Was the Picnic Ruined?

By Jack E. White

Albert Murray, the black social critic, once wisecracked, "Sure we got our troubles, but if white folks could be black for just one Saturday night, they wouldn't never want to be white folks no more." Henry Louis Gates Jr. does not go nearly that far in Colored People (Knopf; 216 pages; $22), his memoir of growing up in a West Virginia mill town during the 1950s and '60s. But his beguiling elegy for the exuberant society blacks created for themselves under the veil of segregation provides one explanation of why few African Americans, even if they had the power to change, would choose to be anything else.

As the chairman of Harvard's black-studies department and the author of several volumes of dense literary theory as well as countless op-ed pieces on racial issues, Gates, 44, has become one of the nation's most influential intellectuals. In Colored People he turns from scholarship to autobiography and writes intimately about his childhood, his teenage religious fanaticism, a frustrated youthful romance with a white girl. Still, history is never distant from Gates' mind. His coming of age coincided with one of America's most tumultuous eras, as the civil rights movement propelled blacks from "the colored world of the fifties ((to)) a Negro world of the early sixties ((to)) the advent of the black world of the later sixties."

These upheavals were slow to arrive for the 350 colored people in Gates' hometown of Piedmont, nestled in a sleepy hollow between the Allegheny Mountains and the Potomac River Valley. At first folks simply watched the speeches and marches on television. When the effects of the civil rights movement finally did come to the town in the 1960s, the impact was ambiguous. Blacks welcomed expanded job opportunities and an end to humiliating reminders of where -- quite literally -- they stood: they were now allowed to sit down in white restaurants. But integration also meant that the nurturing institutions blacks had created to take the sting out of segregation would become moribund.

Among these segregated but proud institutions was the elementary school where generations received the sort of rigorous education that inner-city blacks today can hardly imagine. Another was the separate-but-more-than-equal "colored picnic," where blacks who worked at the paper mill gathered to dance, play bid whist and gorge themselves on soul food. Small wonder, as Gates writes, that for many of his parents' generation, "integration was experienced as a loss . . . Who in his right mind would want to go to the mill picnic with the white folks when it meant shutting the colored one down?" The black men and women of Piedmont never thought of themselves as second-class people despite their second-class status. This society teemed with role models , of hard work, family stability and excellence.

If properly admiring, however, Gates is not sanctimonious. He takes pleasure in describing his community's eccentrics, like Mr. Charlie, who confided that "George Washington was Abraham Lincoln's daddy," among other facts that whites had supposedly withheld from blacks; and churchy Miss Sarah, who consulted with Jesus every day, getting "full reports on all the seraphim and cherubim." Gates irreverently addresses such matters as blacks' fascination with their multitude of skin tones and their daily struggles to subdue their bushy hair. Even today, he writes, "so many black people still get their hair straightened that it's a wonder we don't have a national holiday for Madame C.J. Walker, who invented the process for straightening kinky hair, rather than Dr. King."

The strongest character in the book is Gates' mother Pauline, who looked down on whites as uncouth, dirty people who tasted their food "right out of the pot." Pauline's long struggle to become the owner of a home reflected the complicated, bittersweet consequences of change. Just as her children were on the brink of buying the house of a white family for whom Pauline had worked as a domestic, she began inventing reasons to back away from the purchase. Badgered by her son, she tearfully dredged up bitter memories of how the white family had mistreated her, compelling her to work on holidays instead of spending them with her family, and leaving money lying around to see if she would steal it. Pauline's children argued that she could exorcise those ghosts by making the house her own, and she relented. But as Gates acknowledges, "I'll never know if we did the right thing by buying her that house or if our insistence on vindicating her was somehow misguided."

What sets Gates' memoir apart from the harrowing, up-from-the-ghetto autobiographies that have appeared recently is its reminder that the black mainstream is not a tangle of pathology. Rather, he demonstrates, it is the source of a strong and resilient culture that has given the world such gifts as "a Jessye Norman aria, a Muhammad Ali shuffle, a Michael Jordan slam dunk, a Spike Lee movie, a Thurgood Marshall opinion, a Toni Morrison novel, James Brown's Camel Walk." Add to the list Gates' graceful, sparely written memoir, which establishes that he has not only brains but also a whole lot of soul.