The novel begins with a quotation from a spiritual text, Earthseed: The Books of the Living, written by Lauren Oya Olamina. Lauren’s daughter, Larkin, reflects on the legacy of her mother, who is now dead. Larkin has ambivalent feelings about her mother, noting that her mother was “there for all the world, but never there for me” (xiv). The parallel construction of the sentence introduces the conflict between Larkin’s awareness that her mother was a profoundly influential spiritual leader and her grief that the two of them did not have a closer emotional bond. To process these feelings, Larkin is compiling a text that will combine the writings of both her mother and her father, Taylor Franklin Bankole, with her own reflections. 

Writing in 2032, Bankole looks back on a period of upheaval and suffering known as the Pox—usually dated between 2015 and 2030. Bankole, born in 1970, argues that widespread problems began plaguing the United States of America much earlier and remain ongoing. Larkin interjects in the narrative to explain some context about her parents: the two of them met in 2027 during a period of violent crisis.