Zede is a girl in South America whose family lives a content life, but a poor one. Since she makes the most of her time, she is a skilled seamstress, and she ends up receiving an education and working as a teacher, until she is arrested for her Communistic political opinions. In prison she gives birth to Carlotta. When they escape, they flee persecution to San Francisco where Zede works as a costume seamstress to support Carlotta through college.
Carlotta works with Zede as a seamstress, and when she delivers a cape to Arveyda, a famous rockstar, they fall in love. He tells her about life in Indiana as an ethnic Indian. Carlotta has children with Arveyda and they are married, but one day she discovers that her mother has been sleeping with him too, and she flees back to South America with her kids.
We meet Suwelo, a professor of history whose ex-wife Fanny said his masculinity was toxic to her. He contemplates whether Black men have failed Black women in some systemic way. He meets an entity named Lissie who appears in his books, but eventually, he understands her to be a spirit who incarnates and reincarnates.
Lissie tells him about her lives. In one life, she was a black person in Africa where they could speak with animals. She was an albino, so she was constantly burned by the sun, and feared by people. Then people invaded and conquered and introduced land ownership.
Fanny, the ex-wife, meets the woman who freed Zede and Carlotta from prison, a white woman named Mary Jane. Fanny turns out to be the granddaughter of Shug and Celie from The Color Purple, and they offer life advice. Fanny decides to go to therapy after all to work through her beef with Suwelo—that he also slept with Carlotta. After working things out privately with the entity "Lissie," Suwelo decides to make the necessary changes to kept their marriage together.
