It’s 1916 in the city of New Orleans when Andre Boulanger is born to an octoroon prostitute and a Creole man of high social standing. The child’s grandmother hires a hit man to kill baby Andre and his mother to eliminate the taint in the bloodline, but Andre is spared… He looks white enough to sell to a childless white couple, and the hit man finds that couple in Arthur and Hannah Arcineux. The Arcineuxs change Andre’s name to Sebastian. He becomes a sculptor, a man about town, and, after serving as a Navy lieutenant in WWII, he marries a high society New Orleans woman, Lucinda O'Rourke. But when Lucinda gives birth to a black baby, Sebastian renounces her and the child, thinking she has been unfaithful to him with a black man. Sebastian leaves for Jamaica, and Lucinda’s father concocts a plan to pretend the baby died at childbirth. He pays Cally, the family maid, to take the baby away and keep it hidden. Cally names the child Vincent and raises him as her own. After finding his great-grandmother’s diary, Sebastian must come to terms with his true identity-and come face-to-face with Vincent, the black son he abandoned years earlier.