Colored People: A Memoir, by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Bradley, David
COLORED PEOPLE: A MEMOIR, by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Alfred A. Knopf, 1994. 216 pp. $22.00. Not long ago I was part of a "focus group." The idea of these things is that a publisher assembles some...
...WINTER • 1995 • 119 Books Gates is as free of Franklin's pretensions as he is of Wright's...
...many more will be confused that Gates, in a confusing time shift, then leaps years beyond the last scene of Colored People to follow his mother's story to 1986, when Pauline, deeply depressed, was again hospitalized...
...He recalls his anger when Maggie rejected his loving description of his late mother, and writes, "I found myself wishing that Maggie could have seen my mother when she was young...
...Amen," she said, quietly at first...
...Colored People, though autobiographical, it not about Henry Louis "Skip" Gates...
...Its application, while showing how Colored People is connected to the so-called AfricanAmerican literary tradition, also raises the possibility that some of the book's most eloquent sequences are shaped more by tradition than by Gates's aesthetic judgment or subjective experience, or even by objective fact...
...One is that, as a child, he saw no direct confrontations over segregation...
...And on second thinking, this instance of unawareness seems symptomatic of a deeper flaw: Gates's irony, precise and powerful on the level of language and anecdote, falters with regard to larger narrative structures—the tragedy of his mother's life, the paradoxes of his own...
...he credits his brother Rocky, six years older, with being "the pioneer" in many areas, and, especially, a "factor that eased my passage in school...
...I was more aggressive around white people than Daddy, and it didn't go down well with him...
...I was never a good player...
...Solutions were suggested, the most comforting—and least practical— of which turned on technology: CDROM, Internet, the Information Superhighway...
...Is that what I want on my gravestone: Here lies an African American...
...from Cambridge, or his W.E.B...
...also loved sports...
...All three were indignant about segregation—even Washington, who dismissed slavery itself as "the institution which the Nation unhappily had engrafted upon it...
...The idea of these things is that a publisher assembles some academics and asks them to assess the need for new materials in a given subject . . . to do market research, in other words...
...It is Pauline's life story that gives Colored People narrative structure...
...But in the aftermath of a celebratory feast she revealed that the white woman: used to make me sit out in the kitchen . . . and eat the scraps...
...He praised Douglass for making "his life . . . the vehicle for a social program" and for serving "as editor and censor of even the smallest bits of data about his life until he had rendered them in language as part of the public self...
...Gates couches this incident in terms of a woman sitting with the men...
...They were still scared, but they couldn't let Mama down . . . so they'd dress up too, the women, and traipse on over to the PTA, just to see Mama read her minutes, just to represent the race, just to let those white people know that we was around here too...
...Worse, by failing to give his role coherent explication, he deprives Colored People of power and complexity...
...I was exhausted, so we walked easy...
...I know I look bad, she said, wiping her forehead where the sweat ran down from under her wig...
...Race purists would molt over Gates telling his daughters: I have written to you because of the day when we were driving home and you asked your mother and me just exactly what the civil rights movement had been all about and I pointed to a motel on Route 2 and said that at one time I could not have stayed there...
...To feel nostalgia for such a time may seem a bit obscene, but there are several factors that make Gates's feeling comprehensible...
...It was like watching the Olympics or the World Series when somebody colored was on...
...contemporary readers tend to expect that an autobiography will be shaped primarily by internal factors— the author's individual experience, hardwon insights, and personal symbols...
...Only a single block separated Erin Street from East Hampshire, but in Gates's childhood that meant distance, not proximity...
...Distant clashes seemed unreal: Every night we'd wait until the news to see what "Dr...
...But his mother's racism was not easily dismissed...
...Colemans divided their world according to criteria like "bad" or "good" hair and dark or 114 • DISSENT Books light skin...
...But most important of all, for Piedmont and me, she did not seem to fear white people...
...I'd accepted the assignment because rumor had it the book was controversial and I just love a Negro intellectual chicken-fight...
...A typical dying mill town—the Westvaco paper mill, in this case—Piedmont today is characterized by "crumbling infrastructure and the resignation of its people...
