Harp Oletsky narrates the events of Black Sunday, April 14, resentful of distant New York journalists who reduce Nebraska's catastrophe to sensational headlines and dismiss farmers as ignorant gamblers. He recalls the morning being deceptively cheerful: at 2:15 p.m., driving home from Mass under blue skies, he stopped to speak with his neighbor Ed Leedskalin, who was gathering young thistle to boil with lard and salt to feed his four hungry children.

Harp reflects on a recent visit from a young, sunburned government agent—one of Roosevelt's New Dealers—who lectured the Grange about soil erosion and screened The Plow That Broke the Plains. The agent blamed farmers for uprooting native grasses and warned that topsoil, which takes five hundred years per inch to build, was being lost by the ton. Though the message angered Harp's friend Otto and others, Harp privately concedes the truth: tilling the soil to powder destroyed nature's sponge, and now everything is blowing away.

At 3:00 p.m., the duster struck. Harp managed to reach his niece Dell just before the dust wall hit. He admits he took satisfaction in seeing her habitual smirk unravel into genuine fear, taking it as proof she was still a child and feeling gratitude when she joined him in terror after refusing to join him in prayer. As they raced home through near-zero visibility, a windmill on Sender's property burst into flames, dirt pounded the truck, and thousands of birds flew ahead of the advancing darkness. Harp, wearing driving goggles and pressing a water-soaked radiator rag to Dell's face, miraculously got them home, leaving him with the indelible image of waves of earth crashing over the prairie and the sky exhaling all her birds.