New York, 1863. As the Civil War rages on, free Blacks and Irish immigrants live and love together in the unlikeliest of neighborhoods – the dangerous streets and raffish tenement houses of Manhattan’s Five Points. The denizens of a local saloon, including an indomitable Black woman who owns it, a conflicted newly arrived Irish immigrant, a fearless runaway slave and a once-great songwriter, struggle with what it means to be an American while living through one of the most tumultuous, racially divided eras in our country’s history.