HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR., AFRICAN-AMERICAN SCHOLAR
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the African-American scholar, was born in 1950 and raised in Piedmont, West Virginia. An eminent academic at Harvard University, chairman of its African-American Studies Department, literary scholar, cultural critic, author, journalist, filmmaker, professor, builder of an academic department, promoter of genealogy, gadfly of the status quo — Professor Gates has been many things.
He’s risen to great heights in the academic world, a kind of intellectual broker whose name and influence creates or sponsors heavyweight academic projects. He’s a canny businessman, too. Like David McCullough, Gates has used exposure on PBS to make himself a more marketable author.
As a boy, Gates was aware that his home county in West Virginia, Mineral County, had 22,000 people, only 351 of whom were African-American. “Colored,” was the word used in the ‘50’s. Piedmont was a mostly Irish- and Italian-American town, with a cluster of WASP families on East Hampshire Street and a single Jewish family. The town was nestled in the Allegheny Mountains, with fine views of the Potomac River.
The Westvaco paper mill had opened in Piedmont back in 1888, offering good-paying jobs. By the late 1950’s, the paper mill was an aging patriarch, both hated and revered as patriarchs are. By then, the health and profitability of the mill were the source of some anxiety in town.
Henry’s parents had named him “Henry Louis Gates, Jr.” but everyone called him “Skip.” He learned there was nothing wrong with the sulfurous rotten egg smell that suffused the town. It was the smell of the bleaches used at the paper mill. “Smells like money to me,” is what Piedmont children were told to say when outsiders complained of the odor.
Skip’s father, Henry Louis Gates, Sr. had a union job at the paper mill and also worked a second job, so there was money enough at home. Skip’s father was from a middle-class family in Cumberland, West Virginia. The Gates family were storytellers: funny, caustic, and blunt.
Henry Gates was also tough-minded; he used to chide people who went to an integrated picnic and only sat with other black folks (“Don’t go over there… if all you’re going to do is Jim Crow yourself.”) Skip got the message and mixed with the O’Rourkes and the O’Briens and the DiBualdos and the Barbaritos. One of his friends was Finnegan Lannon. Another was Johnny DiPilato.
Henry also warned Skip darkly: “People go crazy over sex.” The clear admonition was that the Gates family did NOT do that; a Gates man had brains and ambition, and played the long game, taking his sweet time before getting hitched, and not worrying about who elbowed who at a nightclub or who looked at someone else’s wife wrong.
Skip’s mother was a Coleman, from a strong, working-class family rooted in Piedmont and skilled at carpentry, masonry, and fixing anything broken. The nine Coleman brothers were a hovering presence and very serious about food: fried chicken with gravy, mashed potatoes, buttered rolls, green beans, boiled eggs, corn pudding, iceberg lettuce, and fresh tomatoes were all subjects of sharp pleasure and nuanced conversation. The Colemans cooked their vegetables for hours, with fatback, ham hocks or bacon drippings. It was nothing for them to spent an entire Sunday cooking and eating together. Life was about family, and the Coleman family was about food.
Skip’s mother often wrote and delivered eulogies for African-Americans who’d passed away. Her son recalled “She made the ignorant and ugly sound like scholars and movie stars, turned the mean and evil into saints and angels.” If the Coleman and Gates families protected their children well, and embraced their segregated lives, they still knew that life was hard, and Mrs. Gates was determined to describe the dead as they’d wished to be in life — and might have been in a gentler world.
As the Gates family drove home from the funeral, Henry would tease his wife that by the time she was done with the eulogizing he couldn’t even recognize the sonofabitch in the casket. But they both knew she’d done right. A sweet sendoff from the world was not too much to ask.
Skip reflected later that the white people that colored people knew in Piedmont were like allegorical characters, labeled by occupation: Mr. Mail Man, Mr. Insurance Man, Mr. Landlord Man. And the most-feared: Mr. Police Man.
