Life on the Color Line
Life on the Color LineLife On The Color Line
This is an elegantly written memoir about the life of Greg Williams and his younger brother Mike.The boys live in Virginia with their parents who ran a rowdy bar for military people associated with the bases in Norfolk. Their father was a temperamental, brilliant, exceedingly charming, devious alcoholic. When his fathers marriage and business came apart in Virginia, Greg was about 8 years old, and Mike a bit younger. Their father moved them to Muncie, Indiana and left them with some of his relatives, who had no income and no ability to care for them. The striking aspect of this story is that during this move to Muncie, the boys learned from their father that he was a black man and that in Muncie, they, too, would be black.
Although the boys looked white, and their father who passed for Italian had married a white woman from Muncie, their grandmother was a black woman from Kentucky now settled in Muncie with only the barest means of subsistence. The boys first stayed with relatives who could not afford to keep them and eventually were raised by a black woman,...
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