James’s mother, Ruth McBride Jordan, is born Ruchel Dwajra Zylska in Poland in 1921 to an Orthodox Jewish family. The daughter of a rabbi, Ruth moves with her family to America in 1923 and later settles in Suffolk, Virginia. At age 20, Ruth leaves Suffolk forever and, a year later, marries a Black man named Andrew “Dennis” McBride, the author’s father. This causes Ruth’s deeply racist father—whom she calls Tateh—to disown her. Although Ruth is happy to escape Tateh, she is devastated to leave her mother Mameh, a quiet and gentle woman left with poor health after a childhood bout with polio. Of Mameh, Ruth says, “She’s the one person I didn’t do right by” (3).

In 1971, when James is 14, his stepfather Hunter Jordan dies of a stroke at the age of 72. Given that James’s biological father Dennis died in 1957, while Ruth was pregnant with James, James has grown up thinking of Hunter as his father. Devastated by Hunter’s death, Ruth takes up a new hobby: riding a rickety secondhand bicycle up and down the street. His mother’s behavior embarrasses James, in no small part because she is the only white person in their St.