An Original Spencer

Laura Reed is a black Chicago woman who is at the start of her career. Once her MBA is in hand, she is off to the glamorous life of Madison Avenue. Then one day, she wakes up and finds herself in a hospital at the turn of the twentieth century, recovering from an acute fever. To her shock, she has taken the place of her exact lookalike, and is now married to Justin, a man who clearly hates his wife. He considers Laura to be her, only under some illness-induced delusion that she is someone else.


It has been only thirty-five years since the abolishment of slavery, and Laura now has to navigate her way through a time when a black woman was expected to be silent and submissive, virtues that she never had prepared to emulate. With no one else to turn to, she relies on the help of a little girl who believes Laura’s story, and shows her how to live in 1900 and understand the person she is now married to.


Justin Spencer is an honest, hard-working man who owns a home in an all-Negro neighborhood of Chicago. Suddenly, his wife is acting strangely, erratically, and even violently. When she sullies his reputation in the community, he is compelled to punish her with a leather strap, not realizing that he is at only the beginning of a wild ride from which he will never recover.