For most of her eighty-one years, Margaret Cape has been watching and waiting for the signposts that will tell her where to find the story of her life that her father promised her. One was surely Big John Cape, a Southern plantation owner many years her senior. He loved her, though, and Margaret Finley of Baldwin, Massachusetts, became Margaret Cape of Cape Plantation in Rosamond, Mississippi.

Rosamond, however, comes to distrust Margaret and her quiet disregard of its traditions. When Big John dies, the town wonders at her marriage only a few years later to Big John's son, but Margaret has chosen her way. Isolated on the immense plantation, she invests her future in her firstborn son, John Buie Cape III, teaching him to disregard the social and racial rules Rosamond and the Capes cling to so steadfastly.

So dedicated is she that when John Buie III is killed the same day his father falls to his death, Margaret stops speaking, stops thinking, almost stops existing. Yet even in her wide-eyed sleep she knows that Cape Plantation must be returned to its rightful owner.