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

Williams’s real love is basketball. He’s excited to try out for the Muncie Central basketball team and, fortunately, is one of the 12 players picked for the team. Williams knows that he’s not one of the stars. He mainly hopes to get some playing time. Eventually, he moves up to be the number six man on the basketball team, the one who will go in whenever Brian Settles isn’t playing. In a basketball game they’re winning, a fan throws a cup onto the stadium floor. Brian slips on it, tearing a ligament. He’s out for the season. Williams hopes to move up to take Brian’s place on the varsity team. Instead, the coach brings up a B team player who’s taller and demotes Williams to the B team. This effectively ends Williams’s basketball season. When he receives a participation certificate at the end of the season, he drops it in the trash on the way home.

One evening after fishing with three of his athlete friends in the White River outside Muncie, they’re walking home past a drive-in where many white students have gathered. The students taunt and then follow them. A large crowd of the kids eventually surrounds them, and the athletes turn to face them. When some boys in the crowd begin to throw things and two brandish baseball bats, Williams and the others run away from the crowd, easily outdistancing them. They’re amazed that many in the crowd are students who cheered for them when they defeated rival schools in football and basketball. Brian says, “Don’t matter what you achieve or how big you get you, will always be a n***** in Muncie” (226). In his senior year, Williams doesn’t make the basketball team. This devastates him. He was afraid of failure leading up to it and now fears that his athletic life is over.

Tony gets a steady job as the custodian in a restaurant, working from 11pm to 7 am. Even though he’s drinking again, he manages to hold onto the job because no one sees him drunk. He calls his sons at Dora’s house and tells them to come down about 3am and do his job while he sleeps. The boys clean and make themselves food, finishing up just in time for the day shift to come in at 7am. When Tony loses his entire paycheck gambling, Williams refuses to work for him again. Consequently, Tony says that he’ll teach him a lesson. By the time Tony shows up at Dora’s, most of the day has passed, and Tony is drunk. Williams guesses that his father probably came to find him after being thrown out of Bob’s Tavern. He comes into the bathroom where William is sitting on the toilet, taunts him, and threatens him. When Williams doesn’t respond to him as he wants, Tony hits him twice in the head. As he starts to throw a third punch, William blocks it and hits his father hard in the chest, knocking Tony backwards into the bathtub. Tony gets up, telling him that he’s going to get a gun and kill him, and leaves. The two never discuss the incident, which occurs on Williams’s 18th birthday.

Williams joins a YMCA team that travels and has a lot of fun playing good Black teams from other communities. Brian’s abilities are improving, and his team is doing exceptionally well. Meanwhile, the Bearcats are on the way to becoming one of the top four teams in the state. Unexpectedly, Brian arrives at Miss Dora’s house early one morning and tells Williams that he and three other players have been kicked off the basketball team after a hazing incident in which the team’s sophomores were sexually harassed. Brian’s shot at a basketball scholarship is gone. The scandal appears in the newspapers and stirs many racial comments given that the boys dismissed from the team are all Black.

In Williams’s senior year, Tony buys him a car. He puts the title in Williams’s name, though Tony keeps and drives it. Williams learns that Tony is going to drive his car to Indianapolis with his friend Buck. As they talk about the trip, Williams realizes that they’re going to drive drunk to Indianapolis the next day. He decides to drive them himself so that they can travel safely. His brother Mike comes along and begs to drive the car, which Tony insists is acceptable. The two older men drink Thunderbird wine and soon are inebriated. Buck tells Mike to pull over, walks into the farmyard of a white family, urinates, and parades about with his privates exposed. A woman who lives on the farm observes this and calls the police. A few miles down the road, a state trooper pulls them over. Because Mike has forgotten his driver’s license, Williams secretly hands his license to Mike. The trooper quickly deduces that Mike isn’t Gregory H. Williams. Determining that the license belongs to Williams, the officer takes him back to his squad car. After a lengthy candid discussion, the two strike a deal that Tony and Buck won’t be arrested and Mike won’t be given a ticket if, instead, Williams accepts a ticket for letting someone else use his license. He must return to the community where this happened in three weeks to deal with the ticket. This arrangement is contingent on Williams returning immediately to Muncie with his passengers.

