Hetty "Handful" Grimké, an urban slave in early nineteenth- century Charleston, yearns for life beyond the suffocating walls that enclose her within the wealthy Grimké household. The Grimkés daughter Sarah has known from an early age she is meant to do something large in the world, but she is hemmed in by the limits imposed on women. On Sarahs eleventh birthday in 1803, she is given ownership of ten-year-old Handful, who is to be her handmaid. Over the next thirty-five years, both strive for lives of their own, dramatically shaping each others destinies and forming a complex relationship marked by guilt, defiance, estrangement, and the uneasy ways of love.