...There Gates de-emphasized the distinction between fiction and non-fiction, postulating that Frederick Douglass had "carefully crafted that public image by which he determined he should be recalled . . . a self Douglass created, manipulated, and transformed, if ever so slightly, through three fictive selves he posited in his three autobiographies...
...DuBois's Souls of Black Folk: I was a little tyke . . In a wee wooden schoolhouse something put it into the boys' and girls' heads to buy gorgeous visiting cards .. . and exchange . . . one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card—refused it peremptorily, with a 118 • DISSENT Books glance...
...That is not hyperbole...
...She lingered on life-support, while her family, including Gates's wife and children, gathered...
...It was as if there were a permanent TAKE-AWAY sign for colored people...
...For example, Gates's father could sit down at the Cut-Rate...
...His childhood was more affected by quaint practices at a lunch counter called the Cut-Rate...
...Gates did have some problems...
...Support was offered...
...Three months later every union in the mill was integrated, making a colored picnic seem less appropriate...
...Absent Gates's theory, such comparisons— many more are possible—would be intriguing...
...It was almost like a war being fought overseas...
...But, on second reading, it seems Gates is actually unaware of the irony, for rather than ending the scene with that line, he adds a sentence that is as syntactically confused as it is emotionally sentimental: "I had told her how much I loved her, and she had smiled that deep-down smile, something to take with her on the road...
...from Yale or his Ph.D...
...That did not end the discussion—though it should have...
...it would seem unfair not to apply it to his own...
...After transferring to Yale and leaving Piedmont, he returned to disrupt the Coleman Christmas dinner: I brought my wife, Sharon, to dinner up there in 1973...
...Thus, Gates was instrumental in destroying the ultimate object of his nostalWINTER • 1995 • 117 Books gia— and colored Piedmont's "most beloved, and cementing, ritual...
...In Colored People, he claims that inheritance...
...What I cannot say is what Gates's memoir—or his memories—has gained or lost thereby...
...Yet Colored People was not gratuitously confrontational...
...Other than that, colored and white got on pretty well...
...He was .. . talking smaller steps than usual so I could keep up...
...Pauline believed "the key to wealth and comfort in America was owning property...
...Segregation was central to that legislation...
...was a poor athlete...
...They would mouth the white man's commands in'the day .. . and enact their own legislation . . . . in their sepia world at night...
...I'll shut it down first, Carl Dadisman had vowed...
...two years later Gates was in puppy love with Linda...
...A certain radiance was slowly transforming her soft brown face, as she listened to Malcolm X naming the white man the Devil...
...She gained weight, talked of dying "for hours," hoarded obsessively, cleaned compulsively...
...There was, however, a reconciliation that Gates describes in a beautifully rendered scene: Pop and II...
...As a freshman in a local college he publicly violated the tenets of people who "dated colored, married colored...
...Pauline, hoping to buy adjoining land and "build a sort of family complex," "was all excited...
...After a "pitched battle" she gave in...
...But he had his mother's blessing and coaching, and, eventually, the approval of the teacher he'd deceived: I searched the audience . . . to see her expression . . . she liked the speech and as good as told me so with a big wink at the end of the ceremony...
...Gates does not force this nostalgia on the reader or insist that all Piedmont residents saw WINTER • 1995 • 113 Books things through that sepia lens...
...Elsewhere in the text Gates reveals he worked one summer in the mill, "hired for the express purpose of encouraging a few black people to transfer to the craft unions...
...Its essence is foreshadowed in Gates's line about the prohibition on colored land ownership driving his mother crazy...
...White people . . . smelled bad, Mama always said...
...The schools desegregated "without a peep...
...He wreaked similar havoc on the Coleman family...
...She simply hated them, hated them with a passion she seldom disclosed...
...I came home from college one summer...
...In his 1845 Narrative Frederick Douglass noted that Northern prejudice prevented his plying the trade he'd learned as a Southern slave...
...He even said some things sure to get him shunned at white cocktail parties...
...began the long walk up the hill...
...But what all that suggests about the function of factual accuracy, artistic inspiration, and individual expression in autobiographical expressions by blacks is very hard to say...
