This book is not one that I would have expected to read, or to really enjoy. The title didn't attract me, and no one recommended it to me. I simply stumbled upon it.
I ordered it because I had already read some things by the author. To my mind, he is just about as skilled in the art of writing--in syntax, choice of words, organization, and also in researching and understanding subject matter--as any writer whose work I have ever read. He knows what to say, how to say it very well, and when enough is enough, which is too often a lost art.
If you have watched any episodes of Finding Your Roots, the television series about celebrities who explore the branches of their family trees through DNA testing, you have seen him. Or perhaps you will remember him from a documentary or two.
He is an impressive fellow on TV, but many of the talking heads on the flat screen are, to put it kindly, less than intellectually endowed. Anyone with the talent can be taught to speak, and given the right things to say, might sound impressive. Does anyone remember the fictional television newsman Ted Baxter, who looked good and sounded good but who understood next to nothing? There have been many real Ted Baxters. They enter our living rooms daily, and they are paid millions.
But as I said, I had read this author's work before. He is in no way a common commentator. His advanced degrees include a Doctorate. He is on the staff at Harvard. In eighth grade, he won West Virginia's coveted Golden Horseshoe Award, an honor that had been denied his older brother for reasons most improper.
He has written quite a lot. One book I have was too large to lift when I was recovering from surgery, and it is also very hard to put down, for reasons unrelated to heft.
I recently put another of his books on the Kindle and read it.
It is autobiographical. The author grew up in the mill town of Piedmont, West Virginia, on the North Branch Potomac River and the Maryland border. Piedmont is almost equidistant between Pittsburgh, PA and Washington, DC. It is twenty five miles by country road from Cumberland, MD, Colonel Washington's headquarters during the French and Indian War.
The author was born in 1950, and the book paints a picture, or weaves a tapestry, of his life in the years that followed.
The writing style is a departure from the author's usual, rather professorial, but very readable approach. It is vividly entertaining and ribald, and it is delivered in a story-telling tone, with just a touch of the Jean Shepherd narrative technique. One is enthralled by the family stories. It is an easy and very captivating read.
The point of view is that of a young African American growing up in small town America in an era in which the words "civil" and "rights" were not yet commonly used together. Life was good--considering.
For me, that perspective is worth hearing, especially when it is so well described by one who lived it first hand. I never experienced the exclusions and closed doors that were often reluctantly but necessarily accepted then as the way things were.
The author recounts conversations among his aunts and uncles--conversations to which no white people would ever have been privy. The subjects are diverse--culinary things, people's impressions of the appearances of the children who were escorted by the Army to Central High School in Little Rock, AR in 1957 after Brown v. Board of Education, and Nat "King" Cole's hair are just a few. There are less than favorable generalizations about white people that elicited smiles and chuckles from me. I enjoyed his accounts of the annual Colored Mill Picnics--the picnics for the mill employees were segregated in those days.
The book takes us to the author's enrollment at WVU Potomac State College at Keyser, where a tough and demanding English professor influenced him, and where he decided to not follow in his older brother's footsteps in pursuit of the study of medicine. The account runs it course when the author reaches adulthood.
I really do recommend this autobiography by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., not only for reading pleasure, but for gaining a little knowledge and insight, enjoying some rich humor, and leaving the reader with a warm feeling. I don't think that sentence is constructed with the parallelism that Louis Gates would have ensured, but I am going to go with it anyway.
The book will likely be best enjoyed by those who were around in those days, as I was.
Saving the best for last, the title is Colored People.
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