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

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-7

Chapters 8-11

Chapters 12-15

Chapters 16-21

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Chapters 1-3 Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 1 Summary: “The Open House Cafe”

Williams precedes the first chapter with the poem “Cross” by biracial poet Langston Hughes. It captures the perplexity of Hughes’s life, feeling neither fully white nor fully Black. In his acknowledgments, Williams thanks those who helped him develop the book and expresses appreciation to his wife, Sara Whitney Williams. He mentions three people in his dedication: his father, James Anthony “Tony” Williams; the woman who raised him, Dora Smith; and his wife, Sara.

As Chapter 1 begins, Williams is named Gregory Howard, although for reasons unknown everyone calls him “Billy.” At six years old, he spends his days sitting on a stool by the cash register of the Open House Cafe, which his parents run. It’s located on US Highway 1 between Alexandria and Fort Belvoir, Virginia. The clientele is largely soldiers. His father, James A. “Tony” Williams, was a draftee who narrowly avoided a court martial for stealing 500 bedsheets.

From his earliest days, Williams notices that his father’s drinking is a problem. He portrays his mother, of whom he has few memories, as being beautiful, tall, and austere. His father is a gregarious charmer: “While Dad always seemed to enjoy himself, I never saw my mother smile” (4). He hints that his father is a womanizer.

The cafe is a segregated establishment with room for 70 people in the well-maintained front section, which is for white patrons. Black customers receive service in the back section. Although it’s against Virginia law to serve both white and Black patrons under one roof, Tony gets away with it by repeatedly sweet-talking the alcohol commission’s agent. The cafe sits on the line between the white and Black communities. Williams writes, “I guess there has never been a time in my life that I haven’t been right on the color line” (4).

One night, Harvey, a large Black man who cleans the establishment in the evening, chases Williams and his mother, brother, and baby sister down the street with a hatchet. He threatens to kill them, but when he finds them hiding in a stand of bushes, he walks away in the darkness. He’s taken to a mental hospital for six months, is pronounced “cured,” and returns to work at the cafe.

The cafe is popular among those who have been enlisted to serve in the Korean war. As they’re about to depart, Tony throws grand parties for them, ignoring the segregation laws. Williams and his brother sneak into the front room for one such gathering of around 100 men and watch as a female cafe worker performs a “striptease.”

The verbal and physical fights between his parents increase. When Williams is seven, his father is attacked while breaking up an argument and is stabbed in the neck. Harvey hits the attacker with the cafe’s baseball bat, and workers carry Tony into the kitchen, trying to slow his profuse bleeding. Because of the cafe’s address, their concern is that the ambulance might not arrive to take him to the hospital: The African American cook, Percy, voices this concern when he shouts to William’s mother, “Mary, I hope you told them this was a white man stabbed, and they don’t think it’s a n***** cut up down here in Gum Springs” (9).

Chapter 2 Summary: “The Midas Touch”

Tony’s money-making schemes include selling surplus gas masks to children as Christmas presents. In addition, he wins a septic tank servicing truck and begins to pump out septic tanks in some of Fairfax County’s finer neighborhoods. Tony confides to Williams that he removes only half the waste from the tanks so that he’ll have to service them again soon. Tony pours the untreated sewerage into a Potomac River tributary. Once he completes the day’s pumping, Tony takes Williams and his brother Mike, now seven and six years old, on spending sprees.

The family moves from their living area in the tavern to a nice home in Alexandria. Williams has two Schwinn bicycles, though he’s scarcely able to ride them. Tony comes to be called “the man with the Midas touch” (13). Working alone with Tony and other employees to paint the inside of the tavern, Williams hears stories of his father’s dalliances. Tony is cavalier, scarcely attempting to hide his infidelities.

Williams and his brother Mike take a train to visit their maternal grandparents in 1951. His parents don’t trust anyone to manage the cafe in their absence and send the boys alone for the 600-mile trip. Tony makes it clear that Williams is in charge, telling him that if anything goes wrong on the trip, it’ll be his fault. After a scare on the trip, the conductor tells Williams’s grandfather that the boys won’t be allowed to travel back to Virginia on their own.

During the vacation, Williams becomes aware that the adults in his grandparents’ house are keeping something from him. He describes his grandmother as “cold and secretive” (17) but his grandfather as “warm and open” (17).

