The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader Read online

  THE HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR. READER

  THE

  HENRY

  LOUIS

  GATES, JR.

  READER

  Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

  Edited by Abby Wolf

  BASIC CIVITAS

  A Member of the Perseus Books Group

  New York

  Many of the essays in this collection have been revised and updated by the author since their original publication.

  Copyright © 2012 by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

  Published by Basic Civitas Books,

  A Member of the Perseus Books Group

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address Basic Civitas Books, 387 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10016-8810.

  Books published by Basic Civitas Books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the United States by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, or call (800) 810-4145, ext. 5000, or e-mail [email protected].

  Designed by Trish Wilkinson

  Set in 10 point Baskerville

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Gates, Henry Louis.

  The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. reader / Henry Louis Gates, Jr.; edited by Abby Wolf.

  p.cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-465-02924-2 (e-book) 1. American literature—African American authors—History and criticism. 2. African Americans in literature. 3. Literature and society—United States. I. Wolf, Abby. II. Title.

  PS153.N5G273 2012

  810.9′896073—dc23

  2011049179

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Dedicated to Frank H. Pearl,

  for fulfilling the dream of W. E. B. Du Bois’s

  Africana Encyclopedia

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  PART I. GENEALOGIES

  1. Family Matters, The New Yorker

  2. My Yiddishe Mama, The Wall Street Journal

  3. Native Sons of Liberty, The New York Times Week in Review

  4. In the Kitchen, Colored People

  5. Walk the Last Mile, Colored People

  6. The Last Mill Picnic, Colored People

  7. In Our Lifetime, The Root

  PART II. EXCAVATION

  1. Introduction, Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black by Harriet E. Wilson

  2. Introduction, The Bondwoman’s Narrative: A Novel by Hannah Crafts

  3. In Her Own Write, series introduction, The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers

  4. Introduction, African American Lives, with Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham

  5. Introduction to the First Edition, Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition, with Kwame Anthony Appiah

  6. Prefatory Notes on the African Slave Trade, In Search of Our Roots

  PART III. CANONS

  1. The Master’s Pieces: On Canon Formation and the African-American Tradition, Loose Canons

  2. Introduction, “Tell Me, Sir, . . . What Is ‘Black’ Literature?,” Loose Canons

  3. Preface to the Second Edition, The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, with Nellie Y. McKay

  4. Canon Confidential: A Sam Slade Caper, The New York Times Book Review

  PART IV. “RACE,” WRITING, AND READING

  1. Being, the Will, and the Semantics of Death: Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman

  2. Introduction, Writing “Race” and the Difference It Makes, Critical Inquiry

  3. Preface, The Image of the Black in Western Art, with David Bindman

  4. The Signifying Monkey and the Language of Signifyin(g): Rhetorical Difference and the Orders of Meaning, The Signifying Monkey

  5. Reading “Race,” Writing, and Difference, PMLA

  6. Jean Toomer’s Conflicted Racial Identity, with Rudolph P. Byrd, The Chronicle of Higher Education

  PART V. READING PEOPLE

  1. Both Sides Now: W. E. B. Du Bois, The New York Times

  2. The Prince Who Refused the Kingdom: John Hope Franklin, Du Bois Review

  3. King of Cats: Albert Murray, The New Yorker

  4. White Like Me: Anatole Broyard, The New Yorker

  5. Bliss Broyard, In Search of Our Roots

  6. Elizabeth Alexander, Faces of America

  7. Oprah Winfrey, In Search of Our Roots

  PART VI. READING PLACES

  1. Africa, to Me, Wonders of the African World

  2. Black London, The New Yorker

  3. Harlem on Our Minds, Critical Inquiry

  4. Introduction, Black in Latin America

  5. Brazil: “May Exú Give Me the Power of Speech,” Black in Latin America

  PART VII. CULTURE AND POLITICS

  1. 2 Live Crew, Decoded, The New York Times

  2. “Authenticity,” or the Lesson of Little Tree, The New York Times Book Review

  3. The Chitlin Circuit, The New Yorker

  4. Changing Places, The New York Times

  5. Forty Acres and a Gap in Wealth, The New York Times

  6. Ending the Slavery Blame-Game, The New York Times

  7. Is He a Racist?: James Watson’s Errant, Perilous Theories, The Washington Post

  PART VIII. INTERVIEWS

  1. An Interview with Josephine Baker and James Baldwin, The Southern Review

  2. The Future of Africa: An Interview with Wole Soyinka, The Root

  3. A Conversation with Condoleezza Rice: On Leadership, Du Bois Review

  4. A Conversation with William Julius Wilson on the Election of Barack Obama, Du Bois Review

  5. A Conversation with Isabel Wilkerson: On America’s Great Migration, Du Bois Review

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  INTRODUCTION

  MY FATHER DIED shortly before we began putting this reader together. He was 97 and a half years old when he passed, and for most of his time on Earth he was telling stories. His stories were rich and warm and wickedly funny, and they certainly were a form of sustenance to me. But they also left me always wanting more, so I went looking to our literature and history. And I found a treasure trove.

