The New Openness : COLORED PEOPLE: A Memoir, <i> By Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Alfred A. Knopf: $22; 216 pp.)</i>

When Henry Louis Gates Jr. applied to Yale in his springtime of militancy in 1969, he began his personal essay: “My grandfather was colored, my father was Negro, and I am black.” Now, in a preface to his affecting, beautifully written and morally complex memoir, Gates addresses his two daughters:

“In your lifetimes, I suspect, you will go from being African Americans, to ‘people of color,’ to being, once again, ‘colored people.’ (The linguistic trend toward condensation is strong.) I don’t mind any of the names myself. But I have to confess that I like ‘colored’ best, maybe because when I hear the word, I hear it in my mother’s voice and in the sepia tones of my childhood.”

Gates, a social and cultural historian who is chairman of Harvard’s department of Afro-American studies, is not choosing politico-linguistic sides but he is making a point. It is a singularly open point; throughout his book Gates scatters the different racial terms with only seeming casualness. The author, along with such writers as Stephen Carter and Cornell West, belongs to a current in African-American thinking that might be called “the new openness.” It does not fall along older left-right lines; it tends to strike a shifting center as it considers the ways in which quotas, government redress of economic imbalances, racially based politics and the like help and harm the advancement of African-Americans.

It is no bland center, but an explosive one, based not on denying the contradictions but on bringing them into difficult dialogue. The civil rights and Black Power movements have accomplished great things, the thought goes; but while enlarging one part of black reality, they have--as revolutions tend to do--denied or constricted another part. In “Colored People” Gates uses not abstract arguments but a colorful account of his childhood to explore and consider the contradictions. Instead of trying to square the circle, he has done what circles are best suited to: put a circus in it. It is a circus of memory, by turns entrancing and instructive; and mustering at times an anger that any militant would envy.

He starts, as I mentioned, with his daughters. When they visited the zoo in Washington, he nodded to another black man; “Why?” one daughter wanted to know. And he begins his circus overture.

Why should he feel linked to another person because he shares his color? “Thirty million Americans are black, and thirty million is a lot of people.” He resents having his views tactfully canvassed when a Mike Tyson misbehaves. But he cannot squelch a special joy in a Jessye Norman, a Toni Morrison, a Nelson Mandela and a Joe Louis who, asked what he would have done if Max Schmeling had failed to go down for the knockout punch, replied: “I’da run around behind him to see what was holdin’ him up.”

“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 the other side, to experience a humanity that is neither colorless nor reducible to color.” And he can admire those who say they’ve transcended any particular group attachment--”but I always want to run around behind them to see what holds them up.” And he has “stopped trying to tell other Negroes how to be black.” And so:

“I am not Everynegro.” He cannot tell the story of urban blacks in the ‘80s and ‘90s. He was brought up in a strong family in a West Virginia mountain town in the ‘50s and ‘60s; a place rigorously though peacefully segregated and then gradually and not violently integrated. He will tell his story: privileged in some ways, hard and combative in others.

Piedmont was one of three little towns linked by the paper mill that gave them jobs. Shabby enough, except for a handful of mansions, it had a glorious outdoors of mountains, woods and streams. A quarter of its population was black; the rest was mostly Italian or Irish. Each group had its own neighborhood; downtown there seemed to be mingling but on special terms. Blacks could patronize the luncheonette but only for takeout. They could not own property and so they rented their homes. At the mill they were loaders; the craft unions excluded them. All these things changed gradually as Gates grew up. The first and most important change took place the year before he entered school: It was desegregated.

This meant that at one point Gates’ two best friends belonged respectively to the groups “whose names ended with ‘O’ (Italians) and those whose names began with ‘O’ “(Irish). It meant that with his first aptitude test, scoring 487 out of 500, he became one of the school’s princes--eventually its valedictorian--and that he was thrown into close friendship, which suffered strains and distance as the the years passed, with the school’s brightest--white--girl. It meant that the same society that discriminated against him was also a source of support and encouragement.

