Life on the Color Line: The True Story of a White Boy Who Discovered He Was Black

Williams attends Wilson Junior High School, an integrated school in Muncie that has three different groups of students: Black students, middle-class white students, and impoverished white students. The middle-class students avoid the other two groups, while the kids from Shed Town, the white poverty-stricken area, declare virtual war on the Black kids. The tension is palpable. An unexpected police presence helps them avoid a gang fight on the first day of school.

Williams’s role as the starting quarterback of the football team is under threat when the coach discovers that he’s biracial. His friend Brian Settles encourages him to never let one of the white Shed Town boys take away his achievements. Williams becomes a great student of the game, anticipating everything the other players do. He accepts physical punishment to maintain his role. His successful effort to keep the role of first-string quarterback helps stir an attitude in him. Something begins to grow inside him that he has kept with him throughout his life: an unwillingness to give up or quit. However, he confesses that he’s unsure whether it’s a blessing or curse.

Williams discovers another huge area of disconnect when his friend Brian encourages him to find a date and come to a party. He summons his courage and starts asking girls. A girl named Mayme accepts. He gets new clothes and walks her slowly down the street to the party. Along the way, he notices that they’re attracting a lot of attention from passersby and gawkers. People begin to shout names at him because they assume that he’s a white boy walking with a Black girl. Even when they get to the party, they can scarcely enjoy themselves because people perceive that he’s a white man courting a Black girl. Afterward, sitting by himself at the Madison playground, Williams thinks that he won’t be able to date at all. White people don’t want to see him with Black girls, and Black people don’t want to see him with white girls.

That fall, Tony announces a plan for the boys to buy their own Christmas presents. He has returned from a trip to Indianapolis with a batch of Christmas cards. He tells the boys that they must go house to house in the lower middle-class white section. They are to split their sales proceeds with their father. Williams longs for a pair of Hood basketball shoes. After selling all his cards, he goes to the store and buys the shoes instead of splitting the money with his father. His father, furious, threatens to leave Muncie and abandon them. Mike begins to cry, pleading with him not to leave them. Tony forces them to go to church on Saturday night and ask the Lord for forgiveness. The next day, wondering if their father will leave, they go to their Grandmother Sallie’s house and find that he took all the money Mike made, used it to get drunk, and is in a much better mood.

When Williams is in the ninth grade, Brian calls and tells him to come to his house because a young woman there is going to give herself to Brian, to another boy, and then to Williams. Williams is torn because he his father and others have consistently warned him about the dangers of getting a girl pregnant and that it would end his pursuit of college, as happened to his father. Tony apparently got a girl from Whitley pregnant and had to run away and hide for a year. The pregnancy resulted in Williams’s half-brother Jimmy. When Brian calls again to encourage him to come over, Williams doesn’t answer the phone. His brother Mike is much more adventurous. As a challenge, Mike takes a Shed Town girl out of the balcony of a movie theater and later claims he had sex with her in the alley behind the cinema.

The following week, as Williams and Brian walk home from school past a saloon called Bob’s Tavern, they see a drunk being thrown out of the establishment onto the street. As the boys stare at the man, Williams realizes that it’s his father. Tony immediately orders Williams to help him get home. Embarrassed, Williams picks up his father in a fireman’s carry and treks to his grandmother’s house. Along the way, he feels wetness on his shoulder and realizes that his father has urinated, and it’s running down his shirt. For a moment, he thinks about throwing his father off the overpass to the street below but decides against it. He remembers a friend telling him that the only way to survive in Muncie is to find humor in his misfortune, though he finds nothing funny in carrying his drunken father home past his friends. He deposits his father in his grandmother’s front yard.

Williams has another encounter with Hattie, a girl he kissed two years earlier, that ends in the two of them engaging in a sexual comedy of errors, which his Grandmother Sallie interrupts. After this, his father approaches him and warns him again not to have sex with girls because he might cause a pregnancy.

Brian sets Williams up again, this time with a white girl named Janie who has expressed a real interest in him. He manages to make a date with her on the upper floors of the school. As they’re kissing, they hear a teacher approach. Even though they’re not caught kissing, the teacher calls Williams out the next day and tells him how much trouble he’ll get into if he becomes involved with white girls since he’s one of the “colored boys.” He’s sent to the guidance counselor, who lectures him about how bad it’ll be for him to become involved with a white girl. These white adults both tell him that he has a limited future and that the best he can do is be a “credit to his race” (183).

Once again, Tony’s drinking goes out of control. William sees him staggering down the middle of a street, interrupting traffic, wearing two ammunition belts across his blue suit and an army helmet. He announces that he’s going to Cuba to join Castro, whom he perceives as a hero of Black men.

