Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard professor and cultural critic, has been so prolific as a writer that the idea of fitting his essential works into a single volume of a manageable size seems preposterous. It has been done, however, in the recently published The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader.
The reader, edited by Harvard literature professor Abby Wolf, serves as a reminder of how accessible, informative and, yes, often funny Gates’ writing can be, particularly compared to other academics. (His description of Black hair care from his memoir, for example, is hilarious and culturally on-point. See “In the Kitchen,” page 19 in the book.)
Many other familiar pieces have found their way into the book, and Gates says he was most delighted that excerpts from Colored People: A Memoir (Knopf 1994), in particular a chapter about his mother and her death, “Walk the Last Mile,” have been resurrected for a new generation. The book is about growing up in a small town in the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia in the 1950s and ’60s.
“I wrote Colored People so that my daughters, who are now 29 and 30, would have a record of this—I call it the sepia world—under segregation,” Gates says. “My mother died in ’87, and my daughters were too young to know her. I wanted them to know both my mother through the book and that world—the world that shaped me.”
Gates, who is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard as well as director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, is pleased that the reader includes some of his academic writings. He is also glad to see his profiles for The New Yorker take on a new life, including his favorite profile, a piercingly insightful and haunting piece about a longtime New York Times book critic. The writer, Anatole Broyard, a Black/Creole man, passed for White and went to his death without revealing his secret to his children.
The Gates reader opens with an article from The New Yorker, about the day Gates’ grandfather, Edward St. Lawrence Gates, was buried. That day, Henry Sr. introduced his sons to their grandfather’s voluminous scrapbooks, meticulously documenting family and local history. He also showed the boys the picture of their great-great-grandmother, Jane Gates, born into slavery in 1819.
It is no coincidence that these favorite stories of Gates’ revolve around love of family, present and past. It was that day and that picture that he says ignited one of his life’s central passions: genealogy—the search for roots—his and other people’s.
