Colored People: A Memoir

by Henry Louis Gates Jr.

In a coming-of-age story as enchantingly vivid and ribald as anything Mark Twain or Zora Neale Hurston, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., recounts his childhood in the mill town of Piedmont, West Virginia, in the 1950s and 1960s and ushers readers into a gossip, of lye-and-mashed-potato “processes,” and of slyly stubborn resistance to the indignities of segregation.
 
A winner of the Chicago Tribune ’s Heartland Award and the Lillian Smith Prize, Colored People is a pungent and poignant masterpiece of recollection, a work that extends and deepens our sense of African American history even as it entrances us with its bravura storytelling

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, History, Race, African American, Biography, Biography Memoir

216 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Henry Louis "Skip" Gates Jr. is a Professor of African and African-American Studies at Harvard University and Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. He is well-known as a literary critic, an editor of literature, and a proponent of black literature and black cultural studies.

Reviews

[Gretchen Rubin]

A wonderful memoir of Gates's childhood, of his extended family and their West Virginia town.

[Rhonda Browning · Rating 5 out of 5]

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is an extraordinary scholar, particularly on African-American issues. He was born and raised in Piedmont, West Virginia during the time of early racial desegregation and, as a black man, he was directly influenced by this dramatic historical period. Gates graduated summa cum laude from Yale University with a degree in history, then received a Ph.D. in English from Cambridge.
He has written for The New Yorker, The Village Voice, Time, The New Republic, and other prominent magazines. In addition to Colored People: A Memoir, Gates has authored and co-authored several books including Figures in Black: Works, Signs, and the “Racial” Self (1987), The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (1988), and Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man (1997).
The preface to Colored People is a letter from Gates to his daughters, Maggie and Liza and, though the book is dedicated to his father Henry Louis Gates, Sr. and in memory of his mother Pauline Augusta Coleman Gates, the entire autobiography is written in conversational tone, as if Gates were recounting his stories not only to his daughters, but to their entire generation.
Gates’ collection of memories describes the era long since past (both for good and for bad) when blacks and whites were segregated, and the subsequent integration of these colors, and what it was like to live in that world and be a part of its evolution. The title Colored People is beautifully appropriate, not only for the shades of black America it represents, but for each one of us; black, white, red, yellow: none of us are see-through.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. invites us, through his words, to live with him in Piedmont, West Virginia and experience life—black life—through his eyes. We stroll through his town, invade his cultural rituals as a welcome guest, experience the love of family and community with him, and suffer the pain and frustration of segregation alongside him. I felt privileged to walk with Gates into segregated, comfortable, welcoming, “safe” black cultural spaces I could never enter otherwise: a black funeral, a black church, a black barbershop, a black family reunion. In contrast, when entering places outside these “safe” zones, I felt anger and pain at being judged, criticized, and belittled because of skin color.
Gates emphasizes to his readers, through his personal life experiences, that color is simply an outside condition that changes with the sunshine. He allows us to see that we are all human beings first, experiencing the same emotions, passions, and ambitions as the man next to us, regardless of his color.
He doesn’t discount white racism though, nor try to “Uncle Tom” it into something to be scoffed at as negligible. He allows us to know what West Virginia was like in the 1950’s through the eyes of a young black man. We feel his warm acceptance when he falls for the affections of a white girl, and when he is recognized for superior intellect among his peers, many of whom are white. We share in the camaraderie he feels when he plays ball with his white friends. But then we are appalled when he is forced to leave the company of their table in a restaurant and stand at the counter, because of his skin color. We are angered because those same white friends don’t stick up for him when he is forcibly thrown from a dance club simply because he is black.
Through both the segregation and integration, Gates shares with us what he finds to be of greatest value in his life; the love of his family. His memoir is somewhat biographical in this sense, in that the lives of his maternal family, the Colemans, and his paternal family, the Gateses, are shared with us in detail. We learn how Henry Louis Gates, Jr. found the support and strength to become the intellectual force he is today. Through the lives of his family members, we see yet another generation of segregated black America. We learn what it is like to be “kept down” in a dead-end mill job, to be forced to drink from a separate water fountain, to be drawn into a box and dared to cross its lines.
Through the Colemans and the Gateses we experience the freedom of integration, but also the fear and uncertainty of leaving behind a safe and comfortable life we have come to accept, if not love. There is fear and discomfort in change, and we dread its revolution even as we feel its excitement through Gates’ memories.
Gates’ optimistic personality shines throughout his book. It’s refreshing to me that, despite his formidable education and vast first-hand knowledge of racism, segregation and integration, his autobiography is not written in lofty, scholarly terminology, but in an easy, relaxed manner that informs, educates, and leaves the reader with the impression of having enjoyed an intimate chat with a good friend.
Colored People: A Memoir is a text which, in my opinion, should be a part of every West Virginia student’s high school or university curriculum. Gates’ underlying message—that freedom should never be taken for granted—is one that must be ingrained in every American citizen, regardless of color or creed. His personal memoirs—one West Virginia man’s record of an era—offer a candid glimpse into the trials of integration few of us today, thankfully, will never experience. This book is not to be missed by anyone who cares about history, about race, and about multicultural America as we now know it and how it came to be.

