COLORED PEOPLE

By Henry Louis Gates Jr.

As one of America's premier academics, an insightful cultural critic -- and, coincidentally a black man -- Henry Louis Gates Jr. says what's on his mind.

He tells you from the word go that his memoir, Colored People, is an exploration of family not race. If you have no particular interest in the skeletons that knock around in the Gates' closets, then you're in for a long haul.

And if you're hoping for sight into Gates' political stance -- like breezing into Toronto last October as Garth Drabinsky's black ace-in-the-hole in defence of the controversial staging of the dubious musical Showboat -- you won't find it in here.

Gates, or "Skip," wants us to follow him back to a lost era in the 50s and 60s, to Piedmont, West Virginia, a fishbowl of a mill town -- population 2,600.

The locals whittle away the time by keeping tabs on cuckolds and concubines alike, getting drunk or trying to figure out a sure-fire way to enter the kingdom of heaven at the end of their travails.

The people of Piedmont are hilarious and perceptive as they chop the world down into chunks that are easy to digest. It's their isolated existence against the backdrop of the civil rights movement and Vietnam that accounts for the parts in Colored People that are so eloquently written. Unfortunately, these aren't the focal point of the book.

The essence Gates' chosen story is the class struggle between the two sides of his family. The Colemans, his mother's side, are working class and working hard to serve notice that they have achieved a fair measure of respectability. The Gates, his father's side, are black bourgeoisie (a generation removed). It's a tepid mix of personalities and ideologies.

Sure, some tales of this brood are interesting, but the book's catchy rhythm is decimated when Gates digs too deep into his genealogy.

Gates-boosters and the conservative media will eat this up.

--sigcino moyo

original publication: NOW