  When I entered the field of Afro-American Studies, as it was called then, there were a few trailblazers showing us the way—for instance, Charles T. Davis, John Blassingame, and John Hope Franklin, to name but three. But we were working within a larger culture that could not comprehend a literary history for a people who, for much of their time in this country, not only had been denied literacy but also had been deemed unworthy of it. What our teachers found, and what we continued to unearth under their instruction, was a long and complex history of writing, reading, and representation. Black men and black women have imitated, manipulated, complicated, and created forms of literary expression (oral or written) that were sufficient to tell their own stories—stories of individuals and stories of a people—for most of the five centuries we have been in this country.

  As workers in this “new” field, we devoted ourselves not only to understanding the substance of these stories but also to enumerating and theorizing their formal elements. We were interested in what the stories meant, of course, but also in how they were constructed. By establishing the consciousness that went into making these works, we were able to talk about African American consciousness itself, about the multitude of ways in which blacks ha
ve reflected on their own lives and the lives of others. Black writing did not just happen; it was not simply a spontaneous and disorganized profusion of words and images. Rather, it was an art that displayed the same craft, skill, and method as Shakespeare, romantic poetry, the novel, or any other literary form that has been pronounced canonical and, more to the point, legitimate. It has been my great honor as a member of the literary critical profession to help bring these stories to public view. There is certainly a thrill of discovery in finding a buried manuscript, but there is an even more profound thrill in seeing that manuscript on a high school syllabus.

  For my entire reading and writing life, I have been driven mainly by two questions: Where are we?, and How did we get here? These are the questions that unite all of the pieces contained in this reader. Implicit in both of those questions is, of course, Where are we going? But as a scholar of literature and of history, I have not been in the habit of predicting. A reader of this type may gesture toward the future by suggesting continuums, but it necessarily looks back. It shines a light—sometimes loving, sometimes harsh—on one’s body of existing work.

  The selections that make up this reader display the common threads that have bound together even the most disparate-seeming pieces of my writing. The chapter from The Signifying Monkey, for instance, traffics in the jargon of literary theory whereas an essay like “Family Matters” for The New Yorker takes a belletristic tone. But however different the sounds of the pieces may be, and whether I was writing about the African origins of literary signification or the narrative history of my family, I have been deeply concerned with and devoted to tracing roots.

  Over the course of my career, I have moved from exploring the roots of our literature to exploring the literal roots of our people. Rather than interpreting our lives by deconstructing literary texts, I now more often attempt to reconstruct our past by interpreting genealogical and historical documents. But the same impulses are still there. I’m still fascinated by the stories that get told and how those stories are told. This love of stories is something I learned at home; it is, indeed, something that makes any place I am a home. I am proud to be a part of this African American literary and historical genealogy, and though, as I said, I am not in the habit of predicting the future, I imagine a rich and colorful one for people of African descent as we continue to make our way in the world through our words and stories.

  A note on the text: We have chosen not to update the pieces in this book, and we have retained the style of each of the original publications.

  Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

  Cambridge, Mass.

  PART I

  GENEALOGIES

  THE AFRICAN AMERICAN literary tradition gives a privileged place to stories of family and descent. Sometimes these are families bound by blood; other times these are families forged by necessity. This tradition is certainly not unique in its regard for genealogy. But often, and uniquely, these stories reflect the fractures that slavery wrought on the African American family, the currents of pain, and the burden of rebuilding that slavery left in its wake.

  Gates’s own family history is characterized less by fractures than solidity. Both sides of his family, the Colemans and the Gateses, lived in slavery and then in freedom in the same area of West Virginia and Western Maryland for 250 years. Still, there were stories to be uncovered, histories to be unearthed, and myths to be put to rest. While his genealogy films date only from 2006, his personal family history has been a subject of great interest since his childhood; it has been the source of some of his most lyrical writing since he published a memoir of his boyhood home, Colored People, in 1994.

  This section ends with Gates’s meditation on the election of President Barack Obama, which was a moment both of unmatched historical significance and of intensely personal—familial—reflection. Placed as it is here, it is difficult not to imagine how Obama’s election would have been celebrated on the streets of Piedmont, West Virginia, and how it would have been marveled at and welcomed by ancestors such as Jane Gates and John Redman.

  Abby Wolf

  FAMILY MATTERS

  MY FATHER’S FATHER, Edward St. Lawrence Gates—known to his children and grandchildren as Pop—had two hobbies. He was renowned for one of them in and around his hometown of Cumberland, Maryland: he grew tulips—“like a Dutchman,” people said. He practically looked like a Dutchman, too—“light and bright and damned near white,” as my father used to say. I learned about his second hobby only after his death, in 1960, when he was eighty-one and I was nine.