...It was awful to remember that was all we had ever said...
...Doctors and dentists, lawyers and pharmacists...
...it would have made Colored People not only provocative but profound...
...In a room she shared with a white woman, Pauline suffered what appears to have been a heart attack...
...but "Even when we were with Daddy...
...Still, though he qualifies it with the phrase "or at least that's the color my memory has given it," Gates insists that "the fifties in Piedmont were a sepia time," and so often uses the word sepia that the book sometimes seems to read the way a D.W...
...Piedmont's colored people could not work at the mill except on the loading dock—craft unions barred them...
...Worst, he creates the no doubt erroneous impression that he himself does not comprehend the meaning and power of his own story...
...For instance, to give his own high school valedictory address, rather than one prepared for him, he had to act "surreptitiously, because this was not allowed...
...The single civil rights protest on record took place before he was born...
...But Gates is Gates, and what he would no doubt offer were he to pop up on-screen is the "Theory of African-American Literary Criticism" articulated in his most prominent work of literary criticism, The Signifying Monkey...
...His adolescent rebellions against racism caused friction between him and his uncles, and forced his mother to make "a painful choice" between her brothers and her son...
...As Gateses never had family reunions Gates never saw them gathered until, at ten, he attended his paternal grandfather's funeral...
...King and dem" were doing...
...we had to stand at the counter and order takeout, then eat on white paper plates using plastic spoons...
...Gates, at seven, tested this assertion at the swimming pool, approaching a white girl named Linda Hoffman with "nostrils flared, trying to breathe in as deeply as I could, prepared for the worst...
...The assertion was refuted...
...I felt chagrined and maybe a little proud as I joined her on stage...
...The years of having her hair done had damaged her hair so much that she was going bald...
...Pauline, a woman born in a "nurturing" colored world, raised under the protective "netting" of a colored family, died in a now-integrated hospital, surrounded by a nowintegrated family...
...Certainly it astigmatized his view of Pauline...
...The first colored to own guns . .. the first to become Eagle Scouts, the first to go to college," the twelve children of his mother's generation were "the last conceived, born, and bred under segregation," and had carved out a dark-chocolate world . . . as nurturing as the loamy soil...
...In the 1940s, she spearheaded a demand for a colored high school...
...Not to mention try to get a job in the craft unions at the paper mill...
...By failing to make it so Gates denies dramatic support to a point he makes expositorially: "Nobody wanted segregation, you understand, but nobody thought of this as segregation...
...Griffiths film looked...
...But the women served her too...
...Gates expounded his theory using autobiographical writings...
...Gates's walk home with his father can be read against this, from James Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son: We were walking, just the two of us, in our usual silence...
...Two: if somebody had to do the dirty job, Gates would be a fitting choice, not because of his B.A...
...The mill didn't want a lawsuit like the one brought against the Swordfish...
...Similarly, Gates's graduation speech sequence can be read against the sequence in Black Boy where Wright openly (not "surreptitiously") rejects the prepared speech, is discouraged by his uncle (rather than encouraged by his mother) to write and deliver his own, and after doing so, rather than looking for reactions, "did not care if they liked it or not...
...Though born to Coleman status, Gates was more intrigued by his father's family...
...I had never before seen such a ceremony: I had read about it in books .. . I suddenly sensed in my grandfather's parlor what manners meant and how people of breeding behaved and were able to express...
...This group's focus was introductory American literature, and the session quickly became a group grappling with the question of whether any textbook or anthology could reconcile historical significance, literary importance, and aesthetic quality with contemporary demands for sociological sensitivity— for multiculturalism, in other words...
...Even in the fifties, she voiced it freely enough for him to clearly recall her words: White people, she said, were dirty: they tasted right out of pots on the stove...
...That caramel ice cream sure tasted good .. . That day he knew me, and he seemed to care...
...I could leave the matter there were Gates not the Gates who some think can explain African-American literature at the press of a function key...
...Integrate...
...In the 1920s they'd sold their rural holdings and moved to "the mysterious world of Cumberland, Maryland...
