Her mother, writer Alice Walker, and her father, Jewish civil rights lawyer Mel Levanthal, certainly must have thought so when they posed for their wedding portrait in 1967, in defiance of Mississippi's miscegenation laws. Didn't their "shiny, outlaw love," as their daughter calls it, herald the racial harmony we all knew was just around the corner? Wasn't racial animosity, after all, just a giant misunderstanding that could be remedied by the "clear application of law" (as Levanthal believed) or through the "magic ability of words to redefine and create subjectivity" as Walker would have it)?

History, of course, proved such idealism a bit premature. Racial differences, like marriage itself, turned out to be more complicated. With the rise of black nationalism, almost overnight Levanthal was recast as an interloper by some of the very people whose rights he had fought for. Walker left her husband's arms to embrace feminism and eventual Color Purple fame. While Walker made San Francisco her home, Levanthal ended up in lily-white Larchmont, N.Y., married to the nice Jewish girl his parents had preferred all along. These new worlds barely intersected. Except for one small matter:

A "copper-colored" daughter.

"The only problem, of course, is me," Rebecca Walker writes, describing her parents' union and break-up in Black, White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self (Riverhead Books, $23.95). After their black and white retreat into their own comfort zones, "I no longer make sense. I am a remnant, a throwaway, a painful reminder of a happier and more optimistic but ultimately unsustainable time."

That, of course, could be the lament of many a child of divorce, a fact that evokes the challenge posed in reading Rebecca Walker's lyrical and devastatingly honest memoir of growing up bi-racial in America. In Black, White and Jewish Rebecca places her parents' schism squarely at the center of her identity confusion. She bravely shares details of private childhood agonies associated with mixed heritage. What is she to make of her Jewish great-grandmother's stony silence or her black uncle's description of her laugh as "cracker"? But surely a view through the prism of race is only part of the story of this complex human life, in which so many of society's contradictions intersect.

How much of Rebecca Walker's amalgam of personal pain is due to being crushed between the unyielding weight of two (or is it really three?) estranged cultures, and how much can be blamed on the usual suspects -- growing pains, cultural ennui, and that ubiquitous American devil, bad parenting?

If title space had permitted, she easily could have added Child of a Cockamamie Joint Custody Arrangement and Child of a Famous Person.

Rebecca Levanthal Walker nee Rebecca Grant Levanthal was in the third grade in Brooklyn when her parents separated. When Alice Walker moves to San Francisco, "where she feels she can write better because she can see the sky," Alice and Mel decide to shuttle their young daughter back and forth between the East and West coasts every two years.

What were they thinking, Rebecca wonders with understated restraint. "I don't know how they come up with that number, two, as opposed to one, or why they didn't simply put me in junior high here and high school there. I don't know if staying in one city so that I wouldn't have to spend my life zigzagging the country, so that I could have some semblance of a normal relationship with friends and family members, ever crossed either of my parents' minds."

Trapped in a destructive cycle, needing to reinvent herself every couple of years when she had no clue as to who she was in the first place, Rebecca finds she belongs simultaneously to two worlds and to none.

Not surprisingly, some of the adjustments she makes take on a racial twist. Denying part of herself each time she shuffles from city to city, from Jewish to black, from status quo middle class to radical artist bohemia, she trains herself to keep the code, not to say something too white when she is with friends from the inner city, not to say anything too black when she is at Jewish summer camp.

But mostly Rebecca Walker's story, as she tells it, is about raising herself. Her mother brags in interviews that she and her daughter are like sisters, but as Rebecca points out, "being my mother's sister doesn't allow me to be her daughter." So while Alice Walker is off on speaking engagements, sometimes for days on end, her "sister" Rebecca is choosing her own high school, taking drugs, having sex and generally fending for herself. When at 14, Rebecca tells her mother she is pregnant, Alice Walker arranges for an abortion.

"She doesn't lecture me, she doesn't say, How did this happen, aren't you using birth control, she doesn't say much of anything, except to call her boyfriend a few hours later and tell him . . . I hear her sighing as she speaks, the same sigh I hear when she worries about money, when she's feeling overwhelmed and retreats to her bedroom for hours, sometimes days," writes Rebecca.

When it's Rebecca's father's turn to parent, he doesn't do much better. He and stepmother Judy, whom Rebecca guiltily calls "Mom," have little or no clue about Rebecca's complicated life. Perhaps afraid of the answers, they don't ask any questions.

"It suits me fine, I guess, this having a whole life they don't know about, moving around, making decisions without the benefit of their opinion, except that I feel so alone and unsure of myself, like I'm winging every decision, every move, faking like I know what I'm doing all the time rather than being sure," writes Rebecca.

When Rebecca is in the 12th grade, she legally changes her name to Walker, a name that "links me tangibly and forever with blackness." When her father, "oblivious to my reality," suggests her choice has something to do with her own anti-Semitism, she feels betrayed. "Why should I carry the name of the man who beat my grandmother and has refused to this day to see me or any other of his son's children," she writes.

To judge from Rebecca's account, Alice Walker and Mel Levanthal stumbled into an irony of their own making. Once so certain that understanding across racial lines was possible, as parents they seem to have often wound up failing to practice what they preached; because they, like much of America, failed to realize that their daughter's unique racial experiences effectively placed her in a "race" to which neither of them belonged.

Still Rebecca not only survives, she thrives. Her memoir doesn't speak much of her present life -- we learn only in passing that she works as a political activist in the San Fransisco Bay area and that she's gay -- but she makes it clear that she has found her own way at last. When her female companion, who is black, asks her if she considers black people her people, she answers with confidence. How can she feel fully identified with any one group of people when she has other people, too, who are not included in that grouping?

Black, White and Jewish should make Rebecca's parents squirm, but it is hardly a Mommy and Daddy Dearest. Mel and Alice are no different than legions of other baby boomer parents who have mixed a high degree of self-absorption with an even higher degree of creative idealism. Even when parents fall short of their own ideals, they can still manage to pass something of value on to their children. Despite all their parental bumblings, Alice and Mel gave their daughter the tools she needed to work her way out of all this confusion, not the least important of which was love.

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