Ten years ago, two of Belle Haven's Negro sharecroppers were lynched by Klansmen, in which the patriarch of the cotton plantation blamed his own son, Ethan, for this atrocity. Belle Haven is a traditional southern plantation in Savannah, Georgia, in the picturesque sprawling low-country. Now, William Montague is lying on his deathbed, agonizing over which of his children to entrust with his precious Belle Haven estate; his son Ethan, a Klansman, blasphemed his land and his daughter, Natalie, married into the prominent family of his archrival the Guilford's. The Guilford's owned the largest plantation in Cheatham County, and Mr. Montague was adamant that they wouldn't get a single acre of his beloved 850 fertile acres. Unbeknownst to his two children, William Montague had an illegitimate child, Vincent, by a Negro woman prior to his marriage to their mother, and to make amends, he wills the estate to his half-Negro son Vincent, who lives in Chicago. Vincent's wife, Suzanne, and their five children endure some difficulties adjusting to the segregated South during the height of the civil rights movement in the early 1960's, in addition to the dissension Vincent encounters with his half-brother. Ethan is repulsed with the notion of having a Negro brother and is enraged at the loss of the plantation he had relished for so many years and promises to make their lives a living hell. A bitter legal battle ensues for possession of the plantation, as Ethan contests his fathers will, hiring one of Georgia's most prominent lawyer. Hattie Mae, the cook and housekeeper, lost her husband to the Klan, and now that her boy is coming of age, she fears the inevitable, and will do all in her powers to make sure that he doesn't meet the same fate as his father. Although, it was ten years ago, now that one of the men responsible for the lynching has been identified, she attempts to see that justice prevails. After the body of a white philandering drunk