Billy Black, a wrinkled old man with wise and knowing eyes, is the eldest grandson of the legendary last official chief of the Quileute Tribe, Ephraim Back, which appears to be more than enough of a claim for him serve as the chief of the Quileute Council after Ephraim's death, starting at a very young age, even despite the disabilities incurred in an automobile collision which left him him crippled not only physically, from the waist down, but also somewhat emotionally, due to the loss of his beloved wife in the same collision, leaving him not only romantically bereft, but also left him to be the only parent of three young children, two daughters, and the youngest being a son: not an easy thing, parenting three children and leading a tribal council, from a wheelchair.
But, Billy is by no means crippled intellectually. He is renowned for making very good decisions, one of which is to become best buds with another chief: the Chief of Police in the nearby town of Forks, Washington, who also lost his wife quite early in marriage, ignoring the fact that Charlie Swan's loss was due to divorce, knowing that Charlie's daughter, Isabella, or "Just 'Bella'" was a very good influence on the lives of his oldest daughters, who would invite Bella all the way out to their place just to make mud pies along with his son. As is often the case in a divorce, however, Bella's visits to Forks became fewer and further between, and eventually ended altoghter, but not before Billy could learn that Charlie's favorite hobbies: fishing and watching sports on TV, both things that can be done whether on foot, or in a wheelchair, causes the relationship between the two men to bond even closer than most brothers can ever claim to have.
But, that friendship does not mean that Billy is willing to compromise in any of his morals or beliefs. For instance, despite Cheif Swan's insistance that a newly arrived physician, Dr. Carlisle Cullen, is one of the best things that could happen to the region, Billy firmly disagrees.
Of course, most of that is becasue of a rather closely-kept family secret, that is almost at complete odds with an equally-closely-kept secret of the Cullen Family, one that Billy beleives to be much more dangerous to the region than anything beneficial the Cullens could bring, which causes him to react with utmost hatred any time the topic with Charlie ever emerges. That secret happens to hing upon something that Billy, himself, actually witnessed as a very young child, the transformation of his grandfather Ephram from a human into a wolf and then back to human form again.
This is the real reason why Billy retains the right to lead the tribal council: that he is one of the last to know that what almost everybody younger than he would only be able to conclude to be wild, made-up stories turned into legends, is that Billy and a few others his age and older, happen to know those stories to be true.
And part of that legend is that not all that long before Ephraim's death, while a wolf, Ephraim's main role to play was to protect the tribe from enemies of any kind, including the blood-drinking cold ones, which the Cullens happen to have been when Ephraim met them for the very first time. Somewhat vexed by the Cullens' choice to only drink the blood of animals, and not humans, Ephraim, a man of justice more than a man of action, chose to make a treaty with the Cullens, not to kill them, like he would gladly have tried to do, even outnumbered like he was, so long as the Cullens never bit a human and stayed off of Quileute Tribal lands from that point on. Billy had become the protector of that treaty, always therafter wary of the Cullens, although not quite the man of justice his grandfather had been. Billy's overt hatred of the cullens probably also stemmed from a sense of jealousy that neither his father nor he appeared to have inherited Ephraim's genetic ability to transform into wolves themselves, and that the trait appeard to completely die out with Ephram's generation, leaving Billy and the tribe no way to really protect themselves from the Cullens should the Cullens happen to break the treaty, so, without breaking the treaty himself, by telling anybody outside of the tribe of the Cullens' true nature, the best Billy can do to warn the other residents of the region is to demonstrate as much hatred toward the Cullens as a man of sanity can muster.
But, any jealousy that might have been related to the lack of his ability to transorm into a wolf himself appears to be lost in Billy, because almost as soon as one of his not-too-distant relatives, Sam Uley, does begin transforming into a wolf, Billy at first does his best to help guide Sam, and then starts to defer to Sam toward become the one to lead the Tribe, which Sam eventually begins to do, and continues to do, even after Billy's son, Jacob, too, begins to transform, although both happen to know that due to bloodlines, in addition to this ability, it happens to be Jacob's birthright to do the tribal leading.
By then, however, Charlie's daughter Bella happened to move back to Forks, to live with her dad, and start dating one of the Cullens, despite anything Billy could say to dissuade her from so doing, without also saying anything that might break the Quileute treaty with them.
When Billy's unheeded warnings appear to be fulfilled with the Cullen family up and leaving town without leaving anybody so much as a forwarding address, and his own son Jacob steps in to try to fill that void in Bella's life, both Billy and Sam realize that it would be much better for everyone for Sam to continue leading the pack until the roller-coaster ride of romancing Bella began to stabilize... if ever.. because when the Cullens return, and Bella goes straight back to the cullen of her choice, Jacob would rather die himself than to allow Bella to end up with one of them.
And Jacob's romantic life was by no means the only romantic roller-coaster ride his children happened to put him through. His oldest daughter fell in love and married and left to go live in Hawaii in almost no time at all, so Billy doesn't get to see her anywhere near as often as he would like, while his younger daughter appears to be completely off limits to any boys until the day that she happens to come back from college and catch the eye of another of the tribe's wolf-shape-shifter teenagers, who falls madly in love with her, and can't live without her, and can't stand to be away from her, who doesn't happen to be by any means Jacob's best of friends, so there begins to be no small amount of contention there. But, Paul doesn't step over any inappropriate lines in anybody's estimation except Jacob's, so Billy does his best to put up with it, if not actually want this relationship for his daughter.
The biggest question in everybody's mind about him now, is whether or not Billy will live long enough to see Jacob get a chance to marry the newest madly-in-love interest of Jacob's life, a rather young girl, who happens to be much, much, more mature than her actual age might suggest, named Renesmee... Renesmee Cullen, that is. As Jacob appears to be content to remain firmly on the side of appropriate behavior toward her, and as Jacob is by birthright and ability the tribe's future cheif, Billy has decided not to even begin to say a word against it, and to become as supportive of it as a wearied older man like himself can ever be.
Billy resides in La Push, on the Quileute Reservation in Washington State.
