A short novel set in late seventeenth-century America, before the country existed as a nation. It follows several people on an isolated farm, including a young enslaved girl named Florens, the farmer who owns her, his wife, and other servants and laborers. Their lives are bound together by need and fragile dependence in a world where race and servitude were still taking shape. Morrison presents an early America of danger and uncertainty, and reflects on motherhood, abandonment and the meaning of freedom.