Henry Louis Gates Jr.: Head Negro In Charge

It’s not surprising that Skip Gates should have become a lightning rod in the national conversation on race. His life has been full of the contradictions that characterize the racial debate in this country. Having grown up a poor black boy in Appalachia, where, as he recounts in his 1995 memoir, Colored People, “‘nigger’ was hung on me so many times that I thought it was my name,” he now dines at the White House and counts Nobel laureates and heads of state among his friends.

Gates also hangs out with Steven Spielberg and Spike Lee, Jodie Foster and Quincy Jones, New Yorker editor Tina Brown, and United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan. He dines with Al and Tipper Gore, and has profiled Hillary Rodham Clinton and Colin Powell for The New Yorker. He summers on the Vineyard, and the African art stuffed into his home rivals the collection Mobutu stashed away in Zaire.

There have been such items on his menu as work in Hollywood with Spielberg (he was a consultant on Amistad), CD-ROM deals with Microsoft, literary anthologies, TV series, and more. As the Washington Post put it, “Gates … seems to have a role in nearly every African American scholarly project in the country.” Fast company for a man who is, after all, an academic.

Yet only seven years ago, when Gates became the head of Afro-American studies, the department was housed in cramped headquarters over a drugstore on Mass. Ave. Born out of student protests in 1969, the field was considered by many scholars, both white and black, as either unworthy of serious regard or tainted by its ideological origins. Today, it is a mark of Gates’s success that the institute is housed in the prestigious Barker Center, on Quincy Street.

Long known as the Harvard Freshman Union, where generations of students threw pats of butter onto the ceiling of the Great Hall, the newly transformed building, which was designed by Stanford White, still has the feel of a turn-of-the-century old boys’ club. “Af-Am,” as the department is known around Harvard, occupies the second floor of the east wing, where much of the African art and the portraits of black literary figures is from Gates’s private collection. It is so luxurious that when the building opened last fall, complete with a cafe he had lobbied for, Gates was heard to remark in his best homegrown West Virginia accent, “I’m struttin’ in high cotton now!”

These days, however, Gates has little time for coffee breaks. On his tidy exec-style desk are his writing tools—a Mont Blanc rollerball, legal pads, and the Marantz tape recorder on which he tapes interviews for the steady stream of profiles, essays, and reviews he produces for Tina Brown’s magazine.
“Your hair is different today,” Gates tells me, his eyes owlishly appreciative behind large round-rimmed glasses. “You’re taller than I remembered.”

These are not the lines of a masher or even a flirt. The man notices and relishes fine detail. The scrutiny, the personal touch, the pampering attention establish a useful disarming intimacy that he applies equally to men and women. Hang out with Gates and you’re gonna get yourself flattered. You may even get a job offer. “Doing this interview is like going to a therapist,” he tells me. “Shit, I don’t let that many people into my life, and I’m not exactly sure why I have chosen to answer your questions, but I have.”

Gates is at pains to point out that his life has had plenty of bumps and bruises, although the gimpy boy who grew up in Piedmont, West Virginia, found nurturing and unconditional love set against the mean realities of segregation. His father, Henry Louis Gates Sr., nicknamed “Heinie,” was so light-skinned he could pass for white. But the only way the elder Gates could support his wife and two sons in Piedmont was with two jobs: loading trucks at the paper mill and working nights as a janitor for the phone company.

Gates’s mother, Pauline Coleman Gates, was a dark-skinned woman, complicated, as practical as she was proud, who worked cleaning white people’s houses. She subscribed to Jack & Jill magazine so her two boys—Skip and his older, more athletic brother, Rocky—could see how children “outside the Valley” looked and lived.

Growing up, Skip Gates was a confessed mama’s boy, unashamed to play with Betsy McCall dolls cut out from his mother’s magazines. It was she who gave him his nickname, calling him “Skippy Boy” or “Skipper Ripper Dipper.” The sports-based camaraderie between his older brother and their father excluded Skip and stigmatized him as less than manly. But he idolized his mother. When she read the eulogy at a funeral, he recalls in Colored People, “she made the ignorant and ugly sound like scholars and movie stars, turned the mean and evil into saints and angels. She knew what people had meant to be in their hearts, not what the world had forced them to become. She knew the ways in which working too hard for paltry wages could turn you mean and cold, could kill the thing that had made you laugh.

“And she always got it right, even if after the funeral Daddy would wonder aloud which sonofabitch had been put in that casket instead of that simple-assed nigger So-and-So. Mama’d always laugh at that—it meant that she had been real good.”

It was a racial education unfamiliar to most whites. Gates’s father used to look at the black children portrayed in Jack & Jill and say, “They handpicked those children. No dummies, no nappy hair, heads not too kinky, lips not too thick, no disses and no dats.”

Pauline Gates didn’t care for white people. She told her sons white people were dirty: “They tasted right out of pots on the stove” like “some kind of animal, or the lowest order of trash.” White people said blacks “smelled bad naturally … but it was white people who smelled bad, Mama always said. ‘When they get wet,’ she said, ‘they smell like dogs.'”

But if she hated whites, she disguised it well, both inside and outside her home. In 1957 she was elected the first black secretary of the Piedmont PTA. Two years later, however, when Skip was nine, he got a full glimpse of his mother’s antipathy toward whites. The family was watching a CBS News documentary about Black Muslims, “The Hate That Hate Produced.” To Skip, the Muslims were “just about the scariest black people I’d ever seen. Black people who talked right into the faces of white people, telling them off without even blinking.” He recounts the scene in Colored People: “While I sat cowering in our living room, I happened to glance over at my mother. A certain radiance was slowly transforming her soft brown face, as she listened to Malcolm X naming the white man the Devil. ‘Amen,’ she said, quietly at first. ‘All right now,’ she continued, much more heatedly.

“All this time, and I hadn’t known just how deeply my mother despised white people. It was like watching the Wicked Witch of the West emerge out of the transforming features of Dorothy. The revelation was both terrifying and thrilling.

“The same thing would happen several years later when the Martin Luther King riots were shown on television. The first colored secretary of the Piedmont PTA watched the flames with dancing eyes.”