of mercy and concern for the welfare of the impoverished miners' families, she is suspected of being a Communist and dismissed from the Red Cross. And as she goes from this battlefield to others - the Spanish Civil War, where she meets her idealistic husband, Tye Dunston; London during World War II; and back to the South during the civil rights movement - she continues to risk being misunderstood, in order to do what her heart compels her is right.