When Doug's father refuses to return to suburban New York from one of his lengthy business trips, his mother swallows a bottle of sleeping pills and Doug and sister Constance move in with their mother's mother in Rochester, who takes them in temporarily. At the end of the school year, Constance goes on to college and Grandma unloads Doug, putting him on a plane to Chicago to live with Carleton, the father he barely knows, and his father's young, beautiful, Native American wife. Doug finds himself living two blocks from the infamous Cabrini-Green housing projects, in an area where whites had mostly fled and black gangs are taking control. Carleton moved in with Mary a year earlier, marrying her two weeks after his wife died, and they remain in her apartment in the changing neighborhood because he'd lost another job due to his drinking and because Mary didn't like to be surrounded by white people anyway. Doug is immediately thrust into a world of petty crime, violence, and racial hatred, some of which emanates from Mary, who loves his father but despises herself for living with a white man. And yet, on her good days, she becomes more of a mother to Doug than he'd ever had, teaching him how to treat a lady and how to find his way in the inner-city. On her bad days, she locks him out of their apartment. So Doug comes of age in the streets, dates girls who live in the projects, and sees people beaten and killed. The people he comes to trust and learn from are people who are not white. They're Indian, they're Hispanic, and mostly they're Black. So who is he, he wonders, who thought of himself as White? This is the story of how it turns out.

Here's how it starts: Vardaman is chased by two older boys and he jumps into the elevator shaft and reaches for the steel cable and catches it, seven stories high, but his hands are slipping. He can barely hang on. The elevator is broken because the building is in Chicago, the Cabrini-Green projects, and because the older boys run the building no one wants to venture inside to fix things. The steel fibers rip into Vardaman's fingers and he falls, bruised but alive, one more escape. Not everything fits a label. Vardaman is smart and he does well in second grade. His mother checks his assignments when she gets back from her day shift at the nursing home, and it is there, after work one day, that she meets the wealthy and white middle-aged son of one of the patients. He introduces himself, approaches her as she's bending over the engine of her car that won't start and offers to help, attracted to her youth and exotic beauty. She accepts his help, attracted to his polite scent of money and perhaps a path for her and her son out from the projects. And so begins their cautious but quickened dance of daring as Alexander expands his boundaries and Linda tests the limits of her own. And watching it all is Vardaman, confused by what his mother is doing, afraid of what the brothers will think of her being with a white man, and maybe taking it out on him, and all he wants is for it to be ended. This is a novel about three persons exploring who each one of them really is - in their separate grips of age and race and money - and where their innocence might reside and their happiness might be found.

Here's how it starts: Vardaman is chased by two older boys and he jumps into the elevator shaft and reaches for the steel cable and catches it, seven stories high, but his hands are slipping. He can barely hang on. The elevator is broken because the building is in Chicago, the Cabrini-Green projects, and because the older boys run the building no one wants to venture inside to fix things. The steel fibers rip into Vardaman's fingers and he falls, bruised but alive, one more escape. Not everything fits a label. Vardaman is smart and he does well in second grade. His mother checks his assignments when she gets back from her day shift at the nursing home, and it is there, after work one day, that she meets the wealthy and white middle-aged son of one of the patients. He introduces himself, approaches her as she's bending over the engine of her car that won't start and offers to help, attracted to her youth and exotic beauty. She accepts his help, attracted to his polite scent of money and perhaps a path for her and her son out from the projects. And so begins their cautious but quickened dance of daring as Alexander expands his boundaries and Linda tests the limits of her own. And watching it all is Vardaman, confused by what his mother is doing, afraid of what the brothers will think of her being with a white man, and maybe taking it out on him, and all he wants is for it to be ended. This is a novel about three persons exploring who each one of them really is - in their separate grips of age and race and money - and where their innocence might reside and their happiness might be found.

When Doug's father refuses to return to suburban New York from one of his lengthy business trips, his mother swallows a bottle of sleeping pills and Doug and sister Constance move in with their mother's mother in Rochester, who takes them in temporarily. At the end of the school year, Constance goes on to college and Grandma unloads Doug, putting him on a plane to Chicago to live with Carleton, the father he barely knows, and his father's young, beautiful, Native American wife. Doug finds himself living two blocks from the infamous Cabrini-Green housing projects, in an area where whites had mostly fled and black gangs are taking control. Carleton moved in with Mary a year earlier, marrying her two weeks after his wife died, and they remain in her apartment in the changing neighborhood because he'd lost another job due to his drinking and because Mary didn't like to be surrounded by white people anyway. Doug is immediately thrust into a world of petty crime, violence, and racial hatred, some of which emanates from Mary, who loves his father but despises herself for living with a white man. And yet, on her good days, she becomes more of a mother to Doug than he'd ever had, teaching him how to treat a lady and how to find his way in the inner-city. On her bad days, she locks him out of their apartment. So Doug comes of age in the streets, dates girls who live in the projects, and sees people beaten and killed. The people he comes to trust and learn from are people who are not white. They're Indian, they're Hispanic, and mostly they're Black. So who is he, he wonders, who thought of himself as White? This is the story of how it turns out.