When Jane McKeene was born in the middle of the Civil War, she caused quite a stir. After all, it isn’t every day that “a Negro comes flying out from between the legs of the richest white woman in Haller County, Kentucky” (1). As soon as the midwife saw that her white mistress had given birth to a Black child, she planned to suffocate the baby and spare her mother the shame. Aunt Aggie, “the woman who mostly raised [Jane]” (3), stopped the midwife and saved Jane’s life.

Jane thinks about how she might have been trained to become a house servant like Aggie, but everything changed when “two days after [Jane] was born [...] the dead rose up and started to walk on a battlefield in a small town in Pennsylvania called Gettysburg” (3).

Seventeen years later, the undead (now called “shamblers”) have derailed the Civil War, and Black and Indigenous children are sent to learn how to fight to protect the white people of America.

Jane is training at Miss Preston’s School of Combat for Negro Girls, where she is learning to become an Attendant who will “keep her charge from being killed by the dead” (10).