On the evening of the trial, Williams and Mike must ride the bus because the car has broken down. Tony is drunk, lying on his mother’s couch and watching TV. He refuses to go. The boys make their way to the courthouse and wait through a long parade of other people being sentenced to jail and paying large fines. Williams knows that he can’t afford to pay a sizeable fine. The brothers see a friend who is paying a ticket before returning to Muncie. They ask him if they can ride back with him that evening if Williams doesn’t go to jail. He agrees to wait for them. When Williams’s case is called, the judge asks where his parents are. The judge explodes in anger on learning that Tony refused to come. The state trooper explains that Tony was drunk in the backseat and is probably a person with alcoholism. He adds that Williams has been taking care of him. The judge retires the case, gives a Williams a stern warning, and allows him to leave without a fine or conviction.

As they ride back to Muncie, they pass a large state prison. Williams sees in that moment that he holds his future in his hands and that only he can determine the outcome of his life. He realizes that he was foolish to ever trust his father, who talks a good act but almost never follows through: “My dependence on Dad was an illusion. He often had good advice, but when it got right down to it, I couldn’t count on him. His irresponsibility had given me a great gift. It made me realize that I could survive a crisis without him” (243). 

Later in the week that they face the traffic charge, Mike disappears for two days. When Williams asks Dora about it, he learns that Mike left a cryptic note on the kitchen table saying that he’s going to Detroit. Williams discovers that the trip to Detroit is to accompany a drug dealer who is bringing back heroin to sell in Muncie.

When he confronts his brother about the danger and foolishness of this, he learns that the underlying reason Mike wants to go to Detroit is that he’s in love with a woman, Bernice, who lives there. Mike explains that she’s a booster, which is a professional shoplifter. In a series of startling revelations, Williams learns that Bernice has already traveled to Muncie, that she’s 40 years old, and that she has been to bed with Mike and Tony simultaneously. Tony promised to pay Mike $10 to have sex with her, afterward paying only $5.

By haranguing Mike, Williams convinces his brother to go back to school and apply himself. However, Williams soon learns that Mike is having an affair with a student teacher, a white woman. The teacher eventually calls Williams and asks him to tell Mike on her behalf that their affair is over. She says that she went to bed with him only because she felt sorry for him.

Mike drops out of school to join the Navy. Williams gives this little thought, knowing that Mike is an underage youth, so Tony must sign for him before he can enlist. To Williams’s surprise, Tony signs to allow his son to join. Mike soon comes home from boot camp, however, saying that he quit the Navy. Williams discovers that he threatened to kill himself and was given a 1Y discharge.

Soon thereafter, Mike goes to Detroit and marries Bernice but is back within a few weeks. Bernice stabbed him, and he and lost a pint and a half of blood. Mike decides to go to Chicago and live in a housing project that Williams later discovers is a notorious setting for violence and crime. Williams closes the chapter confessing feelings of guilt that he continues to experience for the troubled course of his brother’s life. While Williams’s life progressed positively, Mike’s continued to deteriorate. The boys mirrored the prophecy Tony expressed repeatedly, saying that Williams was bound for glory, while Mike could expect nothing but misery. 

At Williams’s request, Tony helps him sign up for an advanced math class. His father shows up at the assistant principal’s office after Williams took him out of a saloon the previous night, walked him home to sleep it off, and then walked him to the high school the next morning.

Williams meets a beautiful young girl he first saw when she was in junior high school, a year behind him. She was an eighth-grade cheerleader, and her name is Sara Whitney. She shows little interest in him at first. However, her girlfriend is interested in his friend Brian, so she joins in a conspiracy to get Brian and her girlfriend together. As a result, Williams enlists her girlfriend’s aid to get Sara to talk to Williams. At last, growing more interested, even though she knows that their relationship can’t be public knowledge, she begins to spend a lot of time with Williams. It’s the most open relationship he has ever experienced. He’s surprised at what he can confide in her.

Sara asks to meet Tony. Although Williams is unenthusiastic, he enables the meeting. On a Saturday morning, Sara gives Tony and Mike a ride from the cafe where Tony is the janitor. She drops them at Sallie’s house. When they stop, Mike sees Tony give Sara a big kiss. Mike tells this to Williams, who is devastated and feels betrayed. When he confronts her about it, she explains that both Mike and Tony steamrolled her with flattery and that Tony unexpectedly gave her a mature, sexy, and inappropriate kiss. He realizes that Sara was innocent in the encounter.

When Williams graduates from Central High School, his father gives him a pocket secretary with his name inscribed on it. In addition, he receives a gift from his mother’s youngest sister, who cares enough to search him out. He expresses deep gratitude to Miss Dora, who is physically unable to walk to the school to attend his graduation.

