Cleo Allfrey, a Black photographer working for Roy Stryker's Resettlement Administration Historical Section, recounts her arrival in Nebraska. After her Contax camera was stolen from her Lincoln motel, she discovered a pristine Graflex camera and full kit of equipment in a Danish pawnshop in Dannebrog, sold to her at a suspiciously low price by an elderly red-wigged shopkeeper. The unsettling coincidence—finding exactly what she desperately needed—gives her a sense of déjà vu. The shopkeeper directs her toward an archaeological dig and recounts the founding of Dannebrog on what was once Indian land.

Cleo learns to operate her demanding new Graflex, then drives to Guide Rock near Webster to photograph Asa T. Hill, Director of the Nebraska State Historical Society, supervising the excavation of a Pawnee village site. Hill, mistaking her for a man (she dresses in her brother's clothes despite Stryker's advice), boasts about his discovery and recounts how the Pawnee were removed to Oklahoma in 1876 after settler George DeWitt plowed their land. Cleo grows disturbed when Hill performs a Hamlet skit with a human skull, and her refusal to flatter him with extra photographs offends him.

She drives on to a New Deal resettlement farmstead, noting that no Black families were chosen for the cooperative, then wanders the shortgrass prairie photographing a striking lightning-split cottonwood she calls a doppelgänger. Approaching Uz, she is startled by a green wheat field—an anomaly in the dust country—and resolves to photograph it the next day. She reflects on her work, her captions, and the burden her camera places on subjects.

Entering Uz at dusk, Cleo finds an ugly, weather-beaten town. She photographs a billboard for Sheriff Iscoe and rents a room above the Country Jentleman saloon. At the bar, she meets a young White girl with old eyes who is waiting for her boss to open up an upstairs office; the girl points to a poster advertising 'The Antidote of Uz.'