A powerful and singular story of two African-Americans who must decide between amorous love or the love of their people.

After a difficult first year teaching at a Brooklyn public high school, Jonah Winters decides to leave his job to vagabond through South America with his friend Octavio. Before he departs, Jonah has a troubled night of revelry and self-destruction, only to be rescued from arrest by former basketball star Nathaniel Archimbald who brings him back to his Bronx home.

While recovering from his hangover, Jonah converses with Nathaniel about former lives and loves. The son of American expats, Jonah recalls living a cushy post-undergraduate life in Paris working as an apprentice film projectionist, a one-time girlfriend that still has his heart, and the decision to teach in Brooklyn.

Nathaniel tells Jonah that he too has lived in Paris, where he resumed the studies he had abandoned to play basketball professionally. There he fell in love with a Parisian graduate student named Laura Pertrossian, who abruptly left not only him, but her entire life for a South American destination unknown. Nathaniel, in his grief, returned him to coach basketball for kids living in low-income neighborhoods.

When he is unable to persuade Jonah to remain a teacher, Nathaniel hands him a letter to give to Laura were he to find her during his travels. Jonah and Octavio depart for Rio de Janeiro where Jonah discovers how different it is to be a black North American in South America. When Octavio falls in love with a Brazilian art student, Jonah finds himself making his way down the Southern Cone alone where a chance encounter will change the way he sees everything.