A couple days later, Tony shows up late and drunk at Dora’s house. Against her better judgment, she lets him in. He loudly accuses Williams of seeing his mother, Mary, and not saying anything about it. When Dora yells for Tony to leave, he begins insulting her. She starts up the stairs with a butcher knife. Williams and Mike restrain their father and beg Dora not to cut him. She eventually retreats and orders him out, saying that he’s never to return or speak to her that way again. The boys take him to their Grandmother Sallie’s house. Along the way, Williams realizes that he has forgotten his shoes.

When Williams’s attends his ninth-grade graduation, the other Black boys insist that he follow the custom of having a date, so he asks an African American girl to be his date. When Tony hears about this, he verbally assaults his son. Tony asserts that Williams is only to associate with white girls, whom he sees as a big part of Williams’s ticket out of Muncie. Williams insists that he’s going to date the Black girl because he really likes her and says that they’ll be the last ones in the processional. He isn’t surprised when he gets no support from the adults—teachers and administrators—who are there as he walks into the full auditorium. He sees the glares and stares from people hostile toward him. Williams insists that he’s glad he didn’t get any support because then he would’ve had to care about them. He recognizes his father in the crowd and sees how angry he is. His friend Brian calls out to him, “Way to go big shoulders” (188).

Williams begins his high school career at Muncie’s large and well-known Central High School. He hopes to avoid the racial prejudice that dogged him at Wilson so that he’ll have a better chance at academic excellence. He encounters his white cousin Ben Cook in the cafeteria at lunch. Ben gives him a panicked look and refuses to acknowledge him. One of his neighbors, Mrs. Reese, is working in the cafeteria and gives him extra-large helpings. When William goes to the auditorium to eat his lunch, he realizes that he must immediately choose between sitting with the white students or the Black students on his first day of school. The races don’t mix at all. He realizes that his natural choice is to sit with the Black students. He has a cousin whom he calls Jemima who sits beside him, and he’s immediately relieved that she’s there. Some of the students around him ask themselves what they’d do if they had white skin, as he does. One of the kids asks him why he doesn’t go sit with the white kids since he looks so white. Another, who seems to understand his situation, proclaims that he’s doing what’s best for him and that everybody should support him because he knows where he belongs.

Williams’s favorite teacher is Mrs. Bartlett, the history teacher, who recognizes his ability and willingness to study. He gives his best in her class and excels. He has an IQ test that comes back a few weeks into the semester and is disappointed to learn that his IQ is only “above average.” Mrs. Barrett consoles him, saying that she’d much rather have someone like him, who does so much more with what he has, than someone who’s reportedly gifted with the IQ of a genius.

Ben Cook, his cousin, seeks Williams out to make a connection so that he can impress Mrs. Bartlett, who thinks he’s a total slacker. During their conversation, Williams learns that his mother has been to Muncie several times over the last six years even though he had no idea she was there—and that she has remarried and lives in Washington, DC. He’s devastated that she hasn’t contacted him despite having been in Muncie multiple times.

Mrs. Bartlett gives Williams an assignment to write a paper about World War II. Although he’s interested in the military, he has no idea what to write. Miss Dora suggests that he write about the mistreatment of Black soldiers in World War II. This opens an area of extreme interest. He ends up having the help of Mrs. Settles to search out articles unavailable in public libraries. He learns that his father met Harry Truman before Truman was Vice President. When the paper turns out well, Williams expresses a love of history. He tells his father that he’s thinking of becoming a teacher. His father discourages this idea, saying that he needs to be a lawyer because “[y]ou want to make history, not read about it” (197). His father announces the intention to pursue Williams’s education and never let him settle for less than he can be.

A widower named A.D. Smith courts Miss Dora. His late wife was a dear friend of hers. A portly, courteous man, he has little to say to the boys. Williams realizes that Dora and A.D. are going to get married and wonders what this will mean for Mike and him. He overhears a conversation in which A.D. tries to convince Dora to make the boys leave the house, saying they’re not her responsibility. In response, she sternly tells him that they’re her boys and are there to stay. If he doesn’t agree, she insists, the possibility of marriage is over. A.D. apologizes profusely, and the marriage takes place. Williams recognizes what an incredible sacrifice Miss Dora is making by putting her own life and financial well-being in jeopardy to ensure that the boys have a home.

Williams’s father shows up at a basketball court where Williams is playing a pickup game and orders him to take a basket of welfare food to Dora’s house. When Williams arrives at the house and sees several church people there, he fears something has happened to Miss Dora, who has been unwell. Williams rushes into the house, where he discovers that A.D. has died unexpectedly.