Tony dreams of becoming an important figure in Republican politics in Muncie. Grandmother Sallie greatly dislikes the local Republicans, whom the Ku Klux Klan infiltrated in the 1920s. One of the most prominent figures in Muncie politics is a well-known Klan leader.

Tony writes a successful brochure for the Republican party in Delaware County, and the boys ride around the county with him as he dispenses the brochures. Tony instills in Williams the idea that if he builds his reputation within the Republican party, he’ll attain a position of prominence and somehow exact revenge on all the people who have treated him unjustly. He says, “You have to kiss asses a long time before you can kick them” (107). This is an appealing notion to Williams, who longs to pay back people who have humiliated him.

Tony and the boys perform intensive labor for a Republican officeholder, Judge Carson, who keeps them working at his house until lunch on Saturday. When the time comes to eat, the two boys and Tony are ushered into a small room, where the judge’s disdainful wife gives them a partially full bowl of stew and one piece of white bread—and doesn’t respond when they thank her. As a patronage thank-you for his hard work, Tony gets a job as a City Hall janitor, for which he receives $50 a week. This disappoints Williams, who is bitter, though Tony isn’t. Tony sees it as a steppingstone to an imagined higher appointment. During a six-month period of sobriety, Tony works to ingratiate himself to Muncie political figures.

One evening when Tony and Williams are walking home, a police officer with whom Tony went to school stops them and accuses him of being involved in a burglary. Although Tony insists that he wasn’t, the officer roughs him up and arrests him. He’s thrown into jail, where he stays for seven days without any charge. Tony’s patronage acquaintances do nothing to get him out of jail early. When he’s released, he leaves Muncie for Louisville, Kentucky to stay with his Aunt Roxie.

After their father leaves for Louisville, the Williams boys begin to miss their parents and especially long for their mother. On one occasion, they see a woman they think is their mother on the street in Muncie and try to chase down the car she’s in but never draw close enough to see if it’s her. Grandmother Cook, their maternal grandmother, shows up in front of Dora’s house one day in her car. The boys sit in the car to talk to her. She refuses to reveal much about their mother. Apparently, she knows what’s happening in their mother’s life but won’t tell the boys about her or how to get in touch with her. She then calls the boys a racist slur and tells them to get out of her car. Dora consoles them, saying that God must have a purpose for them in all they’ve endured.

Only one person in the Cook family, their mother’s family, reaches out to Williams: his aunt. She and her husband and their two children live only a few blocks away in an efficiency apartment. She tells Williams stories about his origins that he has never heard. His mother was the brightest and most accomplished in the family, and her mother pushed her to attain high achievements, largely because she was trying to compete with other members of her own family. However, her family rejected her and cleaned out her room when she became pregnant and married a Black man. Over time, Williams’s Grandfather Cook sought out Williams, Mike, and Mary. When he saw them, he demanded of his wife that they be allowed to visit. Thus, William saw his Grandmother Cook for the first time when he was six years old. His aunt informs him that the reason his grandfather hasn’t come to find him and Mike is that he’s dying of cancer.

Williams reads the newspaper to his grandmother Sallie, who is illiterate. When he reads her the story about Emmett Till’s murder, Sallie explains to him that this was what always made her nervous when Tony lived in Virginia. She says that it doesn’t matter how much money he has or what he does: His being Black could cause him to come to harm. She warns Williams not to get involved with white women, saying that it would be his “ruination” just as it was his father’s.

In the summer of 1955, the Williams boys talk Dora into taking them via bus to Louisville to see his dad and his Great Aunt Roxie. They enjoy two weeks doing things they can’t do in Muncie. However, the trip back to Indiana is marred when, during a heavy rainstorm, they inadvertently end up in the waiting room that only allows white people at the bus station. Tony almost gets into a fight with an attendant who tells them they must walk through the downpour to the Black waiting room. They end up standing outside, scarcely shielded from the deluge. The bus door opens, and Mike rushes onto the bus to sit behind the driver. Dora and Williams remind him that they must sit at the back.

Williams has difficulty finding inclusion at the rundown YMCA in Muncie for African Americans. Muncie has a well-kept YMCA that has many resources and only caters to white people. The basketball court at the YMCA for Black people is on dirt rather than a hard surface. Usually, Williams waits until no one else is on the court before he checks out a basketball. Otherwise, he must explain to the other kids that he’s really Black. He fights with another boy who accuses him of being white. They get into two separate fights and finally are warned that they won’t be welcome at the Y if they can’t control their tempers. Walking home that day, Williams sees a Black man in the neighborhood named Speck, who has a skin disorder that causes his skin to lose pigment such that he’s as white as Williams. Although he wants to ask Speck about his experiences and whether people persecute him for being white, Williams doesn’t have the courage.