Television showed white faces, though such shows as “Leave It to Beaver” provided an image of middle-class ease that a family such as Gates’ could decide to fight for. When a black figure did appear, it was a neighborhood sensation. “ ‘Colored, colored on Channel Two’ you’d hear somebody shout. Somebody else would run to the phone while yet another hit the front porch telling all the neighbors where to see it,” he writes. There was the federal backing of integration; grudging under Eisenhower, picking up under Kennedy. Something changed, Gates writes; Kennedy put an image of steel on the screen, and it was steel for the blacks:

“Saying that James Meredith will definitely enter the University of Mississippi; and saying it like he believed it (unlike Ike), saying it like the big kids said ‘It’s our turn to play’ on the basketball court and walking all through as if we weren’t there.”

The heart of the memoir is Gates’ portrait of his family, and its placement in a black society whose strength, richness and self-confidence thrived in the darkness of segregation. What oppression doesn’t kill it can make stronger. One of the reflections that runs through the book suggests how much was lost, along with the gains, when integration came. There is a splendid description of the annual picnic of the black mill workers; a free and festive occasion that wilted when it was assimilated. There are beautifully told passages about the black churches, gospel music and hell-raising, and a brilliantly moving recollection of old-style funerals.

Gates’ mother was a remarkable woman who gave up school to work and send several of her brothers to college. She kept her house and two sons immaculately turned out, insisted on excellence--Gates’ brother became an oral surgeon--and proper food. “A slab of fatback or a cupful of bacon dripping or a couple of ham hocks and a long simmering time were absolutely essential to a well-cooked vegetable,” Gates writes. She was in demand at funerals for her golden-tongued elegies; Gates’ father wondered aloud if perhaps someone else had been substituted for the corpse.

Henry Sr., a kind, sardonic man, worked as a loader and janitor, but he came from a well-to-do light-skinned family. His portrait is intriguing but barely sketched in--young Henry was his mother’s boy.

Out of their vibrant, segregated black world her message to her sons was that they must strive and excel in the white world. She became the first colored officer of the PTA; she dressed meticulously for each meeting and spoke out sonorously. It was nothing like compliance, as Gates startlingly shows:

“Most important of all, for me, was that she did not seem to fear white people. She simply hated them, hated them all with a passion she seldom disclosed.” There was fierceness running through her, for all her propriety, but it came at a cost. When Gates was 12, his shining mother slipped into a depression that was to last the rest of her life. It might have shattered him but it didn’t. He took up the fierceness, and it runs through his lovely, haunting memoir; through its humor, its tenderness, its evocation of a time, a place and a society.

A Chance to Work Out Your Grief

Henry Louis Gates’s mother was buried in a formal Episcopal ceremony in the new integrated cemetery. In “Colored People” he writes:

I hate that cemetery. Not because of the lack of aesthetic appeal; not because it’s integrated; but because . . . the Power isn’t there. When you go up on Radical Hill, up past where Sherry Lewis used to live, enter the gate, and take the dusty road to the colored cemetery--now, that’s a cemetery . All the markers have different shapes, and the graves are laid out whopper-jawed . . .

This is where the old souls come to hide, resting till the Day of the Lord. Falling out over graves, like I once saw Mr. Bootsie do when I was a boy, listening to Mama perform her eulogy. Please, please--just one more look, don’t take her yet, just one more look, was all he said, shouting and whooping and hollering and falling out all over his mother’s grave.

You had a chance in a colored funeral. You had a chance to work out your grief. You didn’t have to be in a hurry with it, either. You could touch it, play with it, and talk to it, letting it work itself up in its own good time . . .

At Mama’s funeral . . . I wanted the church to be hot, with the windows closed, those paper-colored funeral home fans spreading the steam rather than cooling things down. I wanted starched collars to wilt and straightened hair to kink up and “go back.” . . . I wanted her to know that I had tried and that I loved her like life itself, and that I would miss her now that she was gone. I wanted to be sad in that dark, holy place, and I wanted that sadness to last.

BOOK MARK: For an excerpt from “Colored People,” see the Opinion section.