NARCISSA Tarver feels like a misfit in her vast extended family as it struggles to maintain white privilege in early Jim Crow southern Mississippi. Largely ignored by parents who are old enough to be her grandparents, young Cissa longs to be important like her adult sister and brothers, especially her brother DUNCAN, who is a doctor and politician. Her only friend is her Negro caregiver, JULIA, though she also obsesses over a chance encounter with a Choctaw woman whom her mother warns is a witch. Cissa loses part of her right hand in an accident, and she blames Duncan for the amputation. Despite her disability, she develops skill as a writer and in her teens begins writing articles for a county newspaper.
Meanwhile, incidents of violence against Negroes proliferate-activity known as whitecapping-and Cissa is horrified when Julia's home is attacked and her daughter seriously wounded. Julia blames Cissa's brother Duncan for the attack. When Cissa confronts him, he answers with a sound slap and a warning that loyalty to family trumps all else. She defies him by submitting an article to the newspaper about the incident, albeit without naming names.
Cissa befriends LIZ at the county newspaper office and gets a job offer to work at the paper, but a family crisis forces her to decline. She continues submitting articles. Although she envies her brother Duncan's political importance as county sheriff and writes about him for the press, she suspects he may be involved in the whitecap violence. When the governor sends a detective to investigate, Cissa cautiously befriends the man and they share information.
Cissa cannot pass up the newsworthy opportunity to go to the state capitol when a federal grand jury convenes to consider whitecapping offenses, even though she is commandeered as Duncan's secretary. After Duncan is indicted (with 300 of his oath-bound associates) Cissa meets again with the detective.
As Duncan's trial looms amid the assassination of a witness and threats toward others, Cissa learns that Duncan is counting on her shorthand records for his defense. Finally convinced that he truly is the power behind the whitecap violence, she refuses to testify. He and all the rest plead guilty but receive minimal punishments. Unbowed, Duncan defeats a long-time incumbent to win a new position as county clerk. Cissa tries to settle into her family role as caretaker of her now widowed mother, but her frustrations simmer as political factionalism festers. She discovers a codicil to her father's will that puts the family "big house" in her name. After her brother is acquitted of murdering a political rival, tensions escalate until another street shootout results in his death. Cissa has had enough. She settles her mother with a sister, sells the house, and departs to join her friend Liz in Texas, where her detective friend is also setting up shop. At last she is doing something that is important to her, following her truth, and escaping the family chaos.