In the New Orleans of the '30s and '40s, things - and people - are supposed to be black and white. Cille and her light-skinned brothers are neither. They are "the color that looks not-quite white next to a white man, and not-quite colored next to a colored man. It was a non-color in a place where you had to be something." The daughter of a dreamy alcoholic father who introduces Cille to "Mr. Keats and Mr.

Shelley" but who exits her life too soon, and a mother who teaches her children not the love of God but the fear of him, young Cille struggles for balance and identity in a world where race and class define people for life, and where her brothers destroy themselves beating against the bars of the cage of a divided culture.