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Colored People (review)

Colored People by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is an autobiographical account of what it was like for a black youth to grow up in Piedmont, West Virginia. Most readers, I'm sure, will find it fascinating. Whites will take an almost voyeuristic delight in discovering what some blacks were thinking about them. And they will be rewarded: "White people, [Mama] said, were dirty. They tasted right out of pots on the stove." And black people—well, wasn't that last quote sufficient? Gates has a wonderful style. At times it seems he is perched upon the wall around Yale University—from which he graduated summa cum laude— finding phrases first from academia and then from the surrounding New Haven ghetto. "People say that God compensates a person when He takes away a sense or a limb. ... In Mr. Comby Kurl's case, his compensatory gift was the capacity to tell lies . . . that nigger could lie his ass off." This book, however, is much more than a thoroughly engaging read. It is well known that information on black Appalachians in book form is extremely limited. In fact, my choice, before Gates's book, of the best autobiographical work in that field would have to be Ely by Ely Green. (One indication of how long it has been since that book was published is that one of Green's grandfathers was a Confederate general and the other was a slave!) In contrast, Gates, now forty-four, saw the crucial transitions of the civil rights era as a high school student, so he was right there when these dramatic and important changes were happening and he writes about them with exceptional candor. Because his family was living in a small town, for them "the TV was the ritual arena for the drama of race." Watching the children in Litde Rock integrating Central High School, for example, Gates quotes his father, "They handpicked those children ... no dummies, no nappy hair, heads not too kinky, lips not too thick, do disses and no dats." Going beyond the media, the author also describes his own efforts to effect change in Piedmont, and how various members of the family and the community reacted.