Fire and Flair : He’s flamboyant, showy, cocksure and widely regarded as a superstar of black studies. But Harvard’s Henry Gates is not without critics. To them, he says: Deal with it.

Talking to him, you get this clear, shining picture of an American childhood that vanished with the 1950s.

A wholesome, loving warmth reminiscent of times gone by is what you think of: a dad so devoted he held down two jobs; a mom who served as secretary to the PTA; two boys who had their share of skirmishes, but who always managed to rank first in the class.

No one locked their doors in this idyllic village. Almost no one swore. The grandmas wore flower-print aprons. And everyone was, as Henry Louis Gates Jr. puts it, colored .

“It’s what we were in the 1950s,” Gates said. He is not a large man, but he projects an immense presence. His smile exudes unshakable confidence. With precisely that smile, he added: “It’s endearing.”

But not every person who totes around a copy of Gates’ just-published memoir, “Colored People” (Knopf, 1994), would comfortably share that opinion. Some non-African Americans study the title quizzically, wondering if it espouses some racist tract. Some African Americans are also less than enamored; Horace Porter, for example, the chairman of the African American Studies department at Stanford University, coolly said the title “totally suggests his point of view.”

In his office overlooking Harvard Square, Gates could not be less troubled. His vast self-assurance enables him to fire off frank opinions with the absolute certainty that the objects of those opinions will have to deal with them on their own terms. After all, he mused, he might have called the book “The Melanin in Me,” a title he sometimes uses for lectures.

But Gates, 43, wrote “Colored People” for his daughters, 14-year-old Maggie and Liza, 12, to whom he writes in his introduction: “In your lifetimes, I suspect, you will go from being African Americans, to ‘people of color,’ to being, once again ‘colored people.’ . . . I have to confess that I like ‘colored’ best, maybe because when I hear the word, I hear in it my mother’s voice and the sepia tones of my childhood.”

Already, in the insularity of the ivory tower, Gates has sprinted forth with a meteoric trajectory that has made him a kind of legend. If his outspokenness were not enough to assure him of that status, colleagues say, his lyrical use of language would be. His scholarship seems above reproach; as a 30-year-old junior professor at Yale, he was among the first group of MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” recipients. At only 33, he earned full tenure at Cornell before moving on to an endowed chair at Duke--and, now, Harvard. Then there is his amazing network of acquaintances, housed in an obese Rolodex.

His enormous circle of friends knows him as “Skip,” the nickname affixed to him as a boy in the strictly segregated mill town of Piedmont, W. Va. Students and faculty at Harvard know him as the W.E.B. DuBois Professor of the Humanities, chairman of the Afro-American Studies Department--and the man who rattled the dust off John Harvard’s grave by hiring Spike Lee as a lecturer.

It was his first major act of flamboyance three years ago after assuming control of the then-moribund department. The faculty had shrunk to just one full-time professor, prompting Gates to quip that he wouldn’t have to clear out any deadwood “because there’s no wood at all.” Only 19 students were declaring Afro-American as their “field of concentration,” as Harvard stuffily calls a major. Even some specialists in the subject were not aware Harvard had an Afro-American Studies department.

“I needed to pull a rabbit out of a hat,” Gates said, proffering his dauntless smile once again. “Br’er Rabbit.”

Street-talking director Spike Lee, Gates said, was his rabbit.

It made this spring’s announcement that Gates had lured scholar and best-selling author Cornel West away from Princeton less surprising. The number of Afro-American “concentrators” at Harvard had tripled, and the faculty had mushroomed proportionately. Still, Gates said, hiring West was a coup that assured his department new credibility by providing more than one resident celebrity.

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But it is Gates who is most widely regarded as black studies’ leading luminary. Admirers and detractors alike think of him as the subject’s superstar.

Former Harvard Law Prof. Derrick Bell, now teaching at New York University, called Gates “the dean of the black academic entrepreneurs.” Peter Gomes, Harvard’s chaplain and a professor of Christian Morals, gushed to the Boston Globe that Gates is “the Second Coming.”

Porter, at Stanford, conceded of Gates that there are those “who feel he is not Afro-centric enough,” those “who feel he sticks his nose in too many peoples’ business” and those “who resent his celebrity.” Nevertheless, Porter described Gates as “an extraordinary person in American intellectual and cultural life right now.”

With degrees from Yale and Cambridge--and honorary degrees from five universities, including Dartmouth--Gates’ intellectual credentials are impeccable, said J. Eugene Grigsby, director of UCLA’s Center for Afro-American Studies.

“Clearly he is a very prolific writer,” Grigsby said. But he added that Gates is also “a self-promoter--and I don’t mean that in a derogatory manner.”

Harvard, Grigsby said, “thinks of itself as king of the hill. Skip’ll fit right in.”

But as to whether Gates should be vaulted to the top of some select academic pantheon, he continued, “I hate it when someone tries to anoint someone. I’d like to know who the Anglo-Saxon thinker is. So why is it that somebody can anoint ‘the Black Intellectual?’ ”

Gates has questions along that line himself. “There are 30 million black Americans--more black Americans than there are Canadians,” he said. “But no one would expect Canadians to speak with one voice.”

