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Adapted from the 1930 novel by Marie Stanley, Gulf Stream tells the story of Adelle Childers, a young, beautiful mixed-race woman growing up amid the grinding poverty and racial humiliation of the Jim Crow South. 

When Adelle catches the eye of a young man from the white gentry, she falls deeply in love; only to be discarded when it becomes clear she will soon give birth to her lover’s child. Abandoning her aunt and infant child, Adelle moves to Mille Fleur, a Creole community, to become the companion of the slowly dying Bezelia Antoine, whose entrancing tales of “passing” for white in Paris and Havana inspire Adelle to dream new dreams. 

Through Bezelia’s influence, the orphaned Adelle attempts to navigate the social and psychological terrain required of a light-skinned African American woman regarded as white within the black community and black everywhere else. 

On Mille Fleur, Adelle finds a new family, with Bezelia and a simple young man named Zach, in a community grown comfortable with the blending of the races centuries before—a place where the blood of Africa is seen as “a sort of Gulf Stream; a never-ending current; a warm, vivid, vital flow of color through the white.” 

Strengthened, Adelle makes the critical decision to move back to her hometown, and reclaim her child, providing for the girl’s education and breaking the cycle—even if it means she will never live the romantic and pampered life and pass as “a white woman” in Bezilia’s beloved Paris. 

Returning home to her now adult daughter, Adele comes face to face with her former lover, her daughter’s father, and his own white daughter culminating in a confrontation between those she loves and despises most.