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

Tony enrolls Williams and his brother Mike in an integrated Muncie elementary school and identifies them as white. When they first start school, most of the kids don’t think that they’re African American. Coming home from school one day by himself, Williams learns that his brother fell off a fire escape at school and had to get stitches in his head. When the teacher delivers him home and discovers that they’re living with Aunt Bess, she realizes that they’re Black.

Mike gets in a fight with a Black boy on the playground. Other Black kids join in to attack Mike. Aunt Bess makes Williams rescue his brother. In doing so, Williams fiercely releases a lot of rage and pummels the Black child. When the small crowd of Black boys threatens to turn on Williams, Aunt Bess shows up with a buggy whip. The boys say that these two white boys are trying to kill one of their friends. Bess informs them that Williams and Mike are Black.

A few days later, a boy named Jimmy shows up at Aunt Bess’s house. Their half-brother, the son of their father, he looks more like Tony than either of the boys. Jimmy is in the Muncie Central High School Bearcats band and invites them to come along for a pep rally.

Aunt Bess and Osco have a conversation that Williams overhears. The two adults say that they can’t take care of the boys and are either going to let Grandma Sallie have them or turn them over to an orphanage. A week later, they summon Grandma Sallie and after some debate Sallie agrees to take them. For months, Tony has been missing, and no one knows where he is.

The three-room shack where the boys’ grandmother lives is dismal. The boys share a cot, each sleeping at one end. Like their father, their grandmother is a person with alcoholism. When she’s gone to work, they have nothing to do, so they look at their father’s memorabilia. Grandma Sallie is angry and bitter. She complains about everything the boys do and refuses to show them any tenderness. To keep the shack warm, she steals coal from a local plant. She tries to force the boys to climb under the fence surrounding the plant to steal extra coal.

At 4am on Good Friday 1954, Tony shows up to see the boys. Grandma Sallie is sleeping with her boyfriend, Joe. The brothers go out into the chilly morning air and sit on the curb as their father explains where he’s been. He blames them for not being with Aunt Bess. He tells them he went to Washington, DC and saw their mother, who is living with a Black man. When the boys ask if she’s coming to see them, Tony says he told her that the boys are in Muncie “learning how to be n*****s” (58).

Tony is physically a broken man, beaten down, with sores on his head that cause him to lose his hair. He periodically goes to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and sobers up. When he does, he tries to take Sallie with him. This results in brief periods of sobriety followed by extreme tension, arguments, and fights. Next, inevitably, are relapses as they start drinking again.

People come to the house most evenings to gamble and drink while Williams sits beside the pot-bellied stove and tries to do his homework. They regale themselves with stories. Williams pieces together that indeed the wild stories his father tells about his childhood are true. When Sallie worked as a house cleaner for a white family in Bowling Green, Kentucky, her young employer impregnated her. She immediately lost her job, and the Bowling Green community shunned her when she had a baby that was white in appearance. Both Black and white people asked her to leave Kentucky, though she remained there until one of her brothers was brutally murdered.

Tony attended Howard University and did well. His goal was to become an attorney. Those who gather in the house love to hear stories about times when he outsmarted white people. He passed for white in many circumstances, such as when attending a lynching in the north in August 1930. Referring to his failure to become an attorney, Tony loudly proclaims that his eldest son (Williams) will become the attorney that Tony never did. Everyone in his family and almost all the adults who know him share this opinion, though Williams is never sure why.

On one occasion, as the boys walk with their father along a railroad track, Tony tries to convince them that they’ll be better off living in an orphanage. Eventually, Tony relents and says they won’t be sent to the orphanage. He tells them that if they could only get out of Muncie, they’d stop being Black and could live normal lives. Based on this experience, the 10-year-old Williams decides “to dream” rather than to despair.

Miss Dora, a woman active in the church community, asks Williams to spend the night at her house. This experience is eye-opening for him because the house has indoor plumbing, running water, and adequate food. She treats him well and gives him a wonderful meal. Dora explains that she met Williams’s mother years before, when Tony used to hang out with Dora’s husband, who was a small-time hustler. Everyone felt that Tony, or “Buster,” married beneath himself when he wed Williams’s mother. Dora explains to Williams that his white grandparents know where he is but simply don’t come to see him.

Before he goes back to sleep, he hears Dora in the other room on her knees praying for guidance. She has been trying to decide which of the two boys she’d take to live with her to save them from Sallie’s house. She decides that she can’t separate the two and will bring both to live with her, with Tony’s permission. When she asks Tony about taking the boys, Tony asks if he can move in as well. She refuses, citing his lifestyle. The two apparently had a relationship before Tony married. Dora says that she’s a church woman now and has no interest in the life Tony lives. She refuses to let him enter her house. Tony commits to helping with expenses for the boys.

In the summer of 1954, the brothers move into Miss Dora’s house. They live in the attic, which has two small rooms. She works on their manners, teaching them what she expects them to do, and tells them to behave like gentlemen. When Dora’s employer, for whom she’s a housekeeper, refers to the boys as “pickaninnies,” she tells him that he’s not to refer to them that way anymore. This is one of the first times Williams has ever seen a Black person confront a white person about behavior.

Tony gets a job at a car wash and receives a weekly paycheck. Each week, Williams tries to intercept his father before Tony gambles away all the money in dice games that he invariably loses. The boys get into the gambling room with him on one occasion and tell him that Dora is waiting for money from him to help buy groceries. However, because he’s ahead in the dice game at that moment, the other men won’t let him leave.

Having nothing more than the $25 a week she earns as a housekeeper, Dora asks for government help and endures a humiliating experience to get a welfare check for $5.50. The one check is all she ever gets. Dora tells the boys that God will help them get through.

Dora attends church four or more times a week. She insists that the boys go to Sunday school and says that if they’re late, she’ll make them sit with her in church all day. To get offering money for church, Williams and his brother go to Sallie’s house, where their dad is sleeping off a Saturday-night drunk, and rummage through his pants for loose change. Other times, they beg people on the street to get change for the offering plate.

On one occasion, Williams feels as though the pastor is directing the sermon toward him, warning him that he must accept Jesus or he’ll be eternally consigned to Hell. He tries to avoid the preacher’s gaze and suddenly realizes that some powerful force has hold of his shoulder. It’s his Sunday school teacher, Brother Anderson, who encourages him to go down to the altar. Dora wants him to go down and make his confession as well. Williams manages to hold out and avoid going forward until the adults move their focus to others who need to be saved. Williams approaches the pastor after a monthly meal and says that he’d like to join the church but must first ask if he can be a lawyer and still go to Heaven. The pastor responds that this isn’t possible, and Williams realizes that he must make a decision: Either he’s going to Heaven, or he’s going to be a lawyer.