[Koren · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a coming of age memoir of what it was like to grow up as a black person in West Virginia in the 50's and 60's. What I liked best about this book was that it wasnt a story of poverty or 'look how hard my life was'. He does deal a lot with the topic of discrimination, but more than that, the author had a loving family and a close knit community, which made him rich in other ways other than money.

[Debbe · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this with my book group and I really enjoyed it. Gates was growing up African American in small town West Virginia at the same time I was growing up in large city Kentucky. His extended family reminded me a lot of my large extended family. The music he listened to was the music I was listening to on the radio. His church experience, while not Roman Catholic, still reminded me of the church community of my youth. The difference of course is that I never faced the discrimination, that was an everyday part of his life. This is an excellent memoir.

[Andrew]

Henry Louis Gates was, for a long time, best known for being arrested for trying to get into his own damn home, or for his PBS documentaries, rather than the deep, semiotic scholarship that he made his intellectual name writing. Being the weirdo I am, I read the semiotic stuff first, and only now am reading something of his that's a bit more user-friendly.

Memoirs are more likely to be bad than good, let's face it. And that goes double for memoirs by writers. But this is a rather moving, lyrical thing, about Gates' own family -- a delightfully shit-talking millworker patriarch and a fiercely protective matriarch -- and a whole black community in the heart of po' white Appalachia, a world that most folks, myself included, know nothing about. And it's about the struggle for integration, told not through the normal narrative, but how everyday encounters between two others had to be resolved in newly integrated high schools and the living rooms of his white childhood friends.

[Phillip · Rating 3 out of 5]

Skip Gates' memoir of growing up in West Virginia is a really interesting portrayal of a multi-racial society struggling with economic and social problems. Gates' prose is moving, funny, and heart rending at times.

I actually got to hear him do a reading from this book when I was in undergrad, and Gates' presentation style mirrors exactly the warm, funny, human character that the book sets him up as.

[Jeanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautifully crafted memoir about Gates' childhood experiences riding the historical wave of desegregation and its complex impact upon small town American life. The author's sense of humor was a surprising gift without taking away from the serious nature of the account.

[Andy Oram · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although Gates is a noted academic, this book is a very different offering. A memoir about his childhood, he covers a range of heart-warming and thought-provoking topics in rural living, race, and identity. The book cuts through politics to offer a very three-dimensional report on the lives of

[Mtutuzeli Nyoka · Rating 5 out of 5]

Henry Louis Gates Jr. is a Professor of African and African-American Studies at Harvard University and Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. His book ‘Colored People’ is a splendid novel, and a classic memoir.
It is a moving account about what it was to be ‘colored’ in the United States of the 1950s. The stage for his novel is his native Piedmont, an immigrant town in West Virginia, which he describes in the most vivid and sentimental terms.

