A fictionalized version of the life of Harriet Jacobs, told in the form of letters that she might have written during her slavery in North Carolina and as she prepared for escape to the North in 1842.

Ruth Fitz, a black teenager surrounded by activism in a family rocked by tragedy, discovers that she has begun to receive parchment letters from Harriet Jacobs, the author of the autobiography and 1861 American classic, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and sets out to use her own voice to make history.