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If properly admiring, however, Gates is not sanctimonious. He takes pleasure in describing his community's eccentrics, like Mr. Charlie, who confided that "George Washington was Abraham Lincoln's daddy," among other facts that whites had supposedly withheld from blacks; and churchy Miss Sarah, who consulted with Jesus every day, getting "full reports on all the seraphim and cherubim." Gates irreverently addresses such matters as blacks' fascination with their multitude of skin tones and their daily struggles to subdue their bushy hair. Even today, he writes, "so many black people still get their hair straightened that it's a wonder we don't have a national holiday for Madame C.J. Walker, who invented the process for straightening kinky hair, rather than Dr. King."
The strongest character in the book is Gates' mother Pauline, who looked down on whites as uncouth, dirty people who tasted their food "right out of the pot." Pauline's long struggle to become the owner of a home reflected the complicated, bittersweet consequences of change. Just as her children were on the brink of buying the house of a white family for whom Pauline had worked as a domestic, she began inventing reasons to back away from the purchase. Badgered by her son, she tearfully dredged up bitter memories of how the white family had mistreated her, compelling her to work on holidays instead of spending them with her family, and leaving money lying around to see if she would steal it. Pauline's children argued that she could exorcise those ghosts by making the house her own, and she relented. But as Gates acknowledges, "I'll never know if we did the right thing by buying her that house or if our insistence on vindicating her was somehow misguided."
What sets Gates' memoir apart from the harrowing, up-from-the-ghetto autobiographies that have appeared recently is its reminder that the black mainstream is not a tangle of pathology. Rather, he demonstrates, it is the source of a strong and resilient culture that has given the world such gifts as "a Jessye Norman aria, a Muhammad Ali shuffle, a Michael Jordan slam dunk, a Spike Lee movie, a Thurgood Marshall opinion, a Toni Morrison novel, James Brown's Camel Walk." Add to the list Gates' graceful, sparely written memoir, which establishes that he has not only brains but also a whole lot of soul.