Chelle, a Black mid-career artist who is running out of steam, has written a check that she's not sure her talent can cash. When the city of Baltimore takes down the Confederate monument across the street from her childhood home, she has an idea: she'll apply for a grant to create a piece to replace it. Years later, she's gotten herself lost in American history and she's no closer to a finished product. When she buys that childhood home, in a neighborhood that is more weed than flower, her circuitous process gets interrupted by her brother Willard, a history-eschewing public figure planning a Juneteenth festival in the park where the monument was, and Thalia, an interior designer who is from this world but not of it. Caught between the past, the present, and the future, Chelle is catapulted into a journey that takes her back before the Middle Passage and out beyond the bounds of this planet.