The first generation of this community of women in the swamp began with the First Mother fleeing from a plantation, a death camp, into the swampland for refuge. The First Mother was pregnant already, and built a home for her child from the mud and clay. She won't speak of who the father is, but he was certainly enslaved alongside her. The First Mother gives birth to the First Daughter, and began teaching her survive. She teaches her to chart the stars and the moon to track her menstruation, and to find mushrooms to eat. When the First Mother had been enslaved, she heard of the island men. The Spanish brought more enslaved men from the islands with them to work and toil near the swamps. Sometimes the island men would court the escaped women at the borders of the swamp. They told the women about the islands that they were stolen from, and of the horrors that the Europeans inflicted. They told the women about their rebellion from the Spanish, and how they also hid in the swamp now in secret communities. The First Mother always knew she would one day find them, and after seventeen springs of her daughter being alive, they both made the journey together. She brings her daughter to find a partner among the escaped island men, and once First Daughter became pregnant, First Mother and First Daughter return to their clay home to nurture the child. This became a tradition, every year of a child's seventeenth spring, they would go find partners with the village of the island men. Babies born boys would be delivered to the island men's village for them to be brought up by their fathers as it was safer for them to be taught by their fathers what it meant to be men in this world. The number of women increased into the tens. Some of the women hunt and weave baskets to gather food. Other women play instruments and wrote songs of the history of the mothers; how the First Mother escaped her death camp, how the Fourth Mothers raised big cat cubs to help them hunt, and how the Fifth Mothers used those big cats to fight off a band of coyotes and skin them for fur. After many generations, the women of this swamp village dwindled from sickness, death in childbirth, and infertility. Some women also left to find towns to live in. That leaves three women- a grandmother, mother, and a daughter. The grandmother, who is Seventh Mother, is dying. The mother is restless, dreaming of her island man being in trouble. One day the island man visits, and is happy to see the mother. The daughter recognized her father. Her father told the mother about how there are railroads cutting through the swamp, and how her son had gone into the city. He tells her how men ride machines now and how the death camps are abandoned; the world is for free men. The father left to the city to be free. The mother argues with Seventh Mother, saying that this was no longer the world that First Mother lived in. The mother wants to be with her island man, to leave to be with him. When the daughter turns ten, Seventh Mother passes away. The mother begins going to town and brining back bread to eat. When the daughter eats the sweet tasting bread, she is afraid of the hunger she now feels to leave their home of mud and clay. When the daughter is fifteen, the mother tries to convince the daughter to leave to the city. The daughter doesn't want to, but finds it hard to explain how connected she feels to this home. Later, she is travelling alone, listening to the voices of her ancestors encouragement. She singes about her decision, her ability to choose, and about how the women will not climb these trails again.