...In 1950, when Gates was born, there were twenty-five hundred—Italian, Irish, "a handful of wealthy WASPs on East Hampshire Street," and three-hundred-fifty colored people living on Back Street, Rat Tail Road, or, like Gates's extended family, "Up the Hill," on Erin Street...
...Gateses . . . weren't Colemans...
...Piedmont's colored people could not try on clothes in stores...
...In fact she epitomized them...
...Gates's presence at Pauline's deathbed can be read against Booker T. Washington's lament, in Up From Slavery, that he was absent when his mother died, though he "always had an intense desire to be with her when she did pass away...
...All this time, and I hadn't known just how deeply my mother despised white people...
...When they get wet, she said, they smell like dogs...
...DuBois Professorship at Harvard, but because, unlike most critics in the field, who simply assume the point, Gates actually has addressed the question of what makes AfricanAmerican literature African-American...
...In his 1901 autobiography, Up From Slavery, Booker T. Washington gave a detailed account of his first encounter with segregated accommodations...
...The first act opened in 1962, when she became menopausal and clinically depressed...
...The theory asserts that the "discrete black difference" that makes African-American literature African-American is that black writers "read each other's texts and seize upon topoi and tropes to revise their own texts," thus creating "curious formal lines of continuity between the texts...
...My darkest fear," he writes in his preface, "is that Piedmont, West Virginia, will cease to exist, if some executives on Park Avenue decide . . . to build a completely new paper mill elsewhere...
...Pauline's fantasy of burning down the Thomas house can be read against Wright's opening—he actually sets fire to his own family's house...
...It tore me up...
...Like telling his daughters, with open relish, they would "go from being African Americans to `people of color' to being, once again, 'colored people.' " But what was going to get him lynched was the memoir's title: Colored People...
...It was like watching the Wicked Witch of the West emerge out of the transforming features of Dorothy...
...In Colored People, he may have deemphasized his role in order to both avoid Wright's pretension and to comment on it, via Signifyin( g...
...The day was a revelation...
...by the time he was seven Piedmont's public institutions—the schools, the swimming pool—were integrated...
...Yet another factor is that segregation in Piedmont was so contradictory as to be risible...
...Even Gates's nostalgia can be seen as a capping of the responses to segregation of Douglass, Washington, and Wright...
...They even served the boys first, before they returned to the kitchen to eat their own supper...
...Gates, as a child, was "short and round—not obese, mind you, but fat," which inspired his father to teasing, which Gates hated...
...All right now," she continued, much more heatedly...
...In 1957, she played a crucial role in school desegregation, as "the first colored secretary" of the Piedmont PTA: Before Mama started reading the minutes, colored people never joined the PTA...
...Gates speculates that Pauline never recovered from that disappointment, but her story was already a tragedy-in-progress...
...It did make me think three thoughts...
...They divided it by gender...
...You know that you don't have to play baseball, don't you boy...
...One: Gates would be appalled at the idea of anybody being the Carl Sagan of AfricanAmerican (or Afro-American, or black, or whatever we're calling it this year) literature...
...It is a pity Gates did not emphasize that irony...
...She used to leave money around, to see if I would steal it...
...Said mission: to review Gates's latest book, not a work of literary criticism, but a memoir...
...And well spoken...
...I had written a review that said so, and been about to send it off, when the Professor From the State of Blondes reminded me of something critical: Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is Henry Louis Gates, Jr...
...After basketball games . . . the colored players had to stand around and drink out of paper cups while the white players and cheerleaders sat down in the red Naugahyde booths and drank out of glasses...
...Gateses .. . drank beer and Scotch, played cards, read detective novels and traded them with each other, did crossword puzzles, and loved puns...
...The Brown decision demolished the legal basis of segregation when Gates was four...
...Even moderate plumage would be ruffled by: I rebel at the notion that I can't be a part of other groups, that I can't construct identities through elective affinity, that race must be the most important thing about me...
...The tangle of family ties served as the netting that covered the garden's yield, setting it off from the chaos...
...That last bit of bigotry had a great effect on Gates's adolescence...
