This book is the first of three on the racism, the delusion, the love, the hatred, the violence, the hope, the meanness and generosity, the humanity and inhumanity, the range of love-hate viciousness and nobility that bind the black and the white people of the United States into the same nation. The second book will be gray and the third will be black, but this first is the white novel. It begins with a love story among the very young at a time when black Americans, eighty years after freedom, were still in bondage. Some say they are in bondage even now, but not like then.

Three children are visiting their grandparents in Vermont and find a toy soldier and toy dog in the snow. The toys come to life and inform the children that they want to find the little boy who had left them there. Together they are magically transported through a potbelly stove in a general store to another store in the miniature village of Duxbury where they experience a number of fantastical adventures.