Warren Maxwell, the owner of a run-down plantation, pressures his son, Hammond, to marry and produce an heir to inherit the plantation. Hammond settles on his own cousin, Blanche, but purchases a sex slave when he returns from the honeymoon. He also buys his father a new Mandingo slave named Mede to breed and train as a prize-fighter.

In New Orleans, a relationship between a black man and a white girl leads to a string of murders.

In February, 1962, as the civil rights movement reaches Bayonne, Louisiana, a New York journalist arrives to interview Jane Pittman, who has just turned 110. She tells him her story dating back to her earliest memories before slavery ended. In between the chapters of her life, the present-day struggles of Blacks in Bayonne, urged on by Jimmy, are dramatized.

A newlywed couple checks into an old hotel in New Orleans where the wife begins having dreams in which she encounters a sinister group of people who seem to want her for some nefarious purpose. When people around her start dying, she realizes she is not dreaming.