The novel follows the adventures of an immortal vampire named Gilda over eight chapters, each set in a different location and year in the United States. Spanning the 200 years between 1850 and 2050, the novel charts African American history from the period of enslavement through abolition, segregation, the Black Power movement, and into an imagined dystopian future of economic and environmental collapse.

Told by an omniscient narrator, the stories in each chapter have their own narrative arcs. The novel proceeds in a linear fashion but does not have a single climactic point. Rather, each chapter shows the beginning, middle, and end of a new stage in Gilda’s personal understanding of what it means to be a vampire and how to relate to the human world with hope and love.  

Gilda begins her life as an escaped slave girl who is taken in by an older woman, a vampire who runs a New Orleans brothel. She grows up there in a supportive community of women. Just before the Civil War begins, the same woman transforms Gilda into a vampire herself and subsequently chooses to end her hundreds-of-years-long life, leaving Gilda in the care of her Lakota companion, Bird, who becomes Gilda’s lifelong mentor, lover, and friend.

After some years introducing Gilda to the vampire life, Bird goes traveling on her own, and Gilda journeys to California in 1890 to learn from the patriarch of her vampire lineage, a big-hearted man named Sorel. There she witnesses her first unhealthy vampire behavior through the childish but charming Eleanor. She experiences deep attraction to Eleanor but parts ways with her when the woman treats Gilda like a servant. Having learned all she can from Sorel, Gilda spends a few years in a small black town in 1920s Missouri and befriends a young widow named Aurelia, the first human she considers turning into a vampire. Ultimately, she decides she cannot tear Aurelia away from her roots in Missouri and leaves her to travel further east.

In the 1950s, Gilda runs a beauty parlor in Boston’s South End. Bird returns to her there, and they support a local community of prostitutes by murdering an evil vampire pimp together. Gilda’s next destination is New York City, where she works in a radical 1970s off-Broadway theater and finally creates her first new vampire: a young man named Julius who has lost his mortal parents and has expansive activist ambitions that immortality can help him address. By the 1980s, Gilda has found her voice as a lounge singer-songwriter and begins a deep romantic connection with an ancient vampire named Effie.

The 21st century finds Gilda living in Effie’s secluded New Hampshire cottage and working under a pseudonym as a bestselling romance novelist. There is increasing political and environmental turmoil in the world outside, and Gilda is forced to leave anyway when the press discovers her location. She heads south, but by 2050 the planet is collapsing and Gilda is in hiding to avoid the mortals who now hunt down vampires for the gift of immortality. Gilda rescues a woman named Ermis from suicide, and the two begin a harrowing but hopeful journey to South America, where Gilda’s vampire family is safely hiding in the ruins of Machu Picchu, continuing to believe in life.