This is the story of the life a black American family, the Breadloves, whose individual tragedies are shaped by the pain, injustice and deprivation of their respective experiences. Cholly and his wife Pauline, their son Sam and Pecula, their ugly little twelve-year-old daughter who covets the blue eyes of her privileged blond white schoolfellows, are all of them tortured and degraded by a past in whose making they played no part. Pecula becomes the focus of the mingled love and hatred engendered by this tragic heritage as the novel moves towards a savage but poignant resolution that leaves Sam delinquent, Pauline bereft, Cholly destitue, and Pecula mad.