The film tells the story of Claudine Price (Diahann Carroll), a single African-American Harlem, Manhattan mother, living on Social welfare with six children, who finds love with a garbage collector, Rupert "Roop" Marshall (James Earl Jones). The pair's relationship is complicated by their poverty, the restrictions of the welfare system and the hostility of her children, particularly eldest son Charles (Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs), who believes that Roop will leave their mother just like her previous husbands had.