At fourteen Langston is uprooted from his home in rural Alabama to post-war inner-city Chicago. He is utterly lost with no friends or family for comfort and only his overworked father to help him through the difficulties of city living. But one day running from ever-present bullies, he accidentally finds his first oasis, a public library, where he begins to find himself.
After his mother dies in 1946, 11-year-old Langston and his father leave rural Alabama for Chicago as part of the Great Migration. Langston discovers that, unlike the whites-only library in Alabama, the local public library welcomes everyone. There, he discovers another Langston, a poet whom he learns inspired his mother enough to name her only son after him.