As a boy in the Red Hook projects in Brooklyn, James McBride knew his mother was different. But when he asked her about it, she simply said, "I am light-skinned." Later, he wondered if he was different too and asked his mother whether he was black or white. "You are a human being," she cut him off. "Get an education, or you will be nobody!" And when James asked what color God was, she said, "God is the color of water." As an adult, McBride eventually convinced his mother to tell her story – the story of the daughter of a rabbi, born in Poland and raised in the South, who fled to Harlem, married a black man, founded a Baptist church, and sent twelve children to college.