A Black man named John is riding the train to Hell, but decides not to get off and keeps going. The conductor tries to kick him off, but John reminds him that he was never given a ticket in the first place so he'll get off where he pleases. Another conductor steps in and says he is being taken to see the boss at Beluthahatchie.

At the station, the Devil drives up, bumping along the train tracks in an old car. John makes fun of him for beating up the car, but the Devil says he doesn't care about what people think as he in charge of their lives not the other way around. The Devil then offers John a tour, which he takes, but forces John to walk next to the car as he drives. The Devil explains how Hell, or the new Beluthahatchie location he's looking to open, won't be too different for Black people than real life was. The only inhabitant of Beluthahatchie is a Black man named Ezekiel who's busy plowing a field. When they stop to chat for a moment, he tells John that he thinks John is there to save his people from this new slavery in the afterlife. John just walks away but a few minutes later, when the Devil goes to steal food from some children, John steals his car and drives back to Ezekiel who tells him to pull his pranks while he can. After a while of driving, two dogs suddenly appear in the front seat and startle John and he crashes. He ends up at the Lake of the Dead and he sings a song about Beluthahatchie before the landscape suddenly shifts again and he's sitting on the old porch of an old sharecropper plot of land.

Out of the field of cotton comes a crowd of Black people, all thanking John for coming to save them as Ezekiel had told them. John doesn't want to be a savior, but no one listens.