In 1839, Elizabeth Beeson Chase, a slave who passes for White and who also possesses psychic powers, must navigate and fight through a raging storm of racism, deceit, slave bounty hunters, and attacks from an angry spirit named Malachai. When a betrayal from her husband sends her running into New York's dangerous Five Points neighborhood, she emerges with a gypsy's mystical secret for freedom and the difficult decision of how to use it. Should she give up her Negro roots, remain White, and establish a new Blue Vein World, so that she can live a privileged life, or should she use the mystical secret to save her people, who already distrust and despise her because of the lightness of her skin?