Colored People
Gates, Henry Louis Jr.
COLORED PEOPLE: A MEMOIR Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Alfred A. Knopf/ 216 pages /$22 reviewed by FRANCIS X. ROCCA "A ademic superstar" may be an oxymoron, but if there is such a thing, Henry Louis...
...Increasingly, for Americans of every color, commodities must fill the place of a community that lies irretrievably in the past...
...The story is told through folksy anecdotes, with frequent asides on the customs and mores of family and neighbors, and this lack of a strong structure can be distracting...
...A dignified woman, punctilious in speech and dress, she consistently encouraged her children to compete in white society...
...But her ambivalence about race relations, if especially intense, was not unique...
...H is mother, Gates now believes, was depressive...
...The author gets his tonsorial expertise from his mother, who used to earn extra dollars from dressing hair in her home, and who eventually went bald from having her own treated in this damaging fashion...
...Ultimately Gates chose the course of his father's family, to which temperament inclined him...
...y et the community to which these strictures confined them also offered certain pleasures and consolations...
...An avid and adept publicity seeker, he writes regularly for the New Yorker and the New York Times, and has brought his friend Spike Lee to Harvard as a visiting professor...
...But a professor's career, no matter how glittering, is humdrum stuff compared to a movie star's, or even a politician's...
...The revelation was both terrifying and thrilling...
...One detail symbolizes the futility of these exertions: the "kitchen," an incorrigibly kinky tuft Francis X. Rocca is a writer living in New Haven, Connecticut...
...the telecast of a documentary on Malcolm X, whose diabolization of The American Spectator August 1994 71 whites Mrs...
...The author has not forgotten the humiliations of the fifties and sixties, when blacks in Piedmont could not try on clothes before they bought them, sit down to a meal at the Cut-Rate diner, or even buy the houses they lived in...
...2,565 at his birth in 1950...
...When TV showed the riots after the assassination of Martin Luther King, "the first colored secretary of the Piedmont PTA watched the flames with dancing eyes...
...The elementary school was integrated the year before he entered first grade...
...so readers will be grateful that this book ends before its subject ever sets foot on a university campus...
...They clung to "colored" schools and churches as insurance of their dignity and independence, and hated the younger blacks who would abandon their world for the white one...
...Obviously Gates, married to a white woman and tenured at a historically white university, does not long for a return to Jim Crow...
...Within his family, the author encountered two opposite attitudes toward the prospect of integration...
...The "dark-chocolate world" had dissolved...
...The rhythms were off...
...Young "Skip" went fishing with his holy-roller Uncle Nemo and reveled in the ebullient Coleman reunions, but he also made pilgrimages to Patterson's Creek and soaked up Gates lore...
...but it is rich territory we are rambling through, and our guide has a keen eye for trivia with retrospective significance...
...the, union at the paper mill, not until the end of his teens...
...The book closes at the scene of the last segregated mill picnic, in 1970, when "hundreds of Negroes gathered to say goodbye to themselves, their heritage, and their sole link to each other, wiped out of existence by the newly enforced anti–Jim Crow laws...
...Gates's childhood coincided with the desegregation of his hometown, Piedmont, West Virginia (pop...
...At the Colored American Legion they could dance the Dirty Dog to the music of James Brown (when the occasional white faces appeared, their "space felt violated...
...Gates is the book's most memorable character, with something of the tragic about her...
...Riding the train, Gates and family didn't envy the white passengers' access to the dining car...
...Gates answered with fervent amens...
...Cornell gave him tenure at' age 33, and Harvard made him chair:- man of Afro-American Studies when he was 40...
...at the base of the neck that can only be trimmed off...
...What he evidently misses is the sense of place, both geographic and social, which in our country today is the price of freedom and prosperity...
...On the other hand were the lighter-skinned Gateses of nearby Cumberland, Maryland: drinkers, Episcopalians, and socialists...
...The occasion was...
...He joined the Methodist church at age twelve, giving up cards and rock 'n' roll, but two years later left its "oppressive literalisms" for the more liberal preachment of an Episcopal priest...
...graduates of Howard and Harvard...
...Their farm at Patterson's Creek, passed down from a white ancestor, had been sold off in the 1920s yet remained the showpiece of their proud legacy...
...Alfred A. Knopf/ 216 pages /$22 reviewed by FRANCIS X. ROCCA "A ademic superstar" may be an oxymoron, but if there is such a thing, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is it...
...She lived to see one son a surgeon and the other a prominent literary critic, yet she could not enjoy all the fruits of their success...
...Yet she hated white people, "hated them with a passion she seldom disclosed...
...Barely into middle age now, he's written his autobiography...
...Here the nostalgia that suffuses the whole book becomes most plaintive and poignant...
...Sushi and fried catfish...
...Their neighborhoods, "clearly demarcated, as if by ropes or turnstiles," were a refuge from the white domain, a comforting extension of the family home...
...When they bought her the grand house she had used to clean as a maid, she moved in reluctantly, haunted by the memory of a stingy and inconsiderate employer...
...In her later years she also suffered debilitating obsessions and compulsions...
...Gates—who has in recent years publicly denounced the "hate literature" published by the Nation of Islam—recalls mixed feelings when he discovered her secret loathing at age nine: "It was like watching the Wicked Witch of the West emerge out of the transforming features of Dorothy...
...In a chapter on pre-Afro hair care, we learn about the brands of grease, the art of the hot comb, the inconveniences of a Murrayed-down stocking cap or a lye "process...
...What else could he have done...
...On the one hand were his clannish, severe, teetotaling Coleman uncles: hunters and handymen who had "carved out a dark-chocolate world" of their own...
...His coming-of-age story is thus also one of dramatic change in a contained, closely observed society...
...Gates's fried chicken...
...Colored People is full of reminders, if any are necessary, that this change was for the better...
...they preferredeach other's company and Mrs...
...In a prefatory letter to his daughters he writes of conflicting desires, to enjoy "shared cultural intimacy" with other blacks and yet remain free "to construct identities through elective affinities . . . Bach and James Brown...
Vol. 27 • August 1994 • No. 8
