An African-American family moves into a house once used as a hiding place for runaway slaves and soon come to believe that their new home is possessed by the spirit of a murdered abolitionist, Dies Drear.
In this retelling of a folktale, a group of slaves, unable to bear their sadness and starvation any longer, calls upon the African magic that allows them to fly away.
As a great wall of dust moves across their drought-stricken farm, a family's distress is relieved by a young man called Drylongso, who literally blows into their lives with the storm.
Thomas Small and his family move into an old house that was once used as part of the Underground Railroad and soon realize that the house, where two fugitive slaves and Dies Drear himself had been killed by bounty hunters, continues to hold many secrets.
Pretty Pearl, a spirited young African god child eager to show off her powers, travels to the New World where, disguised as a human, she lives among a band of free blacks who have created their own separate world deep inside a vast forest.
After his grandfather leaves his family and returns to a dangerous situation on his home island in the Caribbean, fourteen-year-old Junius decides to follow him in search of his lost heritage.
As her predominantly African-American high school becomes more racially mixed, Talley befriends a white girl who shares her passion for running and becomes romantically involved with a drug dealer.
Fourteen-year-old Tree, resentful of her working mother who leaves her in charge of a retarded brother, encounters the ghost of her dead uncle and comes to a deeper understanding of her family's problems.
