Linda, however, was not free to be his. “Skip,” after all, was black and she was white. And as “the age of dating dawned,” notes Gates, “the fact that it was an impossibility for us did not have to be spoken.” Much went unspoken-at least in racially mixed company-in the West Virginia hill country where he grew up. Yet, even as Gates learned the rules of racial etiquette, they were rapidly being revised. Piedmont-like the rest of the segregated South-was watching a way of life come to an end. The local school was desegregated in 1955, the year before Gates entered the first grade. And as Jim Crow died, Piedmont’s culture, inevitably, was changing.
Gates does not exactly celebrate the transformation. For though integration promised equality, it destroyed much of what he held dear. His tone becomes decidedly plaintive when he writes of the last black picnic at the paper mill where Gates’s father and “nearly everybody” in the area worked. “All I know is that Nemo’s corn never tasted saltier, his coffee never smelled fresher, than when these hundreds of Negroes gathered 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.”
This is not to say that Gates preferred the old ways. As an eighth grader, his brother Rocky was unfairly denied West Virginia’s highest award for excellence in state history because the hotel in which he would have stayed to receive the honor was segregated. The injustice, and the deception that accompanied it, so infuriated young Skip that, six years later, he set out to win the Golden Horseshoe award himself. Thanks to his determination and the dawning of a more enlightened age, he succeeded.
Billed as a memoir, “Colored People” is clearly more than an exploration of adolescent yearnings, or of one man’s coming of age. As Gates traces his evolution from “Negro” to Afro-wearing “black,” he also traces the evolution of Piedmont (and, by extension, of much of America) at a time when the relationship between the races was being redefined.
No relationships were more symbolically perilous, of course, than those between nubile white women and young black men. And as a freshman at Potomac State College, Gates created a scandal by going out with a white coed from the nearby town of Keyser, W. Va. The woman’s father, though outraged, apparently tolerated the affair, which became the talk of the town. In the midst of the dating controversy, the father (a political neophyte) decided to run for mayor. Though considered a long shot at best, the man won, largely because, as Gates tells the tale, the contest became a “plebiscite on interracial relationships.” The good people of Keyser apparently felt compelled to prove that they were not racially backward after all. “Colored People” abounds with such stories illustrating the absurd effects of race on American lives.
In an earlier work, Gates related a conversation with his brother, who, in apparent exasperation, asked the author when he intended to produce a book that his own family (meaning nonspecialists) could understand. “Colored People” not only passes that test but illuminates, in a touchingly personal way, the loss that often accompanies progress.