In Haiti, a black female plantation owner enacts a voodoo curse, and revives zombies for revenge on a white male neighbor, who has chosen a white woman over her for marriage.
A struggling widow and her daughter take in a black housekeeper and her fair-skinned daughter. The two women start a successful business but face familial, identity, and racial issues along the way.
Unscrupulously ambitious, Brutus Jones escapes from jail after killing a guard and, through bluff and bravado, finds himself the emperor of a Caribbean island.
Duke Ellington plays hot jazz in a fictional story that finds him down on his luck; he tries in vain to dissuade his friend, dancer Fredi Washington, from working with heart trouble even though it means work for his band. Sure enough, she collapses on stage...