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The narrator of this chapter writes from a third-person limited perspective, where they attempt to tell the story exclusively from Frank’s point of view. Frank is in bed in the mental health ward of a hospital, pretending to be asleep so that nurses do not come by and give him another shot of morphine. A letter that reads “‘Come fast. She be dead if you tarry’” (8) has been sent to him by an unknown woman. The letter refers to Cee’s precarious condition. 

At four in the morning, barefoot and half-dressed, Frank manages to escape and runs six blocks to the AME Zion clapboard church, where he is met by Reverend John Locke and his wife, Jean. When the couple asks Frank why the police took him into their ward, Frank honestly cannot remember but conceives that he must have been acting up. He remembers being beset with anxiety as soon as his ex-girlfriend, Lily, shut the door behind him when he told her he had to go on the journey.  

The Reverend and his wife equip Frank with galoshes and tell him to get to Portland, where he’ll meet Reverend Jessie Maynard, a pastor used to helping black soldiers who are returning from the “integrated misery” of the army, are treated worse than dogs when they come back from war, and are still subject to the same discrimination (18).

As Frank boards the Greyhound bus for the first leg of his journey, he is overtaken by memories. He realizes that he became dependent on Lily to restore his sense of well-being. Lily could not cope with his spells of poor mental health. He reflects on his first “break” with sanity, where it seemed to him that a colored world became “a black-and-white movie screen” (23). Frank hopes that he can reach Chicago without having another such incident. 

When Frank arrives in Chicago, he finds a diner called Booker’s, where African Americans exchange stories about their deprivation with good humor. Everywhere Frank looks, there are signs of racist violence against African Americans. When Frank stops for the night at Billy and Arlene’s house, he sees that their son Thomas’s arm drags because he was shot by a police officer. This turns out to be to Thomas’ advantage because he stays off the streets, studies hard, and has become a math whiz.

That night, Frank has disturbing dreams full of lurid images and worries that they are trying to tell him something about his sister, who is likely sick. Frank tended to Cee when they were children, but he felt that their hometown of Lotus “was suffocating, killing him,” and he enlisted, despite Cee’s reluctance (35).  

The next morning, Billy insists on taking Frank shopping because his scruffy appearance will make him a target for the police. At the end of the chapter, Frank finally boards the bus to Georgia.

This chapter switches back to Frank’s first-person narration. He reflects on the time his family had to leave their land in Bandera County, Texas, when he was 4 years old. They had to also leave their goods and livestock. At the time, his mother was pregnant with Cee. Thus dispossessed, the family was extremely poor and had to subsist on stale leftovers at church pantries. At the Church of the Redeemer, Frank’s mother, Ida, delivered Ycidra, named after a woman who stood ahead of her in the breadline. While Ida pronounces all three syllables of her daughter’s name, everyone else shortens “Ycidra” to “Cee.” The impoverished family have to cross the Texas-Louisiana border in the baking heat. Frank reflects that the family’s last name, Money, is “crazy” because they have never had enough of it (40).

The narration returns to a third-person limited perspective and follows Cee’s life experience. After the Money family are turned out of Texas, they have to stay with their grandfather, Salem, and his rich, mean third wife, Lenore, in Lotus, Georgia. Lenore, who resents the crowding of her house, focuses her resentment on Cee, “the little girl ‘born in the street’”—in other words, on the journey from Texas to Georgia (45). Given that the family are very poor, the parents each work two jobs. One of Ida’s jobs at the lumberyard gives her “lethal asthma,” but it means that the family can afford to rent a place of their own (46). Cee grows up sheltered by Frank, knowing only “chores, church-school,” and the strictness of her step-grandmother (47). While Frank is around, Cee is not permitted to flirt with any man in town; however, after he enlists, she falls for the “first thing she saw wearing belted trousers instead of overalls” (47). Principal (or “Prince,” as he calls himself), the man in question, turns up from Atlanta at Cee’s aunt’s house. Naive and taken in by Prince’s flattery and big-city style, Cee falls for Prince, and at Lenore’s prompting, they get married. 

They move to Atlanta, driving there in the family Ford, which is part of Lenore’s takings from her first marriage. However, Prince soon runs off with the car, leaving Cee to her own devices in Atlanta. When Cee goes back home for her mother’s funeral, Lenore makes her feel so unwelcome that she dares not return again for her father’s funeral. Alone, in Atlanta, Cee endeavors to find a better-paying job than the one she has at the restaurant, Bobby’s. Her friend Thelma helps her find one as the assistant of a Dr. Beauregard Scott, practitioner of experimental medicine. When Cee visits the beautiful neighborhood, meets the glamorous Mrs. Scott, and sees the comfortable bed she is due to sleep in, she laughs with glee. However, the housekeeper, Sarah, tells her that laughter is forbidden because the Scotts are mourning the fate of two daughters who have been put in a home because they suffer from cephalitis. 

Cee’s first impression of her employer is a good one, especially when she notices how many poor people Dr. Beauregard helps. He asks whether Cee has ever been with a man or been married, but she does not register the strangeness of the questions. In time, Cee comes to love her work, “the beautiful house, the kind doctor, and the wages—never skipped or short as they sometimes were at Bobby’s” (65). 

However, one day, Cee enters Dr. Beauregard’s house an hour before his arrival and notices that he has books on eugenics on his shelf, with titles such as “The Passing of the Great Race” (65). Her insufficient education means that she has no idea that eugenics is a dangerous race science that asserts the superiority of Caucasians. Meanwhile, she tells herself that she will one day look up what eugenics means.