Gates’ view of the world was of a child growing up in a colored neighbourhood-one which he depicts as ‘not so much of a neighbourhood as a condition of existence’. His neighbourhood’s themes are the book’s themes- the debasement, the villains and heroes, the names (both the derogatory and loving), the culture, the church, the friendships, the love, the vulnerability of his race and its disappointments, his family’s joys and sorrows.

Marvellous is Gates’ account of his relationship with his mother, and the gradual evolution of young ‘skippy’ into the potent force and unceasing voice against injustice. In the margins of the story we see his rebelliousness and stubborn sense of justice which he inherited from his mother.

In the main, the book is about colored life in Piedmont, when white people were not around. It is tempting to look at the book as only about race and prejudice, which it partially is. But it is also about human sentiments and existence written in human language. Its beauty and genius is in capturing what some have forgotten, and what is commonplace, in a language that many don’t possess.

It is a human story that almost outleaps any contextualisation. It is a mirror of a lost time, and finding one’s roots. Its beauty lies not only in its engaging insights, but also in its characters and the aesthetic nature of the narrative.

His language is never more sublime, grand and almost sailing beyond the known limits of great prose than in the book’s pen-ultimate paragraph: ‘The colored mill picnic would finish its run peaceably, then, if with an air of wistful resignation. All I know is that Nemo’s corn never taster saltier, his coffee never smelled fresher, than when these hundreds of Negros gather to say goodbye to themselves, their heritage, and their sole link to each other, wiped out of existence by the newly enforced anti-Jim Crow laws.’

Gates wrote the book for his daughters’ Maggie and Liza. But, it is also an Ode to his mother-the visionary woman with elegant beauty who shaped his life. The last chapters read like a son’s valediction to a departed parent-expressing love and regret: the inevitable emotions of the living when death takes a loved one away.

Mostly, we read and acquire knowledge to know how things are. But, Gates’ passionate tale is how things were. Yet, with the sweep and narrative of his life, we observe the unbreakable bonds that tie the past with the present. This is why Gates’ masterpiece, a graceful collection of tales and quest for lost history, is so important.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

An engaging memoir of growing up black in a white majority town similar to my own In the 1950s. It provides a window into what those black kids whom I want to school with and played ball with may have experienced. Gates is a fine writer.

[Priscilla Herrington · Rating 4 out of 5]

Henry Louis Gates Jr. published Colored People in 1995. It is a memoir of his childhood and youth in Piedmont, West Virginia in the period immediately before Brown v. Board of Education (1954). In some ways Piedmont was behind the times even in the 50s; colored men could work in the paper mill, but only on the loading dock. And yet, Piedmont complied promptly with the Supreme Court's desegregation order; thus, Skippy Gates never attended a segregated school.

This is a rich memoir, peopled by members of Gates' extended families - his father's people down in Cumberland, Maryland, and his mother's people, the Colemans, right there in Piedmont. Gates provide a warm flavor of life in a small town and especially, life among the Negroes when the white folks weren't around. The reader meets church congregations, the barber and his customers, gamblers and lovers, and the various elders who helped raise him and his brother.

The high point of the year was the Colored Picnic sponsored by the paper company; there was another picnic for the company's white employees and their families and friends. When the company began to integrate its work force, it was a grand day for Negro men who could get better paying jobs in various areas of the company. When the company, in the interests of integration (and not wanting to get in trouble with the federal government for discrimination) did away with the separate picnics, it was a sad day indeed. Gates describes in wonderful detail that last colored picnic, attended by everyone including those who had moved away but came back for the occasion.

Colored People provides an honest appraisal of what was gained and what was lost as even the sleepy town of Piedmont caught up with modern times. Gates also presents his own coming of age, as he discovered a world beyond Piedmont and became politically aware. In his Personal Statement, as part of his application to Yale, he began:

My grandfather was colored, my father was Negro, and I am black.

The Statement ended:

As always, whitey now sits in judgment of me, preparing to cast my fate....

