The heroine, a young, light-skinned African-American woman called Angela Murray, leaves behind her past and passes for white in order to be able to attain fulfilment in life.

Although African-American women were typed in popular song as "a little brown sugar" or a "jellyroll",[5] Angela had to cease thinking of herself as a purveyor of feminine sweetness for sale, and instead step into new roles with inherent value.

In Fauset's actual family was part of the Philadelphia black middle class, and although well-respected and well-connected in the African-American community, they were prohibited from public places such as hospitals, restaurants and stores by widely accepted Jim Crow policies.

Angela, like her mother Mattie, is light skinned and able to “pass” in white society, while Virginia and her father Junius's darker complexion places them on the other side of the color line.

Angela, on the other hand, tries repeatedly to gain acceptance by assuming a white mask, but each time it seems that success and friendship are hers, her ethnicity is exposed and she is stripped of everything she cares about.

However, true friends and her sister urge her to travel to Paris to become an artist, and Anthony, a fellow art school classmate of mixed heritage who watched his father die under the hands of a racist mob in the South, declares his love for Angela.

The “moral to the story” is slowly created for the reader and for the main characters as Angela learns and understands the life lessons that New York affords her.