...Though marred by vertiginous shifts in time, ellipses in narrative, and prose that was often vexatiously repetitive, Colored People was continually provocative, often evocative, and the rest of the time funny as hell...
...Not understanding that, as he now writes, Pauline's passion was for "a piece of earth," Gates pooled resources with his father and 116 • DISSENT Books brother to buy Pauline a house...
...Howard and Talladega, Harvard and Radcliffe—all of these careers and all of these schools were in my grandparents' living room, and each had a Gates face attached to it...
...Today there are eleven hundred such people...
...In fact there is no mystery...
...Gates, Sr...
...Even if you were an in-law, you still weren't a Coleman...
...When Mama opened the door, I saw her as if for the first time: so old and tired and despondent...
...This created the precedent followed by the mill...
...Gates had clearly taken leave, if not of his own senses, then of the concord of sensibilities of the black intelligentsia...
...But Gates is nostalgic about it...
...A bit later, he makes the picnic a symbol of community—and again blames the presumably white mill management for its destruction: 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...
...Or have a drink at the white VFW, or join the white American Legion, or get loans at the bank, or just generally get out of line...
...When she sat down at the table with the men, you could have heard a pin drop...
...Of that world he writes: Its inhabitants went to colored schools, they went to colored churches, they lived in colored neighborhoods, they ate colored food, they listened to colored music, and when all that fat and grease finally closed down their arteries or made their hearts explode, they slept in colored cemeteries, escorted there by colored preachers...
...More relevantly, it is a white woman sitting among colored men—while colored women serve them...
...It is "a story of a village, a family and its friends...
...And saying anything is made more difficult by another of Gates's critical notions, expressed in Figures in Black...
...Gates's response to his grandfather's funeral can be read against this, from DuBois's Autobiography: [M]y grandfather arose, filled the wineglasses and raised his glass and touched the glass of his friend, murmuring a toast...
...Here he simply says, "That was our last Christmas Up the Hill...
...112 • DISSENT Books That, from the chair of Harvard's Department of Afro-American Studies...
...Present the theory, they are problematical...
...only the irony that his daughters will never know the world that created him because he grew far enough beyond it to create them...
...And if he felt I had violated a boundary, he would name it publicly and side with the boundary...
...There were," he writes, "rare occasions when I would look into her face and see a stranger...
...He would do so loudly, even with what struck my child's ears as a certain malice...
...120 • DISSENT...
...His portrait of Pauline surely makes that possible...
...In the portion of his autobiography published in 1946 as Black Boy, Richard Wright called segregation "the terror from which I fled...
...It's hard to catch a baseball with your eyes closed," he writes...
...Few readers will find the matter indeterminate...
...Daddy would almost never take my side in front of others...
...It came as a shock to realize that these mythic characters . . . were actual brown and tan and beige people...
...Then it dawned on me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others . . . shut off from their world by a vast veil...
...Such descriptions are perennial in autobiographical writings by black Americans...
...Leaving school after junior high, she worked to put four brothers through college...
...Your mother could have stayed there, but your mother could not have stayed there with me...
...for her to introduce works by black Americans to her students was, she felt, as for a blind person to teach signing to the deaf...
...Gates pleaded with her...
...But Gates, Sr., refused to sign the papers...
...She was not only a WASP but an immigrant...
...This identification was complicated, though, by conflict with his father...
...The first colored secretary of the Piedmont PTA watched the flames with dancing eyes...
...he did not want us sitting in his booths, eating off his plates and silverware, putting our thick greasy lips all over his glasses...
...Only some kind of animal, or the lowest order of trash, would ever taste out of a pot on the stove...
...In the sixties, Gates writes, she voiced "more WINTER • 1995 • 115 Books freely . . . her long-nurtured hatred of white people...
...I can say it is a brilliant expression of the AfricanAmerican literary tradition...
...Oh, I want to play, I responded . . . "But you don't have to play...
...Possibly it qualified his joy when his love was requited in front of a school assembly: [T]he magician . . . chose Hoffman...
...They dated colored, married colored, divorced and cheated on colored...
...She made me work on Thanksgiving and Christmas...
