When Mamba appears on the Wentworth doorstep, this shrewd woman takes the first step in surmounting a social barrier as thorny as any in early twentieth-century Charleston. For the sake of her family, Mamba navigates a comic, calculated path to the privileged class of African-Americans employed by Charleston's aristocratic white families.

Set in the early twentieth-century, this classic novel transcends racial boundaries by intertwining the stories of three very different families in an amusing plot of deception, ambition, and social transformation.