In 1849, a 19-year-old Irish famine survivor is torn from her twin sister's arms the minute their ship docks in Manhattan, forcing her to continue alone to her indenture in Charleston, South Carolina.

Nora arrives at her employer's vast rice plantation, where 100 slaves are racing to bring in the Fall harvest before the migrating bobolinks - "rice birds" - arrive and strip the fields clean. One of the house servants, a girl also 19 years old (Pearl), reluctantly befriends the frantic and homesick Nora. Pearl is desperate to find her mother, sold away long ago. Nora commits a crime on the plantation and when she runs away to Charleston, she takes Pearl with her. Now hunted like the Lowcountry's despised rice birds, the girls beg a physician to take them in. With reluctance, he does.

To earn money, the girls set up a hair jewelry business, creepy but lucrative. They visit Pearl's lover, a free black man who warns that he and Pearl must flee north soon. A new law to re-enslave freedmen is in the making.

As abolition tension rises in Charleston, Pearl finds and purchases her mother, but the old woman is now lame, dousing Pearl's plans to flee on foot. Her lover leaves town without her.

Nora's twin shows up, dragged to Charleston by her new employer, a wealthy Manhattan socialite who plans to denounce slavery - an illegal activity - on every street corner. Nora persuades her to buy ship tickets to New York for Nora, Pearl and her mother, and the physician, who must flee Charleston because of secrets of his own.

Just when Nora has convinced the socialite to leave, Nora overhears several wealthy men plotting to send a racing yacht to Africa, steal and stow Africans, outrun the naval patrols, and sell the slaves in America. Now Nora can't leave; she must stay to stop these men - but how? With Pearl at her side, Nora finds the courage and the allies she needs to win justice for the persecuted for once in her life.