Abrahan Bento Sassaporta Naggar has traveled to America from the filthy streets of East London in search of a better life. But Abe’s visions of a privileged apprenticeship in the Sassaporta Brothers’ empire are soon replaced with the grim reality of indentured servitude in Greensborough, North Carolina.
 
Some fifty miles west, Dark Water of the Mountains leads a life of irreverent solitude. The daughter of a powerful Cherokee chief, it has been nearly twenty years since she renounced her family’s plans for her to marry a wealthy white man.
 
Far away in Georgia, a black slave named Jacob has resigned himself to a life of loss and injustice in a Cherokee city of refuge for criminals.
 
A trio of outsiders linked by love and friendship, Abe, Dark Water and Jacob face the horrors of President Jackson’s Indian Removal Act as the tribes of the South make the grueling journey across the Mississippi River and into Oklahoma.