...Gates's theory suggests that autobiographies by AfricanAmericans are and should be shaped by external factors—political need, or the work of other African-American autobiographers...
...The Professor From the State of Blondes was excited by what might soon be appearing on a computer screen near her...
...While I sat cowering in our living room, I happened to glance over at my mother...
...Gates elsewhere indicates what that meant: Certainly the borders of our world seemed to be encroached upon when some white man or woman would show up where he or she did not belong . . . Our space was violated when one of them showed up...
...I answered "Yes...
...Obviously comfortable in the world...
...Part of the problem, all agreed, was the inadequate preparation of most of today's incoming students...
...the book's preface alone would make feathers fly...
...This complicates my reading of Colored People...
...I'll never know," he writes, "if we did the right thing by buying her that house, or whether our insistence on vindicating her was somehow misguided...
...The conflict had other aspects...
...At another point in the text Gates reveals that the Swordfish, a whites-only club, was shut down after he and some friends were ejected and called in the State Human Rights Commission...
...One of these occurred when Gates was nine: CBS aired a documentary about Black Muslims . . . just about the scariest black people I'd ever seen...
...It was a sense of guilt so enormous that I couldn't talk to anyone about it...
...Always afraid of the ball...
...Gates's role in bringing change to Piedmont was obviously significant in fact...
...That netting kept out predators...
...That was all we said...
...Another factor is that Gates was not in the vanguard of change...
...In his first book, a work of literary criticism, Figures in Black, Gates asserted that Douglass's "legacy to contemporary black letters was his mastery of the trope of irony...
...He laments that his children "will . . . never experience the magic I can still feel in the place where I learned how to be a colored boy," and even likes the term colored, "because . . . I hear it in my mother's voice and the sepia tones of my childhood...
...What is missing is any coherent exposition of Gates's own role in creating that new age...
...The story of Linda and the magician can be read against this, from W.E.B...
...A veil," Gates writes, "passed over her life, dimming her radiance...
...Her behavior infected Gates: I had developed all sorts of rituals...
...In time Gates decided he was "more like the Gateses than the Colemans...
...The thought of moving into this house . . . I wanted to burn this house down...
...She'd taken to wearing a wig...
...The one selected, on East Hampshire Street, had belonged to a white woman for whom Pauline once worked...
...My father asked me abruptly, "You'd rather write than preach, wouldn't you...
...The same thing would happen several years later when the Martin Luther King riots were shown on television...
...The only problem was that you had to be a Coleman...
...Rumor had the right of it...
...It drove my mother crazy...
...As Benjamin Franklin wrote of his prototypical Autobiography: To shorten the work, as well as for other reasons, I omit all the facts and transactions that may not have a tendency to benefit the young reader, by showing him from my example, and my success in emerging from poverty, and acquiring some degree of wealth, power and reputation, the advantages of certain modes of conduct which I observed, and of avoiding errors which were prejudicial to me...
...Despite the power of this scene, it seems Gates's insight—and insight is the essence of irony—fails here...
...That afternoon, Pauline was committed: I could never shake the idea that if only I hadn't dared fate to punish me, by crossing my legs the wrong way around, Mama wouldn't have become sick and gone to the hospital...
...The village is Piedmont, Mineral County, West Virginia...
...Gates's desire to atone drove him to religion and the Colemans' righteous ways, and eventually to innocently initiate the tragedy's third act...
...But the opening of Colored People does address his daughters, "Dear Maggie and Liza," as Franklin's opening addresses his "Dear Son," and at least part of Gates's intention was to shape the perceptions of the young...
...It also suggests that the memoir's major flaw is a result of Gates writing to fulfill the theory, for in The Signifying Monkey he declared that "the black autobiographical tradition . . . generally depicts a resplendent self as representative of possibilities denied to one's . . . fellow blacks," and sarcastically skewered Richard Wright for setting himself up as "among those few Negroes who could tell not only their own story but also the woeful tale of their pathetic voiceless black countrymen...
...Gates's approbation of Douglass is in keeping with the tradition of American autobiography...
...One is "capping," which Gates illustrates using two eighteenth-century texts, the slave narrative of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw and the Indian captivity narrative of John Marrant: Marrant is capping upon Gronniosaw's trope because his revision seeks to reverse the received trope by displacement and substitution...
