It is about a young African-American girl growing up in the United States in the Aftermath of the Civil War. Libertie is a young girl living with her mother, a trained physician in a community of free Blacks in Brooklyn and the man is an escaped slave she calls Mr. Ben who has " stolen himself away" in a coffin as his means of getting North to freedom. She watches her mother revive the unconscious Mr. Ben with an herbal remedy awestruck by her mother's healing powers. Although Dr. Sampson is able to treat Mr. Ben's physical ailments, healing the emotional wounds of slavery proves much more difficult.