As a boy in Brooklyn`s Red Hook projects, James McBride knew his mother was different. But when he asked about it, she`d simply say `I`m light-skinned.` Later he wondered if he was different too, and asked his mother if he was black or white. `You`re a human being,` she snapped. `Educate yourself or you`ll be a nobody!` And when James asked what colour God was, she said `God is the colour of water.` As an adult, McBride finally persuaded his mother to tell her story - the story of a rabbi`s daughter, born in Poland and raised in the South, who fled to Harlem, married a black man, founded a Baptist church, and put twelve children through college.