Jay Berry Lee is a 14-year-old white American boy who lives in a rural, mountainous area of northeastern Oklahoma called the Ozarks. The story is set in the late 1800s. In first-person point of view, Jay Berry opens the narrative with backstory and description. He reveals that his life was happy and simple until the summer he was 14, and then he “got mixed up with a bunch of monkeys” that made his life much more complicated (1). He describes his parents, who were sharecroppers in Missouri saving up for their own farm before Mama’s father, Jay Berry’s Grandpa, offered them 60 acres near the banks of the Illinois River, which he got through a trade. Jay Berry and his twin sister Daisy, who was born with her right leg “all twisted up” (2), were just babies when Mama and Papa packed the wagon and made the move to the parcel of land in the Ozarks.

The Lee family lives in a log house. Papa farms and Mama keeps the house and chickens. Jay Berry does chores and enjoys small adventures with Rowdy, his bluetick hound, like catching small animals.