Albert Murray, the black social critic, once wisecracked, "Sure we got our troubles, but if white folks could be black for just one Saturday night, they wouldn't never want to be white folks no more." Henry Louis Gates Jr. does not go nearly that far in Colored People (Knopf; 216 pages; $22), his memoir of growing up in a West Virginia mill town during the 1950s and '60s. But his beguiling elegy for the exuberant society blacks created for themselves under the veil of segregation provides one explanation of why few African Americans, even if they had the power to change, would choose to be anything else.
As the chairman of Harvard's black-studies department and the author of several volumes of dense literary theory as well as countless op-ed pieces on racial issues, Gates, 44, has become one of the nation's most influential intellectuals. In Colored People he turns from scholarship to autobiography and writes intimately about his childhood, his teenage religious fanaticism, a frustrated youthful romance with a white girl. Still, history is never distant from Gates' mind. His coming of age coincided with one of America's most tumultuous eras, as the civil rights movement propelled blacks from "the colored world of the fifties ((to)) a Negro world of the early sixties ((to)) the advent of the black world of the later sixties."
These upheavals were slow to arrive for the 350 colored people in Gates' hometown of Piedmont, nestled in a sleepy hollow between the Allegheny Mountains and the Potomac River Valley. At first folks simply watched the speeches and marches on television. When the effects of the civil rights movement finally did come to the town in the 1960s, the impact was ambiguous. Blacks welcomed expanded job opportunities and an end to humiliating reminders of where -- quite literally -- they stood: they were now allowed to sit down in white restaurants. But integration also meant that the nurturing institutions blacks had created to take the sting out of segregation would become moribund.
Among these segregated but proud institutions was the elementary school where generations received the sort of rigorous education that inner-city blacks today can hardly imagine. Another was the separate-but-more-than-equal "colored picnic," where blacks who worked at the paper mill gathered to dance, play bid whist and gorge themselves on soul food. Small wonder, as Gates writes, that for many of his parents' generation, "integration was experienced as a loss . . . Who in his right mind would want to go to the mill picnic with the white folks when it meant shutting the colored one down?" The black men and women of Piedmont never thought of themselves as second-class people despite their second-class status. This society teemed with role models , of hard work, family stability and excellence.