In a mid-twentieth-century Southern town, the shunned twin sister of the much-coveted Cornelius Clay tells her story. Raised in an upper-class black family, her mother gave birth to the narrator and her brother twenty years ago. Since she emerged as a horrifying spidery mass from the womb, the narrator has hidden herself in the walls of her family’s home. The narrator recounts the series of events that led to her birth--her mother’s desire to have a baby so that she could convince her husband to move back to New York, her mother’s subsequent consultation with a witch doctor, and her mother’s greedy disregard for the witch doctor’s instructions. So hungry for a change in environment, the mother did not eat just one of the seeds the witch doctor prescribed her, but all of them. This error has fatal consequences, producing a daughter she deems monstrous.

Intent on exacting revenge, the narrator kills the two beautiful women Cornelius attempts to marry. After the second murder, the narrator’s mother returns to the house to kill her daughter. However, it soon becomes apparent that the narrator’s mother does not want to harm her daughter so much as release her daughter from the prison of her monstrous exterior.