The Coleman and Gates families didn’t dislike white people so much as pity them. “They can’t cook” was a common comment. “That’s why they have to hire us to do their cooking for them.” “They don’t know nothing about seasoning,” said Skip’s Aunt Marguerite. As the civil rights movement heated up, Skip had trouble grasping why black people would risk their lives to integrate lunch counters with that awful white people’s food, dry and pasty. “It’s the principle of the thing,” one of Skip’s relatives explained.
When he was 14, Skip Gates broke a hip. It was misdiagnosed at first, and one leg grew longer than the other, and he never was much good at baseball, the big sport in Piedmont. But he didn’t feel sorry for himself. His mother thought his medical troubles would help him someday when he was a doctor. Skip had his own bedroom with a handsome bookcase, and was allowed to order books from the Book-of-the-Month Club, like “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” and Claude Brown’s stirring novel “Manchild in the Promised Land.”
The written word and the spoken word, so fascinating and so different. Skip loved the thick gossip that broke out when colored women were together in somebody’s kitchen, or when the loaders at the mill got talking. These sparsely educated people could be brilliant, scathing, terribly funny. The loaders, Skip decided were “the Senate, the House, and the Supreme Court of Public Opinion.” They were always searching for new subjects of scrutiny. If none appeared, then old business could always be chewed over, names named, highfalutin’ folks brought low.
Skip had some trouble bonding with his father until they started watching the evening news together. The program was just 15 minutes at first, but those 15 minutes finally gave Skip and his dad a common project. In 1959, when Skip was nine, he and his dad watched together as Mike Wallace interviewed Malcolm X for the TV program “The Hate that Hate Produced.” In 1963, father and son watched coverage of the March on Washington.
Henry loved New York Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. and never mind that Powell was a rogue and thoroughly corrupt. He was a black man defying white folks, doing it in style, and getting away with it. Ed Brooke getting elected to the U.S. Senate in Massachusetts in 1966. Carl Stokes being elected mayor of Cleveland in 1967. Henry and Skip stayed up late, watching the TV reports of these election returns, talking, analyzing, celebrating.
There was plenty of outrageous behavior in Piedmont, but the town was socially conservative. Change was suspect. Folks saw no reason to consolidate the high schools, fluoridate the water, or tell the mill to stop polluting. People saw no reason why anyone should leave town for more than a few years. To go to college was okay, or for a hitch in the army.
The Army might send you anywhere, and you were expected to keep your eyes open and return to Piedmont with funny stories about the crazy folks you’d met and the wild things you’d seen and done. You’d meet up with your buddies, wash the dust out of your system at the VFW Hall, drink gin and orange juice from paper cups, and tell stories. But after three or four years in the Army, you WERE expected to return. If you didn’t, you were acting big-headed and people would talk about this, and try to assign some reason for it.
The summer of 1965, Skip was painfully aware of the riots in Watts, California. At a church camp an Episcopalian priest gave him James Baldwin’s book “Notes of a Native Son,” another book that left a deep impression. Important things were happening in the wider world. A national civil rights movement. The first stirrings of Vietnam War protest. Skip began to realize that to fully develop his life, he would have to leave Piedmont, and not for a few years. but forever. With some trepidation, he let his Coleman uncles know that he believed in racial integration.
In 1969, Skip Gates left Piedmont for Yale University, where he graduated summa cum laude. He then got a doctorate at Cambridge University. He discovered academic resources far, far beyond anything available in Piedmont — though he never met an academic who could talk any better than those mamas in the kitchen in Piedmont, or those loaders at the mill.
He realized that some of the unease he felt from the Coleman clan was that his drive for integration was a threat to the all-Colored world they’d created with love, attention and enormous hard work. Racial segregation was cruel — but there was also comfort in the fact that everything was “colored”: schools, churches, neighborhoods, music, food. When they died, colored people knew they’d have a colored funeral with a colored preacher and be put to rest in a colored cemetery, among their own.
The implicit question to the ambitious young striver Skip Gates was: “Why? Why do you want to be one of THEM?”