Trinidad-born Justin Peters is a Harvard-educated literature professor whose focus on the works of "Dead White Men" receives little professional respect at the public Brooklyn college where he teaches. But whatever troubles he might have at work are eclipsed when he realizes his wife, Sally, is no longer certain about their life together. Once a poet, now a teacher and nearly forty, Harlem-born Sally wants something more. If Sally and Justin's union is to survive (along with four-year-old daughter Giselle), both must face the crippling echoes of their own pasts before those memories forever cloud and alter their future.