...And: As much as we belonged to Piedmont, as much as Piedmont belonged to us, colored weren't allowed to own property...
...Gateses had been Mineral County landowners in the nineteenth century...
...Though this fear is never realized, in Colored People's final scene (which seems to have taken place in the seventies) Gates describes the demise of the colored millworkers' picnic, blaming it on distant authority: The mill administration itself made the decision, it said, because the law forbade separate but equal everything, including picnics...
...With the purchase all but consummated Pauline resisted moving...
...His rejection of the Colemans led Gates to decide that his mother, Pauline, "was totally unlike her sisters and brothers...
...Some of the strongest passages in Colored People can be read as capping...
...Another part, some admitted, was the inadequate preparation of some of today's teachers—ourselves included...
...Pick your little boyfriend, honey, he said, I want Skippy, was all I heard Linda say...
...Three: a mission I'd thought accomplished wasn't...
...At family dinners: the men would be seated first, at the formal dining table . . . while the women served them...
...Prime exponents of this world were Gates's mother's clan, the Colemans, Piedmont's colored aristocracy, occupying—albeit not owning—the town's highest ground...
...I would .. . walk around the kitchen table only from right to left . . . I would approach a chair from its left side, not the right . . . I crossed my legs right calf over left, and never, ever, the other way around...
...Gates knows well how to turn a phrase or twist an anecdote to give his nostalgia an acrid aftertaste and allow for visions less idyllic than his own: All things considered, white and colored Piedmont got along pretty well...
...You were supposed to stand at the counter, get your food to go, and leave...
...And refined...
...A bit earlier he has dealt with the matter in the passive voice: So much was the way I remembered . . . and yet a new age had plainly dawned, an age that made . . . a segregated picnic seem an anachronism...
...But this is 1994, not 1788, or 1845...
...Gates recollects: When I was nine or ten, the Coleman Family Reunion was the social event of the season...
...The Colemans, by contrast, were the force of self-righteousness, teetotalers, non-smoking, nongambling souls, who seemed to equate closecropped, well-oiled hair and well-washed automobiles with the very purpose of life itself...
...But the major reason Gates can feel nostalgic is that he grew up in a world, not of sight and sound, but of mind, where white laws, white customs, white people were irrelevant...
...But the crucial division was Coleman or not-Coleman...
...Gates calls this "Signifyin( g)" and charts several types...
...Won't it be wonderful, she exclaimed, when a student can press a key and "have Henry Louis Gates pop up and explain African-American literature...
...One woman, who taught in one of those states where "diversity" means mixing brunettes with blondes, was especially frank...
...Radiant, in fact...
...In fact it was an assault on a tradition by an heir to that tradition— arguably justifiable, but every bit as confrontational as it would have been, twenty years earlier, for a colored man to ask for a room at that motel on Route 2, with or without a white wife...
...In his preface he tells his daughters "a world that nurtured and sustained me, has mysteriously disappeared...
...When that is done, though, the results are . . . troubling...
...At least as long as colored people didn't try to sit down in the Cut-Rate or at the Rendezvous Bar, or eat pizza at Eddie's, or buy property, or move into the white neighborhoods, or dance with, date or dilate upon white people...
...The way to wealth was opened when one Coleman brother broke the color bar and purchased the family homestead...
...One morning, "For a reason that seemed compelling at the time," Gates crossed his legs in reverse...
...But Jim Crow, though no longer flying high, still had a comfortable roost...
...it should be more clearly significant here...
...At first it seems Gates captures all this with a perfect ironic image: "It was about midnight when we agreed not to shock her heart any more...
...It was simply a personal analysis of the changes wrought by the SCLC, the NAACP, and the Warren Court that dared admit there had been costs as well as benefits...
...Pauline's commitment was to the colored world: She didn't care to live in white neighborhoods or be around white people...
...All the key terms of Gronniosaw's trope are present in Marrant's revision, but the "original" pattern has been rearranged significantly...
Vol. 42 • January 1995 • No. 1
