Magdalena is recovering from polio and her mother's death while living in her grandparents' meager flat in Little Italy, San Francisco. Mother would have said... a "Black Angel" had come to save them when the family move into an elegant home in a wealthy suburb of Los Angeles. Her father has bitterly accepted an offer from a crime Family to pay his medical bills. Magdalena's teenage years are spent trying to please her morose father and protect her reckless sister. An olive-skinned beauty, Magdalena is bright, studious and forgives her father's favoritism towards her fair-haired sister, who resembles "Mama." What she cannot empathize with is her father's self-hatred for rescuing their family from debt. How she deals with her father's bitterness, her sister's recklessness and the crime Family becomes Magdalena's "Black Angel."