After reading Colored People, I understood why Gates has become a leading figure on African American genealogy. He was very aware of his family tree from his childhood. Genealogy was important to his family. His participation in the tv program Who Do You Think You Are? allows him to introduce others to their own roots. Perhaps finding out about one's ancestors may offset the loss of community that Gates notes in Colored People.

[sydney · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book! Gates has a really fun writing style-- very conversational, down-to-earth, and funny. Gates describes growing up in Piedmont, West Virginia in the middle of the Civil Rights movement, which, according to his description, was something that mostly happened on TV but then trickled into everyday life.

I liked the first half of this book a lot. Gates's descriptions of his childhood neighborhood and all the colorful characters who inhabited it were priceless. (My favorite description of someone: "as ugly as homemade sin dipped in misery.") After that, as Gates described his induction into religion and growing older, I was a little less engaged, but it's possible that's because I was trying to read it on the world's most crowded and angry train.

Recommended for people who like memoir, Gates fans, and people interested in learning more about how the Civil Rights movement affected people's lives outside of the epicenters of that movement.

[Joanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is how memoir is DONE. Thoroughly engaging from beginning to end, Gates tells his town, family, and personal history-from growing up in a fully segregated South, through a painful series of integrations, and into a period of Black Pride that celebrates both Afros and confrontations. He recognizes the power of words and tells the story slowly, and richly. He sees the ways in which segregation both helps and hinders him and his friends and relatives, and his calm, measured voice tells of terrible injustices and happy memories side by side. This was a glimpse into a world that I could never be invited to, and I am terribly glad to have read it.

[Serena S. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Professor Gates is my mentor at Harvard and I thought it was about time I read his 1995 memoir. All I can say is: refreshingly honest and lucid; compulsively readable (and relatable); doused in the beloved warm sepia tones of his childhood in Piedmont, West Virginia. A real treat.

[SanzReads · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed his memoir thoroughly. It had some great laugh out loud moments!

[Holly · Rating 3 out of 5]

I bought this in the mid 1990s and never finished. I figured 2020 was as good a time as any to finally read it. I quickly remembered why I had set it aside before. Gates has many valuable insights into race, but the narration is so flat. Most of the action is summarized rather than dramatized, as when the narrator mentions that he was walking down the street when "Mr. Chili"

pulled me aside to tease me. And then he stopped abruptly, placed his hand on my head and looked into my eyes, and said that I had "not a bad grade of hair," and that if combed it backward it would look better. As forgettable as the incident must sound, it was the way he looked at me, right in the eyes, and the warmth of us hand on my head that made me know he thought I was special. It was because I was Pauline Coleman's boy.

I wish this had been a scene instead of an anecdote. I wish we'd gotten the conversation as dialogue instead of paraphrase. It would have some dramatic tension that way. Instead the story is so slack.

Another thing that drains dramatic tension from the work is that Gates so often tells the point of an anecdote in its introduction, or starts so many stories with a spoiler, as when he begins a section like this: "It was in 1966, between my first summer at Peterkin and my second, that I gave up the evangelical Methodist Church for good." It's fine to do this once in a way if the climax of a story is so strange or compelling that people will read to figure out how the character got there. But for something as mundane as leaving one church for another, or when it's done more often than not, it just feels amateurish.

This is not a terrible book, but there are so many better books in the world, that you should read one of them instead.

