The sea was the gift that kept on giving to Lena's father, Earl, a fisherman turned successful rumrunner who built up a small fortune smuggling liquor from offshore ships to thirsty customers back on the island. But when Earl and his entire crew are lost in a mysterious shipwreck and Lena, who’d been on the cusp of a college career in Boston, sees her future slipping away. Desperate to save her family as well as her own hopes of escaping their small town, Lena decides to take over Earl’s rum-running business. For a crew, she ropes in Walter, Sam and Dee. The foursome embarks on a journey from the quaint, colorful streets of Oak Bluffs through gangland Boston to the jazz-filled clubs of Harlem during its Renaissance, all in search of quick money --- and the truth about the shipwreck. 

Philadelphia, 1837. After Charlotte escaped from the crumbling White Oaks plantation down South, she’d expected freedom to feel different from her former life as an enslaved housemaid. Instead, she’s locked away playing servant to her white-passing father, as they attempt to hide their identities from slavecatchers who would destroy their new lives. Longing to break away, Charlotte befriends Nell, a budding abolitionist from one of Philadelphia’s wealthiest Black families. Just as Charlotte starts to envision a future, a familiar face from her past reappears. Evie, her friend from White Oaks, has been brought to the city by the plantation mistress and is desperate to escape. But as Charlotte and Nell conspire to rescue her, they soon discover that fighting for Evie’s freedom may cost them their own.