After many years as a tour guide in the slave museum in Senegal, Alloune, 65, a widower living alone, decides to go to America in search of his ancestors who were taken away from his village two hundred years ago and sold as slaves in the New World. From Charleston to Little Senegal, in New York he searches for his ancestors and also for an ideal vision of an African family. Along the way, he discovers a strong ostracism between the African and African-American communities, embodied in three individuals: his cab driver nephew, Hassan; his nephew's girlfriend, Biram, an African with modern views on love and marriage; and Ida, an older woman who is faced with seeing her pregnant granddaughter destroyed by hard life on the street.