[Leah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Einfühlsame Erinnerung an Gates' Kindheit
Gates schildert in dem Buch seine Jugend der 50er und 60er Jahre und beschreibt, wie er als junger Schwarzer die Zeit der Umbrüche erlebte.
Dabei beschreibt er immer wieder, in welchem Zwiespalt er sich befindet: Zu radikal für manche, zu seicht für andere. Der Akademiker in ihm kann aber toll argumentieren, sodass seine Einstellung oft schlüssig und verständnisvoll wirkt. Er verwebt in diesem Buch dabei geschichtliche Ereignisse mit dem eigenem Leben. So sprüht die Erzählung nur so von Leben und Energie. An manchen Stellen musste ich über seine Schilderungen laut lachen, konnte mir die gemeinsamen Mahlzeiten deutlich vorstellen und war immer mal wieder ziemlich empört über die vermeintliche Normalität der Ausgeschlossenheit.
Er schildert eindrücklich das Familienleben, Gemeinschaftsgefühle - damit endet das Buch auch: Gates gelingt ein runder Bogen, was mit der Papiermühle begann, endet auch dort. Richtig erwachsen fühlt sich Gates außerdem auch erst nach dem Tod seiner Mutter.
Was ich gelernt habe: Ich konnte einige Bildungslücken was afroamerikanische Geschichte angeht schließen. Außerdem wurde ich mir schaurigerweise der Zeit bewusst: Er selbst beschreibt die 50er und 60er als etwas im Sepia-Ton und dieses verklärte Bild wurde für mich aufgebrochen, denn immer wieder dachte ich: "Uff, das ist noch gar nicht so lang her".

[Desmond Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

An enjoyable memoir by Henry Louis Gates, recounting his youth in West Virginia. He shows strong black families in a strong black community, taking care of themselves and proud of it. He shows what was lost and won when Jim Crow gave way to integration, but more than anything he shows the strength and cultural richness of his community. His father's comments about pretty much everything are priceless and had me laughing out loud. He is more honest and less preachy than many who write memoirs. Great reading.

[Lori · Rating 4 out of 5]

I would give this book an almost four. I have been a fan of Henry Louis Gates since Finding your Roots. This is his memoir of his childhood growing up in Piedmont West Virginia. He writes of his family. The struggles with racism. the good and tough parts of his life. A pretty good memoir. Learned some more about this interesting intelligent man.

[Natalie Ramirez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Colored People is one of the best memoirs that I have read. The writing is raw and reflective.

[Linda Spear · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gates is a very entertaining writer and I really devoured this book about his growing up in a tiny industrial town in NE PA. The stories of his family and friends and his awakening to life as a black person kept me reading. When I saw the title, I don't remember thinking it was his story but rather a book about race.....which, of course, it basically becomes.

[Peacegal · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars -- Through evocative writing and humor, Gates shows us what it was like to grow up black in a small Southern West Virginia town during the civil rights era. I for the most part enjoyed it, the at-times crude humor and references may be a turnoff to my older book group ladies.

West Virginia is a land of natural wonders, but unfortunately some members of Gate's family took it for granted. His uncle Nemo, for instance, saw poaching as a higher calling rather than a crime:

Nemo wasn't all that big on the law when it came to shooting deer, rabbits, or squirrels, and catching fish. "Nephew, there's man's laws," he'd allow, his voice trailing off. "And then there's God's laws. God, of course, put all those animals on earth to be killed and eaten, and a great number of those unfortuante souls depositied in the Potomac Valley were put there to be killed and eaten by Uncle Jim. He would justify killing so many animals in terms of the difference between God's law and man's law: Thou shalt not kill applied only man to man.

Nemo's ethics when it came to hunting could sink even lower, when we read that he was not above jacklighting deer, which refers to blinding them with spotlights at night so they could be easily killed.

In the more, um, interesting aspects of hunting, we read of Nemo

[L]aughing real good, his eyes shining as they did only at the thought of sex and death. With turkey hunting, he had both at once. Sex and death. Maybe that's why he loved it so much.

Paging Carol Adams!

[Ilana711 · Rating 3 out of 5]

While I liked how this book compared the author's life to what was happening about segregation and integration in the US, I thought that the book didn't have a solid main idea. Throughout the book, Henry introduces many aspects of his life, but in the end, I couldn't tie them all together to figure out a theme. I think that the author wanted to present integration as the theme but I thought that the book didn't say enough about Henry's thoughts and actions on integration for it to be the theme.
One thing I really liked about this book was how the author made hair a big part of his life. In Henry's neighborhood, hair is considered a big deal. A person's hair could determine how they were judged by other people. People with "good hair" could be treated better than people with "bad hair". I liked this concept because I thought it was interesting how the author used something as simple as hair to show judging inside a community of people who were judged by people with a different skin color. Also, I thought the importance of hair in Henry's neighborhood was a symbol for segregation because in this book people are judged for their hair but everyone has different kinds of hair. This is like how people had different skin colors and were judged based on them during the time period the book was set in.