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Yet even in the rarefied world of academe--where some people are paid simply to be smart--black intellectuals are regarded “as if we were ancient Athens, 10 great minds in one room,” Gates said.

Excluding Harvard’s professional schools, Gates is only the third black professor to be hired there, and--with his joint appointment--the school’s first black professor of English. He is acutely aware of the implications of that attainment. Among his generation, Gates said, “ ‘first black’ is still a modifier.”

“There are so few of us,” he said of the black academic community. “And because there are so few of us, we are the crossover generation.”

Under such circumstances, Gates reasons, a little showmanship--maybe even a lot of showmanship--is not necessarily out of order. He is constantly publishing: books, magazine articles, Op-Ed pieces--offering his thoughts on everything, it seems, except sports, and maybe he just hasn’t found time for that.

He writes at a stunning pace, cranking out a first draft of “Colored People,” for example, in six weeks. (The comforts of an Italian villa, owned by the Rockefeller Foundation, may have helped stir his creative juices a bit.) Unlike the legions of academics who eschew popular publications, Gates’ byline is just as likely to appear in the New Yorker or the New York Times as some remote scholarly journal.

“I do write more than most people,” Gates said, calling himself “one of the most frequently published authors in black studies.” Among “the humanists,” in fact, as Gates thinks of himself, “I am No. 1.”

Gates more than displays the success he began earning so early on. He flaunts it. He drives a Mercedes, not exactly the battered antique Volvo of standard academic issue. His suits are exquisitely tailored, no suede elbow patches or dippy knit neckties for this professor, thank you. At Duke--which he departed in a well-publicized huff when he was not made head of his department--Gates, wife Sharon and their two daughters lived in a house that was said to be 9,000 square feet. At Harvard, his salary is rumored to be among the school’s very highest. But of course, polite Cantabridgians do not discuss unseemly subjects like money.

He takes his cues from carefully chosen role models--among them W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington. His current academic mentor is Brown University President Vartan Gregorian, who advised him: “Skip, turn everything into an event.”

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That may have been among his motives in 1990 when he testified in the obscenity trial of the rap group 2 Live Crew. Gates said the group’s style reflected the traditional African American heritage of “signifying,” or comical derision. He also argued that the group’s right to free speech was no different than Madonna’s--or any other well-known performer.

So some of his activities are perhaps slightly ostentatious, Gates allowed. So what?

“You see, it’s easy for my white colleagues to criticize me for being entrepreneurial,” he said. “But we have to be entrepreneurial.”

But Gates has also drawn fire from some of his own peers in African American studies. Partly it’s envy--”and I’d say envy comes with the territory,” Gates said. But he has also alienated some black scholars who think that he is insufficiently Afro-centric, or that he has overly homogenized the discipline.

Mostly he ignores such sniping, sticking to his position as “a midwife, a conduit to help other people gain access” to his field. He is “trying to carve out a middle ground” that makes the discipline inclusive, Gates said, and to serve in much the same role as “a Talmudic scholar, protecting the traditions.”

But sometimes he gets annoyed, lashing out at the critics who fault him for employing whites in his department. “If someone said I couldn’t teach Milton because I wasn’t Anglo-Saxon and blind, I’d say it was racist garbage,” he said. “There’s no closed shop here by race.”

Gates comes as honestly by his righteousness as by his talent as a raconteur. His late mother set a standard of fearsome excellence. “She believed there was a natural aristocracy, and she was it,” Gates said. Both parents read “all the time,” and his father--who, at 81, spends winters with his younger son and his family--remains a nonstop storyteller.

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Unlike his older brother, an oral surgeon in New Jersey, Skip Gates began school just as the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision forced desegregation. So while the paper mill picnics ceased before they would integrate, the schools took a different path.

“I became the prince of the school because I was smart,” Gates said. “In that classroom, no one hassled me. Ever.”

He paused, and a more modest version of his smile crept onto his face. “It was only years later that I realized how amazing that was,” Gates said.

In his own life, he has had “nothing but golden opportunities.” Still, Gates said, “I get angry about the fact that structural inequality has been such a fundamental fact of African American culture.”

Early in this century, Gates writes in his new book, black entertainer Bert Williams observed that “it’s no disgrace to be colored. But it is awfully inconvenient.” Even at the very tip-top of the academic heap, Gates comes to much the same conclusion today.

“Yes!” he railed. “It is inconvenient, because of white racism. When I walk into a room, people still see my blackness, more than my Gates-ness, or my literary-ness.”

But Gates is an optimist--a luxury, perhaps, made possible by his rock-solid family and by his steady course of success. Some things are changing, he said, such as “the more obvious interplay between race and class.”

The world he grew up in has all but disappeared, Gates said. But some fine remnants have managed to resurface. Only a few years ago, the African American employees at the paper mill in Piedmont, W. Va., decided to resurrect their traditional picnic. And this time, the white employees asked if they could come, too.