A streetwise African American teenager hastily departs bigoted Anderson, South Carolina in the 1940s. During her travels over a span of nearly eighty years, she assumes the identity of her alter ego while living a good life as a nationally respected media mogul. But it is marked with deep-rooted secrets: one involving the murder of a White man and the other dealing with the disappearance of a prominent Black man, both from her past life in the Deep South.

The Bootlegger's Mistress embodies the essence of the Great Migration, the decades-long movement of six million African Americans from the racially oppressive South to the purportedly economic opportunity-laden North during much of the twentieth century.