The Prologue opens with John Robert Lewis recounting “a simple story, a true story, about a group of young children, a wood-frame house, and a windstorm” (xv). The only world four-year-old Lewis is the pine forests, cotton and peanut fields, and red clay roads that surrounded his family’s home in Pike County, Alabama. Lewis’s father, a sharecropper, was the first in the Lewis family to own land. Lewis’s extended sharecropper family also resides in the woods around his childhood home.

Lewis recalls one Saturday afternoon playing with his cousins and siblings at his Aunt Seneva’s home. While they were playing, a thunderstorm rolled in. Aunt Seneva herded the children inside to keep them safe from the elements. However, the house was so fragile, that the wind threatened to pull it from its foundation. Though he and his family were afraid, his Aunt Seneva told the children to “line up and hold hands” (xvi) and then move through the house to keep it tethered to the ground: “And so it went, fifteen children walking with the wind, holding that trembling house down with the weight of our small bodies” (xvi).