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

According to the National Center on Disability and Journalism (NCDJ), “an alcoholic is someone with the disease of alcoholism” (“Alcoholic/Alcoholism.” National Center on Disability and Journalism). Both the NCDJ and the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment recommend using first-person language when referring to people with alcoholism (e.g., use “a person with alcoholism” instead of “an alcoholic”). Many of the individuals Williams writes about have alcoholism, including his father, Tony; his Grandmother Sallie; her lover, Fred Badders; many of Tony’s associates and relatives; and Sara’s grandmother. While Tony and the other individuals with alcoholism who populate the memoir don’t always get into trouble when they’re under the influence of alcohol, they’re almost never sober when they do. Williams’s references to the most common beverages, including cheap wine and even shaving lotion, show that people with alcoholism can sometimes drink the cheapest available form of alcohol, which is one characteristic of terminal-stage alcoholism.

This term refers to a person who descends from more than one race, often African American and Anglo American. Tony is biracial, the child of a Black mother and a white father from Bowling Green, Kentucky. Because his father is biracial, Williams and his siblings are automatically cast as “colored,” which at the time these events occurred, was an unrefined term that ultimately meant the same as being Black.