Williams meets the Settles family. Brian Settles, a boy his age, becomes a lifelong friend. Brian’s mother, Mrs. Settles, was a student alongside Tony when he attended Ball State University. She graduated, while Tony dropped out. Mrs. Settles became a school librarian. She invites Williams to eat with them and tells him that she can bring books home for him to read if he wishes. Although she has a master’s degree from Ball State, she has been unable to break the racial barriers in Muncie’s public schools. The school system has only a few Black teachers. Because she can’t get employment in Muncie’s public schools, she’s “relegated to cleaning houses” (122) close to where she took her college courses.

Williams becomes a regular at the Settles household, where Mrs. Settles “constantly reinforced the importance of an education to me and other boys from the projects who gathered on her porch in the evenings” (122), sharing goals and dreams. Mrs. Settles never discourages the boys from trying to follow their dreams and often brings books from the library to those who want to learn more. Brian informs Williams that he’s an adopted child. Like Williams, his birth mother is white and his father is Black. The Settles adopted him from an orphanage in Lincoln, Nebraska. This is heartening to Williams, who realizes that he’s not alone in being a biracial person and struggling with what it means for him.

Williams is the teacher’s pet of Miss Newman, his sixth-grade teacher at Garfield school. She strongly implies that he’ll receive the “Academic Achievement Prize” (125), which goes to the most outstanding sixth-grade student. She tells him that he should bring his father, who has just returned to Muncie and has a new job. His family collaborates to get Williams a new suit and to let everyone know he’s going to receive this award. His father shows up, and others in the audience are there specifically waiting for the school to bestow this award on Williams. When the award instead goes to a white student, he’s momentarily stunned but quickly understands that it had to be given to a white student. He immediately recognizes that he’s now officially Black.

During what Williams calls “the summer of the ‘cure’” (129), Tony confides to his sons that he’s committing himself to the state for a sobriety cure. His drinking has advanced to the point that he has DTs and blackouts. All his previous attempts at sobriety failed. Williams and Mike accompany Tony to the courthouse, where he becomes a ward of the state. A deputy leads him out, and he’s sent to a treatment center. A month later, the boys receive a five-page letter in which Tony describes what he’s going through and promises that when he gets out of treatment, they’ll move to California and start their lives anew.

During his father’s time in rehab, Williams gravitates to Muncie’s Madison Street playground, a favorite place for many outstanding Black athletes in that area. On one occasion he joins a basketball game. He’s successfully guarding a new player named Earl, a Golden Gloves boxer. When Williams shows him up three times in a row, the boxer hits him repeatedly, knocking him down. Williams walks away and goes home to get a butcher knife. However, Dora refuses to allow him to take it back to the playground. She tells him that he must go back and “just do the best you can” (133) in a fight against Earl. When he returns and Earl confronts him, a massive football player named Big John forestalls the fight, telling Earl—who lost his career to drug addiction—that he must leave Williams alone. A few years later, Williams learns that Big John was killed in Detroit, and he mourns the man who helped him.

Tony does so well in his alcohol recovery that he gets a job, and the state moves him to the Nash Rehabilitation Center, about 15 miles from Muncie, where he lives in a trailer. Williams and Mike take a bus to a point about four miles from the hospital, walking the rest of the way. That evening they stay in Tony’s trailer, where he teaches Mike how to run the shell game: hiding the pea between his fingers as he moves the shells from one place to another. Once Mike goes to sleep, Tony has a conversation with Williams in which he tells him that he must give his absolute best and take the hardest courses he can because he needs to be not just any run-of-the-mill attorney but someone special. Williams is surprised to hear that his father is fully aware of how hard life has been on the boys since they moved to Muncie. It’s a level of emotional intimacy he hasn’t had with his father before. Tony gives Williams a New Testament from the Gideons, which he’s inscribed to him and in which he apologizes for the difficulties Williams has experienced throughout his childhood.

On one occasion, a relative named James shows up to take the two boys and Sallie to see Tony at the center. Before going to the farm, James and Sallie begin to drink. Driving while inebriated, James crashes the car, injuring everyone in the vehicle. Sallie has several broken bones and spends six weeks in the hospital, while Williams has facial scars. The state trooper puts Mike and Williams in the back of his car as an ambulance takes Sallie to the hospital. The officer refuses to believe that the boys are related to Sallie and James. He warns them that he’ll lock them up until they explain who they really are. Williams tells him to contact Tony and verify that they’re boys of color. Tony shows up and claims them.

Later, the boys realize that although Tony is still in rehab on the farm, he has resumed drinking. While driving Sallie home from the hospital, he stops to buy a bottle of wine that the two of them share. He begins to take the boys with him on weekend drives. On the return trips, he stops at bordellos and makes Mike and Williams wait in the car while he goes inside. Although Tony says he’s drinking only on the weekends and is a model of sobriety during the week, Williams realizes that he won’t last long at Nash. The situation comes to a head when, one Saturday evening, Tony, with a car full of fellow rehab patients, pulls up in front of Dora’s house, honks the horn, and asks Williams to go with them to a bordello.