by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Knopf, 1994
Anyone with more than a passing interest in African-American literature is probably familiar with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Professor of English and Chairman of Afro-American studies at Harvard, Gates has perhaps done more than any other scholar to make a place in the literary canon for previously excluded black authors. His work as editor, critic, and theorist has touched on many aspects of the black experience in America; in Colored People Gates turns his formidable intellectual faculties on his own experience.
As a memoir, Colored People is sometimes touching, often funny, always enjoyable. Gates, whose influential theory of signification posits that African-American texts generally comment on and "rewrite" one or more predecessor texts, consciously toys with the black tradition's "novel of movement," in which the protagonist makes a figurative move from innocence to experience and a literal move from one physical place to another (usually from "down South" to "up North"); Gates "signifies" on a body of literature ranging from early slave narratives to Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, and in doing so carves a niche for himself within that rich tradition. In the case of Colored People, the figurative move takes place almost wholly within Piedmont, West Virginia, a "village or town, or something in between" with a population of 2,565 in 1950, the year of Gates' birth. It is in this not-so-sleepy environment that Gates learns to read, falls in love, and finds the Lord; and it is from this place that Gates makes his literal move, to New Haven to study at Yale.
Gate's academic work, while more readable than most in his field, nevertheless demands a deep intellectual commitment on the part of the reader. His memoir is less demanding - Gates is writing for the masses. Colored People's voice is a model of the charmingly prosaic. Displaying an indebtedness to Tolstoy as well as Ellison, Gates' narrative mirrors common experience by bombarding the reader with characters and making no immediate distinction regarding their "importance." Rather, the reader draws such di stinctions after the passage of time (and pages), when certain characters reappear time and again to play major roles in Gate's life and others disappear altogether. Although this prosaic mode is conducive to "Down-home" storytelling, it it not without it problems. One often wishes that Gates would balance the dominant voice of the work with a more critical voice, so as to better analyze his childhood experience. Gates rarely delves analytically into his story in an attempt to help the reader understand the things that Gates surely already does; given Gate's relative lucidity in the critical realm, this is an unfortunate flaw. The reader may also find the method of transition grating, with its short paragraphs and maze-like tangents. However, this complai nt is minor, for once the reader becomes acclimated to the rural storytelling voice it will seem only natural, for instance, for a tale about Mama's distrust of white people to swing by a CBS documentary before dovetailing into a discussion of racial cook ing habits, where an uncle mysteriously stumbles into the narrative track:
White people, he said, were dirty: They tasted right out of pots on the stove. Only some kind of animal, or the lowest order of trash, would ever taste out of a pot on the stove . . . Tasting right out of the pot was almost as bad as drinking after somebody, on the same side of the cup or glass, or right after them on a Coca-Cola bottle without wiping their lips off real good. 'I'd rather go thirsty myself,' Uncle Raymond would say. By the mi-sixties, he was also given to pronouncing: I'd rather people call me a nigger than call me black.' If he'd had to choose between being called black and drinking out of the same bottle after another human being, I'm not sure what Uncle Raymond would have done.
In the poignant preface addressed to his daughters, Gates tries to explain why he penned Colored People. Essentially, he is struggling to find a balance between present and past and to dictate what place the category "race" will hold in his life:
I rebel at the notion that I can't be part of other groups, that I can't construct identities through elective affinity, that race must be the most important thing about me. Is that what I want on my gravestone: Here lies an African-American? So I'm divided. I want to be black, to know black, to luxuriate in whatever I might be calling blackness at any particular time - but to do so in order to come out on the other side, to experience a humanity that is neither colorless nor reducible to color.
It is in regards to this last sentiment that Colored People is so compelling. Attempting to achieve a balance that is particularly difficult for African-Americans given the troubled history and problematic present of the United States, Gates gives us, as readers, page after page of intensely human experience: some of which we can immediately relate to; some of which we marvel at through the distance of time, place, or race; all of which signifies, and is thus significant. (Andrew DuBois)