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Books and Beyond

Library patron

When I finished reading “Colored People, A Memoir,” by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., c 1994, I wanted to encourage everyone to write a family history. That’s what this book is.

Gates grew up in Piedmont, West Virginia, where he was born Sept. 16, 1950. When he was growing up in Piedmont, the population was 2,565. “It was in Piedmont that most of the colored people of Mineral County lived — 351 out a total population of 22,000” (p. 3).

I feel connected to Gates, just like I felt close to Emily Carr, Linda Hasselstrom, and Alan Alda after reading their books. I want to meet them all. In many ways, his story is so different from mine, and in some ways very similar. Childhood events stay with us all of our lives.

My pages of handwritten notes have the headings: Religion, Education, Race Relations, Mama, and Daddy.

The first religious experience he writes about is when Skippy Gates (that’s Henry Louis, Jr.) is 4 years old, and he is to give a personal praise song in front of the congregation on Easter Sunday. He’s been practicing over and over: “Jesus was a boy like me, and like him I want to be” (p. 117). When he gets up front, he is scared and can’t remember what he has memorized. Pretty soon a woman in the back of the church gets up and says these words. It’s his Mama. Then everyone at church gives laughter and applause. Of course, they knew who said the words!

For three years when he is a teenager, he goes to the summer camp in Petersburg, West Virginia, sponsored by the Episcopalian church. It was a camp attended by whites and blacks, and he writes “We were pioneers, people my age, in cross-race relations, able to get to know each other across cultures and classes in a way that was unthinkable in our parents’ generation” (p. 150). In the evening they had a bonfire, treats, and they sang songs like “Kumbaya,” an African-American spiritual.

In 1987 the parent that he feels so close to, his Mama, passes. There is a funeral at the Episcopal church, but in this son’s imagination the service is in the negro church his family attended when he was younger. He feels like crying, and wants to tell his Mama that he loved her “like life itself” (p. 210).

His Daddy’s family, the Gates family, lived in Cumberland, Maryland, about 25 miles from Piedmont. One day at a funeral gathering in his Gates grandparents’ house, there were “Doctors and dentists, lawyers and pharmacists” (p. 69). Interesting Gates family stories in Chapter 6/Down to Cumberland.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., goes one year to Piedmont College, and a professor encourages him to apply at a university like Yale. He does apply to Yale, and is accepted. In the application essay he wrote: “My grandfather was colored, my father was Negro, and I am black” (p. 201).

In the last chapter, The Last Mill Picnic, we read that the mill the blacks worked for in Piedmont could permit one more of the yearly picnics for the African-Americans, but after this, the anti-segregation laws would require the mill picnics to be integrated. Gates writes that his people will miss the lively and meaningful gatherings from years past.

On the cover of the paperback I have, there are 15photographs. The large one is of Henry Louis at the time he wrote this book, and the rest are small snapshots. The photos don’t have captions, but I recognize the one of him at about 18 months walking on the grass dressed in diapers. And since he writes about being on a baseball team, I think that’s him with several others in baseball suits.

The paperback I have of “Colored People” I bought at Main Street Books in Frostburg, MD, in 2011. I didn’t know then that I was about 15 miles north of Piedmont, West Virginia, where Henry Louis Gates, Jr., grew up. Several of my penciled markings in the book I wrote 10 years ago. Here’s one of them: “On Saturdays I used to go to the library in Keyser, check out the recordings of Shakespeare, and listen to them while I read the plays” (p. 110).

Now I will get back to reading his recent book “The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song,” which you can also buy as the video program that was on Pioneer Public TV recently. In the introduction to this book, published in 2021, he writes a lot about the importance of Black sacred music, and refers to the Fisk Jubilee Singers. When I looked online about them, I found that 2021 is the 150th anniversary of this group.

Both “Colored People” and “The Black Church: This is Our Story, This is Our Song” are available at your Marshall-Lyon County Library. The Plum Creek Library System has many Henry Louis Gates, Jr., titles, including “Finding Your Roots: the official companion to the PBS series.” For more information, visit marshalllyonlibrary.org.

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