14-year-old Lily Owen, spends hours imagining a blissful infancy of loving care from her mother, whom she barely remembers. These fantasies are her heart"s answer to the family story that as a child, Lily accidentally shot and killed her mother. All Lily has left of her is a strange image of a Black Madonna with the words “Tiburon, South Carolina." So when Lily"s nanny has to run away for insulting a group of white men, Lily flees to Tiburon with her, determined to find out more about her dead mother. The search for a mother is vividly portrayed in this story set in the early 1960s against a background of racial violence and unrest.