For most of her eighty-one years, Margaret Cape has been watching and waiting for the signposts that will tell her what to do, to find the story of her life that her father promised her. One was surely Big John Cape, a wealthy Southern plantation owner many years her senior. In him Margaret found her first guide, and Margaret Finley of Baldwin, Massachusetts, became Margaret Cape of Cape Plantation in Rosamond, Mississippi. When Big John dies, she is left childless and alone. Rosamond distrusts her quiet disregard of its traditions and wonders at her marriage, only a few years later, to Big John's son. Isolated on the immense plantation, Margaret invests her future in her firstborn son, John Buie III, teaching him to disregard the social and racial rules that Rosamond and the Capes cling to so steadfastly. One day, however, John Buie III is killed, and that same day his father falls to his death, and that same day Margaret stops speaking, stops thinking, almost stops existing. Twenty-seven years later Margaret's second son is dead, and even in her wide-eyed sleep, she knows the Cape Plantation must be returned to its rightful owner. Redolent with the sights and smells of Mississippi Delta and heavily with the atmosphere of its society, Margaret Cape knits toghether the South's evolution with Margaret's determination to remain whole and independent.