Colored People: A Memoir. - book reviews

National Review, August 29, 1994 by Ben C. Toledano

IT ISN'T necessary to approve of the way a system works in order to recognize the skills of those who use it to their maximum advantage. A good case in point is Henry Louis Gates Jr., of whom I first became aware in 1981, when he, as a 30-year-old assistant professor at Yale, received a "genius" grant from the Mac-Arthur Foundation. A year later, a picture of Mr. Gates holding a copy of a book entitled Our Nig, written in 1859 by a free woman of color named Harriet E. Wilson, appeared in newspapers throughout the country. Mr. Gates found the book in a used-book store and shortly thereafter proclaimed it the first novel by a colored person published in the United States.

Four years ago, The New York Times Magazine did a long cover story about Mr. Gates entitled "Black Studies' New Star." The story would have brought tears to the eyes of Horatio Alger. Cornell University made Mr. Gates a full professor when he was only 33, and later created an endowed chair for him. It didn't work. Duke took him away and smugly thought it had him for life. No sooner had he started unpacking in Durham than Princeton began making noises and offers. Mr. Gates's "lifetime" position at Duke has now taken him to Harvard, where he is a professor of English and chairman of Afro-American Studies. Certainly, in terms of what some call the "American Dream," we've got to tip our hats to Mr. Gates, the Sammy Glick of Black Studies, as he talks on the phone in his Mercedes and thinks of new worlds to conquer. As long as the supply of black scholars remains so small and the demand for them so great thanks to the new "cultural pluralism," Mr. Gates can call the tune.

I must admit to a certain problem with memoirs written by 43-year-olds. Surely Mr. Gates has lived a full life thus far, but, at the same time, a reasonable argument can be made that this literary effort is little more than a further example of the author's excessive self-celebration, aided and abetted by the publishing business, which, according to Hugh Pearson, the author of The Shadow of the Panther, most often gives nonfiction contracts to blacks when "it's for a story about their childhood."

For some time now, we who are not persons of color have been told that what information we receive of black culture and of the black experience must come from black persons. Any such accounts from white people are considered illegitimate--in fact, invalid. That too will pass, but for now, what we would know of colored people, we are obliged to learn from them. There are advantages to the present system, which Saul Bellow calls "free speech without any debate," for Mr. Gates and other black scholars are able to write things about themselves that white authors would be chastised for writing.

Mr. Gates is not a Southerner and therefore was deprived, in a literary sense, of the daily lynchings, castrations, and church-, home-, and barn-burnings which all good and morally superior Yankees know are endemic to the South. He was born in Piedmont, West Virginia, almost on the Maryland line and just a few miles south of the Pennsylvania line. The county then had 22,000 inhabitants, of whom 351 were colored; most of these lived in Piedmont, a town of 2,565 souls.

Piedmont was a paper-mill town inhabited predominantly by workingclass people of Italian and Irish descent who belonged to craft unions that were not integrated until 1968. In spite of the racial prejudice built into all of our social and economic systems when he was growing up, Mr. Gates appears to be most comfortable when he is describing the colored world as a "neighborhood" rather than a "condition of existence." I believe his memories suffer when he feels obliged to plug into the usual, tired racism outlet. No fair-minded person can deny that painful indignities were inflicted on colored people by the segregation of lunch counters, restrooms, and other public facilities. Mr. Gates was a victim of that cruel system, but, judging from his book and in spite of his often studied assertions about race, his early years were far more happy and easy than not.

A ten-page section and many other references are devoted to the subject of hair--hot combs, curling irons, "natural kink," Murray's "serious grease," stocking caps, etc. According to Mr. Gates, he spent much of his "childhood and adolescence messing with my hair." The hair-obsession section of the book might give credence to that old joke about why God gave colored people rhythm. Answer: "Because He messed up so badly on their hair."

Mr. Gates's mother was one of 12 children in a well-respected, hardworking Piedmont family named Coleman. Seeing all 12 of them together confirmed for the author why Africans in the New World came to be called colored people. "Their colors ran the full spectrum of brown ... from the richest dark chocolate to the creamiest cafe au lait." The Gates part of the family lived in Cumberland, Maryland, "25 miles, half a dozen shades of brown complexion, and as many grades of hair away." Mr. Gates writes: "My grandfather [Gates] and his father looked like white people, and they married the lightest black people they could find. ... My father's generation, sensing a depletion of the gene pool, so it's been said, married the darkest Negroes they could find." The Colemans were a self-righteous, non-drinking, non-smoking, non-gambling group who emphasized "close-cropped, well-oiled hair and well-washed automobiles," whereas the Gateses were card-playing, Scotch-drinking people who read detective novels, did crossword puzzles, and attended good colleges. When Mr. Gates's great-great-grandmother died in Cumberland in 1892, her obituary read: "Died Today, Jane Gates, City. An Estimable Colored Lady."