Tristan Strong is headed from Chicago to rural Alabama with his grandparents after having had a hard year. He lost his first boxing match, a hard loss since Strongs are boxing champions. Worse still is the death of Eddie, his best friend during a class field trip as Tristan watched. Tristan has one keepsake of Eddie’s, the journal they used for collecting Black folktales for a school project. The journal is strange: It has a symbol—a spider web, symbol of the old African trickster Anansi the spider—that glows green in certain lights. Nana comforts him on the car-ride to Alabama by telling him folktales that Grandpa Alvin scoffs at because he believes Tristan needs to face reality and develop discipline.

Tristan dreams that two characters out of Black folklore, steel driver John Henry and trickster Brer Rabbit, open a hole at the base of a massive tree and send a little creature through it to retrieve an important, unnamed object. The sound of Nana’s knitting needles wakes Tristan from his dream. The Strongs arrive at their family farm in Alabama. The most striking part of the farm is a stand of bottle trees, which Nana explains are a part of Black folk culture: The bottles trap evil spirits who might do harm.