The Beginning of Homewood is addressed as a letter to the narrator's brother. A trip to Greece, two years earlier, began the narrator's meditation on the story of Sybela Owens, who is their great-great-great-grandmother, and the matriarch of a place known as Homewood. The narrator feels that the story is connected to the brother's plight. He is imprisoned, awaiting trial for murder and prison break. Sybela was also imprisoned as a slave. The story itself is an oral tradition, passed down to the narrator through several voices, among them, Aunt May and Aunt Bess, whose voices seem to combine with the narrator's account.

Sybela Owens' story begins in 1859. Sybela lives as a slave on a farm near Cumberland, Maryland. Every day, she wakes to the blast of a conch shell trumpet to do slave labor. She lives with her two young children there, until one...