Howard Lee Johnson was once an angry young black man. His anger began before he was born, when his father impregnated his teenaged mother, then vanished. At twenty, distraught over his mother's death, he sets out to find his father. He ends up in Atlanta, where he falls in love and marries a Christian girl named Charlotte. During the next ten years he lives the life of Riley—until he begins an affair with Naomi, a bartender and former prostitute, and Charlotte kicks him out. For the first time in his life, Howard Lee must face his future, and himself, alone.