Colored People: A Memoir

By Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Book Overview

In a coming-of-age story as enchantingly vivid and ribald as anything Mark Twain or Zora Neale Hurston, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., recounts his childhood in the mill town of Piedmont, West Virginia, in the 1950s and 1960s and ushers readers into a gossip, of lye-and-mashed-potato "processes," and of slyly stubborn resistance to the indignities of segregation. A winner of the Chicago Tribune 's Heartland Award and the Lillian Smith Prize, Colored People is a pungent and poignant masterpiece of recollection, a work that extends and deepens our sense of African American history even as it entrances us with its bravura storytelling

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 067973919X
• ISBN13: 9780679739197
• Release Date: April 1995
• Publisher: Vintage
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.2" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

Courageously Honest Memoir

I place Colored People alongside Angela's Ashes as one of the best works of memoir in recent years. He doesn't moralize; he just tells the honest story. This is a story that, to my knowledge, has not been told elsewhere. It is a story about the freedom and comfort and the pain of a segregated commuinty, and the heartbreak that came with leaving some of that world behind. Most things are deeper and more complex than we like to think they are. Colored People brings that concept forward in a way that no other book has. The people whose expressed frustration with not being able to keep the characters straight are missing the point - this isn't a murder mystery and it doesn't make any difference. Buy it. Read it. Share it. I only wish I'd done so when it first came out.

Being Henry Louis Gates Jr.

This is a great book. No doubt about it. For those who only know Skip Gates from his combatative role in the PBS "Wonders of Africa" series, this book will be a revelation. As a memoir of a young man growing up Black in the segregated south, there are some wonderful epiphanies for people who did not have that experience. As a peice of literary writing, it's a wonderful example of craft and spirit and talent. I don't always agree with the way in which Prof. Gates places himself in the politics of academia or the pronouncements he sometimes makes about being of color in these United States, but he sure tells a good story. Through sharing his early years, some of the complexities of the man are made understandable. I leave it to others to decide exactly what that means.

Warm and funny and haunting and serious.

So removed from my own experience but a story told with such grace, it will always be one of my favorite books. I read it when it was published some time ago and have not forgotten the real sense of place and people. As a white female wasp from New England, I'm not sure I understand why it affected me so. Lost communities that we gave up in the name of something else. On the one hand, it made me think there will always be a separateness and, on the other hand, that we all want the kind of community and gentle exchange that seemed at the heart of the people in this book. The use of the language is admirable - the writing - but it was what I took away about my own very different life that made the book memorable. It's a scholarly work in its way but simple, clear and classic.