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Tish and Fonny are childhood friends who have fallen in love and plan to get married. At the story’s beginning, Fonny is in jail and Tish is three months pregnant. Tish shares the news first with Fonny and then with her mother, Sharon, her father, Joseph, and her sister, Ernestine. Despite the obvious complications the pregnancy adds to their lives, Tish’s close-knit family is overjoyed to welcome a new life. However, Fonny’s family reacts differently. While his father, Frank, is happy, Fonny’s mother curses the baby, and his sisters take her side. Fonny’s parents have been divided in their relationships with both Fonny and Tish since they were children. Frank and Fonny are alike, and they both love Tish. Fonny’s mother, Mrs. Hunt, is a sanctimonious and judgmental woman who disapproves of her husband and, by extension, Fonny, who resembles him. As a result, she also disapproves of Tish. After Mrs. Hunt curses the baby, Frank knocks her down, and then Ernestine and Sharon kick Mrs. Hunt and her daughters out of the apartment. The incident makes it clear to Tish’s family that they will be responsible for paying for Fonny’s lawyer and working to get him out of jail.
Fonny and Tish become close as children after a fight between their friends ends with Fonny spitting on Tish and Tish accidentally injuring Fonny. After the incident, they become like brother and sister, each providing something the other had been missing. Tish thinks of the time Fonny’s mother takes them to her church as their first date. When the congregation gets carried away with the spirit and grows loud, Fonny and Tish cling to each other, aware that no one else in the room loves them. They become lovers when they are eighteen and twenty-one, after Fonny quits vocational school and finds his calling as a sculptor. They soon decide to marry and begin looking for a loft to rent downtown. By this time, Frank has lost his tailor shop and begun drinking, which contributes to frequent fighting in Fonny’s family. Fonny divides his time between his downtown apartment, where he can sculpt, and Tish’s house.
Although vacant lofts are plentiful downtown, the couple struggles to find one, because most landlords they encounter are racist and will not rent to Black people. However, they find a place near Canal Street where the landlord, Levy, likes them because they are so clearly in love. Walking back from viewing the apartment, they stop at a greengrocer so Tish can buy tomatoes for dinner. While Fonny is around the corner buying cigarettes, a man in the store begins to harass Tish, propositioning her and blocking her path when she tries to leave. Just as Fonny returns, the man grabs Tish’s arm, and she slaps him. Fonny grabs the man and begins to beat him. A white police officer arrives on the scene and tries to arrest Fonny. The shopkeeper comes to his defense and tells the cop to leave, but from then on, the cop, Officer Bell, is their enemy. On that night, Fonny and Tish conceive their baby.
Fonny’s childhood friend, Daniel, has recently been released from prison and visits them often. He talks about how he was arrested at random and forced to plead guilty to a crime he could not have committed to avoid being charged for the marijuana he had been carrying at the time of his arrest. He also tells them about some of the trauma he experienced while in prison. Officer Bell seems to stalk Fonny, and Tish sees him everywhere. Ultimately, he arrests Fonny for the rape of Victoria Rogers, claiming he saw him running from the scene of the crime, although he was at his apartment across town with Tish and Daniel at the time. Ernestine explains later to Tish that Victoria was so traumatized by her rape that she is not consciously aware that she has positively identified the man the police wanted her to blame—Fonny—rather than the real assailant.
As the trial date approaches, Victoria disappears. Sharon agrees to go to Puerto Rico to look for Victoria and appeal to her to reconsider her testimony. In Puerto Rico, Sharon hires a taxi driver, Jaime, who takes her to the nightclub where Victoria’s partner Pietro works. When Sharon cannot convince him to talk to Victoria about the trial, Jaime takes her to the shantytown where Victoria lives, but Sharon is also unable to persuade Victoria. Before she leaves the island, she hears from Jaime that Victoria has had a miscarriage and has been taken to a town in the mountains. Back in New York, the prosecution asks for a delay in the trial because Victoria is unavailable to testify. The judge sets bail for Fonny so he can be released in the meantime, and the family scrambles for the money to bail him out. Joseph counsels Frank to stay hopeful, but after he is fired for stealing, he disappears. Two days later, Frank’s body is found in the woods in his car, with the doors locked and the motor running. As Joseph tells the family the news, Tish goes into labor. The book closes with Fonny sculpting, hearing the baby cry and cry.