  Pop Gates was buried at the Rose Hill Cemetery, where our forebears were among the very few Negroes allowed to disturb the eternal sleep of Cumberland’s élite white Episcopal citizenry. The town’s Episcopal churches had been segregated at least since the black St. Philips offered its first Communion, on June 19, 1910. That day, the church’s records show, Pop, his mother, Maud, his wife, Gertrude Helen Redman, and about half a dozen other Gateses took the Sacrament, which was offered by the Diocese of Maryland’s white bishop.

  I was struck by how different Rose Hill was from Thorn Rose, the all-colored cemetery in Keyser, West Virginia, where my mother’s relatives had been buried. The effect was one of unkempt, chaotic modesty, each plot separately maintained by the family of the deceased. The dead at Rose Hill, by contrast, looked almost prosperous, their graves immaculate, some even regnant, crowned with ornate granite memorials. Rose Hill had a full-time groundskeeper and a stone-clad gatehouse, where records of the dead were kept. It was locked at night, unlike Thorn Rose, where just about everyone went to make out. At Thorn Rose, records of the dead seemed to exist only in the collective memory of the families whose ancestors were buried there.

  My brother and I had been made keenly aware, early in our childhood, that the Gateses had a certain status in Cumberland. No one ever explained whether it was because they had owned property for a very long time in what is still mostly a white neighborhood, or because of light-skin privilege, or some combination of both. Being a Gates was somehow special, and not just within the black community in Cumberland.

  After Pop’s burial, my father took us back to the Gates family home, at 505 Green Street, a two-family house that my great-grandfather had bought in 1882. My brother and I followed my father up stairs that I had never climbed. As we walked in single file behind my dad, I noticed that the walls of the living room and staircase of my grandparents’ house were lined with framed sets of blue, red, and yellow ribbons, which Pop had won for his tulips. My grandparents’ bedroom was a cabinet of wonders, its walls decorated with only blue ribbons, along with photographs of family members I would never meet. My dad led my brother and me past the bedroom and onto a sun porch adjoining it. On the right was a trunk that was brimming with toys; it reminded me of something I’d recently seen in a Disney movie. My father turned left, though. Opening a closet door, he pulled out dozens of musty leather books: partially used bank ledgers. (Pop had once been a janitor at the First National Bank on Baltimore Street.) The books were about an inch thick, with big blue- and red-lined pages. A few had been tied with string where the red leather binding had lost its strength. Slowly and silently, he turned glue-stiffened pages that were covered, front and back, with newspaper clippings. So—Pop Gates had kept scrapbooks! That was his second hobby.

  The clippings covered various news stories and human-interest items. There were hundreds of them, seemingly random, sharing only a macabre tenor: headlines about injuries and death, especially murders and fatal accidents; articles about war casualties, robberies, automobile accidents, and even plane crashes. Nestled among them were obituaries, funeral notices, funeral programs, and those laminated bookmarks noting the passing of the dead, complete with a bit of religious verse, a passage from the Bible, birth and death dates, and sometimes a photograph of the deceased. Those scrapbooks were like an archive, decade by decade, of Cumberland’s colored dead, although plenty of dead white people poked their pale visages out of those page
s as well, fighting for air among all those Negroes.

  After a while, it occurred to me that the white and the colored denizens of the obituary notices were dressed alike, their sartorial equality reflecting the shared aesthetic of an Olan Mills photography parlor: three-piece suits and white starched collars, hair slicked down or pressed. I felt as if those scrapbooks were a portal into a world I did not know. I began to wonder: Who were these people?

  “Look here, boy,” Daddy said, startling me as he broke the silence. There, deep in those yellowing pages of newsprint, were two obituaries. One, dated Saturday, January 7, 1888, was from the Cumberland Evening Times. The headline read “DEATH OF ‘AUNT JANE GATES’”:

  Last night at 11 o’clock ‘Aunt Jane Gates,’ colored, a family servant of the Stover’s died in the 75th year of her age. She has lived for a long time on Green Street where her death occurred. Her remains will be interred at Rose Hill Cemetery to-morrow afternoon at 3 o’clock. Services will be held at her residence on Green Street.

  I especially remember another article that called her “an estimable colored woman.” Daddy then retrieved a framed photograph of this woman, who had lived just up the street from where we sat, and was buried steps away from Pop Gates’s newly dug grave. “That woman was Pop’s grandmother,” Daddy said. “She is your great-great-grandmother. And she is the oldest Gates.”

  I stared at the picture until I had that face memorized, an image of the oldest colored woman I’d ever seen, etched indelibly into my nine-year-old head. In 1979, my great-aunt Pansy made a present to me of the original, which now hangs in my kitchen. What was most striking about the woman in the photograph, apart from the white nurse’s hat and uniform she wore, was that she didn’t look like a Gates. She was much darker than her grandson. I would have guessed that she was about my color, although the sepia patina that the photograph has acquired over a century and a quarter makes it hard to tell. But she had a long, straight nose, light eyes, high cheekbones, and an austere countenance. Her hair, poking out from under her nurse’s bonnet, appeared to be a curly wave. She didn’t look especially feminine; in fact, she could have been a man in drag, as my father pointed out years later with irreverent glee.