Born in 1957, writer and musician James McBride narrates roughly half of the book, interspersing his recollections of his upbringing with his interviews of his mother Ruth McBride Jordan. The son of a Jewish white woman and a Black man, James grows up feeling profoundly confused about his racial identity. He contends with many racially fraught messages, and his mother refuses to acknowledge race. His Black peers interrogate him about why his mother is white, while his white peers beg him to dance like James Brown. The media paints the emergent Black Power movement as an existential threat to white people. These influences scramble James’s notion of identity so much that as a child, James punches the adolescent son of a Black Panther because James is certain the boy’s father is going to try to kill Ruth.

In adulthood, though James finds enormous professional success as a journalist at The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, and other prominent outlets, he never makes peace with his racial heritage. Although he finds Blackness and Black communities easier to navigate, he feels the pull of his European Jewish heritage. To reconcile these two sides of his identity, James makes numerous trips to his mother’s hometown in Suffolk, Virginia.