During the depth of the Great Depression, a wino hooker passed out and froze to death in the alley next to Gussie and Sol Steinberg's little grocery store in the ghetto. She left behind a half starved, nine year old boy, Luther, whom the Steinbergs raised and educated as a son. Their biological son, Maxwell, brilliant and sensitive, resented Luther and eventually fled the ghetto for Harvard Law, a Wasp wife and a career in a white-shoe Boston law firm. When Sol dies, Luther reappears in Gussie's life, a handsome, conservatively dressed, "white-speaking" cocaine dealer who sells only to white...