Once Williams graduates from high school, he realizes that he has done nothing to prepare for or apply to college. No one at Central High has helped him get ready for college. He has no money to pay tuition, which is the first issue. He can scrape together a little money by continually finding part-time jobs. Williams gets a job with the Ball State University athletic department making $1.50 an hour and earns enough money to start the semester. He thoroughly enjoys his classes and learns a lot. His understanding of higher education and the world is revelatory.

Sara graduates from high school a semester early and at the beginning of the spring semester starts attending Ball State, as she wants to be with Williams. Her parents suspect that she’s dating a Black student, but she’s evasive and keeps them from learning his identity. Her parents move to Ocala, Florida, and she moves in with her grandmother. An acquaintance recognizes Williams and tells her grandmother that Sara’s dating a Black student. She comes home from studying to find all her clothes in the driveway and her grandmother, a person with alcoholism, screaming at her that she never wants to see her again because she has disgraced the family. In March 1963, Sara breaks off the relationship.

Devastated at losing the girl he loves, Williams turns his attention from the relationship to figuring out how he can earn enough money to stay in school. He applies for a job with the new Republican sheriff. It would make Williams the only Black deputy in Muncie. However, a local Black pastor opposes his quest for the job. The minister apparently thinks that Williams’s face is too pale for anyone to believe that he’s Black. The sheriff stubbornly decides to hire Williams anyway, and Williams becomes the youngest deputy sheriff in Indiana at age 19. Williams’s first assignment is as the turnkey jailer. In addition to having to lock up some acquaintances of his, he deals with two police officers who bring in a drunken Black man whom they’ve obviously roughed up. One officer wants to continue to abuse the prisoner, and Williams informs him that once the prisoner is in the jail, he’s the responsibility of Williams and not the officer. When Williams won’t leave, the officer pushes the man toward Williams and leaves the jail. Because of the deputy sheriff job, Williams can continue with his education at Ball State.

That fall, he gets a phone call from his Uncle Walter, who tells him that his mother has come to town and wants to see him and Mike. Williams wrestles with whether he wants to see his mother after 10 years of absence. He talks it over with Mike, who finally convinces him that it’s the right thing to do. They go to their Grandmother Cook’s house, and a small woman they don’t recognize answers the door. She’s their mother. As they embrace, she informs them that she has been to see them every year. She’d sit in the car across from Miss Dora’s house and watch the boys as they walked to school. She says that it was difficult not to let them know she was there, but she and her white husband, Bob, were afraid to be seen. In addition, she tells them that she sent money and other items for them to her mother, Grandmother Cook, who apparently didn’t give these things to the boys. Williams is stunned and outraged when she informs them that she has always been their legal guardian and that her husband is now ready to adopt them. They plan to build a summer home in Virginia, and she wants Mike and Williams to reunite with the rest of the family. While Mike is willing to accept this and is eager to move back into his mother’s life, Williams decides that he wants no part of it. As he leaves his grandmother’s house, he says, “I felt farther from away from my mother than I had at any time in my life” (282).

He remains a deputy sheriff for three years, which allows him to finish his full-time classes at Ball State. He moves to Washington, DC; becomes a lawyer and then a high school history teacher; and gets a master’s degree, a law degree, and a doctorate. The journey is brutal, and the future at times looks bleak. When he’s thinking about giving up, however, he receives a letter from Miss Dora, which she signs, “love always your truly mother Dora Smith” (282).

Williams and Sara Whitney reunite in 1969 and marry. In 1992, they adopt two boys she met on a mission trip to Honduras. This helps him understand how much Miss Dora put up with while raising him and his brother. Dora passes away in 1975. Both his grandmothers die in 1970. His half-brother Jimmy dies of cancer in 1992. His father, who is sober at the time, dies at age 61. A great many citizens of Muncie turn out to celebrate his life. His brother Mike is blinded in a shooting incident in an Indianapolis bar in 1974 and is still working to rebuild his life.

Williams sometimes thinks about his childhood in Muncie and wonders why he had to endure so much to get to the point where he is now. He recognizes that in some sense he’s called to walk the color line between races to do the best that he can to be a bridge, “shouldering the heavy burden that almost destroyed my youth” (284). He ends by recalling how his father promised him, “‘[S]on, one day this will all pale into insignificance’” (285), but writes, “He was wrong. Muncie has never paled into insignificance. It has lived inside me forever” (285).