When the time comes for their trip home, their parents and grandparents refuse to come for them or accompany them, so the boys are given bus tickets. As they transfer buses in Dayton, Ohio, Mike asks a young woman if they can sit with her since they’re traveling to Washington alone “‘cause our mom and dad don’t love us” (19). The woman agrees and says that she too is by herself.

Chapter 3 Summary: “Captain of My Soul”

Tony’s third money-making idea is rental housing. He enlists the help of anyone who will participate over the course of several weeks to construct several sheet-metal buildings behind the tavern. One resident dies of tuberculosis, and his body is undiscovered for a week. An assistant cook, a Black woman named Miss Sallie, moves into the shack. She’s hostile to the brothers and departs after slapping Williams for dropping an order.

Tony’s drinking escalates. Williams refuses to ride with him in the septic truck because he drives drunk. On one occasion, Tony makes a hard turn and Mike flies out of the truck, breaking his collarbone. Mary forbids her children from riding with Tony and tries to keep the children away from the tavern.

William’s parents fight increasingly: “[T]here was no refuge from the escalating tension between my parents” (22). Williams witnesses an argument in which his father brutalizes his mother, accusing her of sleeping with a Black man and threatening to kill her. The next morning, Williams stops his mother as she leaves with Chuck, a white tavern customer. Initially, Mary’s taking only the two younger children, but when Williams asks if he and Mike can go, she relents. As they prepare to leave with Chuck, Tony arrives. He emotionally begs her to stay. To show his resolve, Tony slams his hand through a plate glass window. Mary and the children go back inside their home.

In July 1953, Tony arrives in Indiana to pick the boys up from their annual summer vacation. They discover that their mother has left Tony, though at first the boys aren’t too worried “since she had left and returned many times” (24). Williams learns that their Pitt Street house is being foreclosed on. Tony and the boys return to their one-room private quarters at the tavern. Both boys lose weight and experience emotional turmoil as they wait in vain for their mother to return. The Korean truce results in the demobilization of many soldiers, and the tavern’s business dwindles. Tony is unable to pay his bills or buy food for the boys.

Tony takes a security guard position at the Pentagon, leaving the boys alone in the tavern. He recruits a woman named Sunshine to stay in the tavern with the boys while he’s gone. The brothers realize that Sunshine and her boyfriend are having sex in the same room where they’re sleeping. Eventually, Tony is fired from his Pentagon job when he gets drunk and misses his hourly check-in. He’s found asleep in front of a general’s liquor cabinet.

By Halloween, the tavern goes out of business. Soon afterward, Tony wrecks the septic truck. The boys have very few clothes remaining, and eventually each has just one khaki outfit that is seldom washed. When a friend offers to take the boys to his home in Alexandria and wash their clothes, a drunken Tony agrees. The friend bathes the boys while washing their clothes and then gets into the tub with them individually and sodomizes them.

Williams reports, “My tenth birthday passed unnoticed” (29). The boys are routinely hungry, as they never have any breakfast. Tony walks with them to the bus stop and begs passersby for lunch money for the boys.

Chapters 1-3 Analysis

The Langston Hughes poem with which Williams opens his book captures the essence of Williams’s lifelong struggle to affirm his identity as a man who is both white and Black, including the irony and mixed emotions of his plight. The idea of not having a place where one belongs permeates the poem and the memoir. While dedicating the book to his wife and the memory of Dora Smith are obvious choices, his inclusion of his father with the others is intriguing in that Tony is clearly a source of frustration, degradation, and humiliation to Williams throughout his formative years.

These first three chapters have by far the most positive tone. The children largely have enough to eat and are upwardly mobile for much of their early life. Although their parents’ relationship is fraught with hostility and violence, their mother is at least present. While Williams introduces many of the figures in his life in the first few pages of the book, he doesn’t mention his mother’s name until page 9. The other aspect of his early life that works in his favor is his assumption that he and his parents are white. This is largely because he and his brother don’t learn that Sallie, the hostile Black cook who treats them harshly, is actually their paternal grandmother.

Despite the positives in his earliest memories, those years are also fraught with uncertainty, chaos, and danger. Threats, enraged arguments, and recriminations fill the Williams boys’ days and nights. No one seemingly attempts to shield these small boys from witnessing drinking, sexuality, or fraudulent acting out—or their consequences. No one protects them from the loss of literally all their possessions or even sodomization by a family friend.