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

Tony Williams, the author’s father, figures prominently in every chapter of the memoir. Williams simultaneously reveres his father and is disgusted by him. Tony is a promoter, con artist, and thief who uses his pale skin tone to portray himself as an “Italian American” rather than a biracial African American. The memoir records the complex, developing relationship between Williams and his father over the first 19 years of the author’s life, portraying Tony as a dangerous person with alcoholism who achieves occasional periods of sobriety only to fall back into out-of-control drinking binges. A demanding individual, he never stops bullying his sons and threatens them with abandonment, beatings, and even murder. When sober, however, he’s capable of deep insights and sound advice. In pivotal moments when Williams needs his father’s support, it’s never clear whether Tony will provide nurture and care—which he occasionally does—or callous indifference. Williams eventually recognizes that if he needs his father’s help, he must first sober Tony up.

The Black community of Muncie remembers Tony, whom they call Buster (a name he acquired while a Golden Gloves boxer), as a youth full of promise. He’s the first from the community to attend Howard University with the intent of becoming a lawyer and then a politician. His career is derailed, supposedly, when he gets a girl pregnant and spends a year hiding out from her family. Most consider his alcohol use and criminal behavior the result of the unplanned pregnancy. Tony clearly views Williams as his vindication. He continually boasts that Williams will fulfill all the promise he didn’t.

It’s intriguing that Tony is one of the three people to whom Williams dedicates the book. Obviously, Williams loved his father and admired him throughout his life, though he didn’t in any way emulate him. Given the horrendous example that Tony set and the humiliation Williams received at his father’s hands, one might question why Williams so revered his father and named him in the book’s dedication. However, though almost every promise Tony made was false and almost every prediction he made was incorrect, his predictions about his sons were accurate. As Tony foretold, Williams rose to greatness.

Mike Williams is the author’s younger brother by one year. He’s a tremendously sympathetic figure in that he endures even greater humiliation and pain than Williams. For instance, after Williams refuses to ride in his father’s septic tank pumping truck because Tony consistently drives while drunk, Mike rides with him and is thrown out of the cab on a sharp turn, breaking his collarbone. This is typical of Mike’s childhood experiences. The absence of his mother affects Mike profoundly, and he’s wracked with fear that his father will desert them too. While Williams at age 10 recognizes that his father’s presence is both a blessing and a curse, Mike expresses only adoration for his dad and is unwilling to disappoint or disobey him in any way—despite the reality that his father roundly condemns Mike’s intelligence and proclaims that he’ll amount to nothing.

Like his brother, Mike adapts to the harsh new realities of their life in Muncie. However, Mike adopts more of a street swagger and emulates the casual insolence of Black teenagers he admires. He’s a much greater risk taker than his brother. Mike lacks lifetime goals or career plans. Due to his dyslexia, he stumbles through school, eventually dropping out in favor of high-risk relationships with prostitutes, drug runners, and con artists. Williams expresses an almost fatherly desire to correct and protect his brother, with scattered success. After Mike is blinded when shot in an Indianapolis bar, he makes some educational and emotional gains.

Devoutly religious, Miss Dora is the widow of a grifter and a former friend of Tony. She appears in the Williams brothers’ lives when they’ve been in Muncie for less than a year. She takes them into her home and raises them as her sons while working as a housekeeper for $25 a week. Short and stout, Dora instills manners and expectations in the boys. When the brothers face challenges and difficulties, Dora explains that God has a purpose for them in all they’re experiencing.

Dora has a fiery spirit and unyielding pride. Without hesitation she confronts her boss and the boys’ father when they degrade or criticize the brothers. Although she yearns for Williams to join her church, she doesn’t force him. She seems to have an uncanny awareness of when to demand the boys’ obedience and when to allow them latitude. As he grows older, Williams returns Dora’s devotion and expresses a deep awareness of the sacrifices she has made on their behalf. Mike, however, isn’t as receptive to her hospitality, sometimes sneaking away for days at a time. Nevertheless, Dora finds ways to bring Mike back into the fold.

Williams has only cloudy memories of Mary, his birth mother. He apparently never gets past the realization that she abandons him and his brother, taking their two younger siblings, while Williams and Mike are on a summer visit with her parents. She comes back into their lives after 10 years and informs them that she had legal custody of them throughout their childhood and that she occasionally came to Muncie and observed them from a distance. This reappearance of their mother after so many years only exacerbates Williams’s perception of abandonment.

Torn about the leaving her children, Mary sought repeatedly to end her relationship with Tony, who abused and degraded her during his rages related to alcohol use. In addition, she was aware of Tony’s consistent womanizing, including his habit of carrying on multiple affairs with the tavern’s female workers. She tried to remove her children from exposure to their father’s lifestyle. Her struggle with decisions about her circumstances and her children is evident in that she left Tony and returned on multiple occasions.

Mary’s younger sister confides to Williams that his mother was the rising star of the family but was abruptly excluded from it when she fell in love with a Black man, married him, and became pregnant with his child. Only because of Grandfather Cook’s intervention are Mary and the children welcome in their Muncie home. The hospitality ends, however, when Mary divorces Tony.