[RYCJ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved Mr. Gate's word choice. So prominently square, yet eloquently fashionable. Almost started this pitch off naming him Sir Gates, following the way he tells on `Colored People' in rather ascot form. Informing some, and reminding others, he graduates us on an annotated history of Piedmont, (a place I'd never heard of), on out to population count and who lived where, did what, and how so, to soufflé us on `prime time' history and familial dealings.

My biggest peeve was wishing Mr. Gates had not changed suits so abruptly and frequently. For instance, he spent a good minute on good hair/bad hair and complexion, but wouldn't treat the `one time when this or that happened' to the same good minute. Dang it! I wanted the longer versions about his parents and the Gates' and Coleman, and even a little more about him, before moving on to the next `prime time' sport.

I really had to get used to that aspect of the storytelling, though too, which I now adore, I love the fact that I can pick up Colored People any time and start reading any section, over and over! Certainly very well done. It's raw and real. A Must, Must Read now sitting on my keeper shelf!

[Lucy]

Gates explains the difficulties that people of color had to go through in the 1950’s. Even though colored people were being mistreated they still stood strong with their head held high. In high school Gates and 3 other friends began an organization called the Fearsome Foursome. When Gates was in college they decided they wanted to integrate a Night Club. The owner of the Club made them leave. While leaving the club the FF had to dodge bottles, and threats coming their way. Gates called and complained about the situation. The owner had the choice to either integrate or shut down. He shut down. This memoir was written to show what it was like before the civil rights era, during the time of segregation, when colored people and white people went to different schools. He wanted to tell the story of how integration was spread throughout the state.

[Redhead42 Berry · Rating 4 out of 5]

I REALLY wanted to like this book more but only was able to give it 4 stars. While the story was charming, sometimes delightfully raw, and very heart touching, the writing was more like a conversation who's subject would wander down a side road, only to return to the main road a chapter or two later.
I still would recommend it because, like I said, it was charming in a way that many other autobiographies are polished and perfected into a better version of the person we are reading about. Mr. Gates seems to tell you how it was with no excuses...no embarassment...and I REALLY appreciate that!
So proud of my fellow West Virginian!!!

[Brenda Conry · Rating 4 out of 5]

His love and admiration for his family and community shines in his memories of this era. He puts you right there with them all through the book.
UPDATE: I just finished this for the second time. I picked up on his more detailed description of his life and the community than I remembered from the first read. The English teacher he insisted on having as his advisor his first year of college must have really been something. Prof. Gates writes so well. As a white person trying to learn more about the Black community--everyday details about life, along with its history and grievances, I could ask for no better guide.

[Amy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book had a charming, meandering style to it, however, whether there was to be some culmination of the various vignettes the author presented, I could never tell. There was no sense of urgency in the writing, and though there doesn't need to be, this rather easily transmuted into a lack of urgency to read on my part. And so, although I was not finished when the time came to return the book to the library, I returned it anyway. Perhaps I'll pick it up again, perhaps I won't; either way, I don't know if there is any more for me to glean from this particular book, well-written though it is.

[Andrea · Rating 2 out of 5]

Did not care much for this at all and I really like the TV specials I have I seen from Henry Louise Gates Jr. I went into this book thinking it was going to be a touching maybe funny memoir. I found it to be more like an explanation of colored people. The things touched on in the book are mostly very common to the Black American community, like good hair - bad hair(goes on about the kitchen), how a family can have many different children and all have different skin tones. Really! To those not aware of all that maybe it is interesting but I not so much for me.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book as part of my West Virginia History course. It is an autobiography of growing up during desegregation in West Virginia, and the sadness to see some things change for the worse and the joy of seeing other things change for the better. Somewhat nostalgic, but an interesting window into the time.