Elizabeth's Field is the story of the free black population living on Maryland's Eastern Shore in a county known for being the birthplace of Harriet Tubman. Elizabeth, a free woman of American Indian and African-American descent, owns land in 1852 and loses it in 1857. Her struggle to hold onto the land and her connection with Sam Green, the local minister who is sentenced to ten years imprisonment for having a copy of Uncle Tom's Cabin, attest to the turmoil existing within Maryland's borders.
Mattie, the present-day farm worker on whose oral history the novel is based, searches for answers to her genealogical history. As she tells the story of her life, she reveals the societal and agricultural changes that occurred on the same land that was Elizabeth's field one hundred and fifty years before.