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That was an inauspicious beginning to Williams’ angry
childhood, which grew worse due to an absent father and a
mother’s struggle to raise her children in poverty. Those –
and ever-present racism - were things young Williams
noticed. He decided that he wasn’t going to live like his
mother, who accepted her lot in life.
From the time he was a preschooler, he fought the people and
the situations surrounding him – even when they were good:
his mother found a white man who offered help, but Williams
refused it. He started getting into trouble, insisting that
he was the man of the house, and he gave up childhood
pleasures even though he was barely old enough to be in
grade school.
Before he was a teenager, he decided he wasn’t going to pick
cotton, either, but he would do what he perceived would even
the score of racism. He practiced running, fast, which
allowed him to escape when approached by white men with
clubs. He stole increasingly larger things, lied, scrapped
and resisted. More than anything, he hated – white people,
other black people, his situation, poverty, everything.
Knowing that he had to leave Shreveport, Williams made his
way to Chicago, but that wasn’t a better place. He headed
back to Louisiana, then decided to find his fortune in
California. He studied and worked, planned and resisted
anew, built a business and worked some more.
And then three things turned his life around: a “beautiful”
woman and two children named Venus and Serena.
Black and White
is one huge surprise of a book.
For the first half, author Richard Williams (with Bart
Davis) rants and roams: the anger is so shockingly strong
that it pulses from each page and, much like his daughters’
tennis volleys, the story goes back and forth until you’re
dizzy. There are also 70-year-old quotes that are inherently
fiction and parts you won’t even want to read,
including a gruesome bit about digging in his mother’s
grave.
But then this book abruptly switches, focusing like a laser.
Williams hones in on tennis, his decision to raise two stars
in the sport, and his 75-page plan to make it happen. This
second half of his story is amazing, in part because it
contrasts so highly with the angry and scattered first half.
Overall, this isn’t a bad book, but it should be approached
with caution and openness. Know that, and Black and
White: The Way I See It might serve you well. |
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