RUBY STEWART is a slave living under the false pretenses of a freed black women in New York in 1853. She abides in turmoil longing to know where she came from. This unrest has caused her to be plagued by dreams and visions of a man she calls the Black Knight and a woman with haunting green eyes. Ruby's only recollection of her past is the name Mag, until she receives a letter from friend Willow Hendricks in the South describing a slave girl that passed through her family's plantation over twenty years ago. Does Ruby dare hope this slave child might be her? Meanwhile her job as a journalist at the Manhattan Observer - a penny newspaper - has Ruby fighting feelings for boss and friend Kipling Reed. She struggles with the impossibility of a relationship between a woman of color and a white man. But her skin color isn't the only hindrance standing in the way of this romance. The unavailable Willow Hendricks has won the eye of Kipling. Torn by her feelings of a love that can never be, will Ruby be able to put the questions of her past to rest?