You Call Him Skippy?

Skippy? That would be Henry Louis Gates Jr., W.E.B. DuBois Professor of Humanities, Chair of the Department of African and African-American Studies at Harvard University, producer of the PBS mini-series Wonders of the African World, author of numerous books, and recipient of numerous prestigious awards, but Skippy to his friends in New London. It was a great night at The Garde Arts Center this past Thursday. As I was hustling into the theater, three buses pulled up to disembark a hundred Coasties intermingled with literary types and just plain folk from the neighborhood. The occasion was "An Evening with HLG, Jr." sponsored by the Community Foundation of Southeastern Connecticut to promote their "Let's Read" initiative, whose goal is "to get every child in southeastern Connecticut, no matter the town or school or family of origin, to love to read by the third grade." Good goal for a good organization in a region with a high school drop out rate that is way too high.

Skippy was introduced by the woman who cajoled him into coming to New London, Bettye Fletcher Comer, a beautiful woman in a smashing light blue suit who is a retired New London school principal and an old friend. I admit it, as charming as Bettye was, and likewise Alice Fitzpatrick, the Community Foundation's President, I expected Skippy to be a bore. The last prestigious author I heard speak in a setting like this was Mr. Updike, and he certainly was, and so very full of hisself. But Gates (I just can't call him Skippy!) was wonderful and compelling, and as much as I hate it when people say he's a regular guy like it's an accolade, he was. (When I leaned over to Betty Anne Reiter to whisper my amazement, she said that if I had read his 1995 Colored People I would have expected just the man he is.) With none of that academic pretentiousness that I was fearing, Gates began to talk about what it was like to grow up in the Fifties and Sixties in America, in West Virginia, no less. He talked about his family and what he termed their blackest values--reading, writing, and aspiring to be a doctor or a lawyer. He talked about how the factory workers in his home town of Piedmont, WV, were proud of his and his brother's academic accomplishments, how they encouraged him when he transferred from the local community college to Yale. And when he went on to Cambridge (not the one in Massachusetts) he found African teachers and fellow students who have remained lifelong friends.

Gates reminded us that this is the generation that produced not only Beloved, the number one novel of the last twenty-five years, but also Invisible Man, 1965's number one novel of the last twenty five years. Gates was unequivocal in attributing his success to affirmative action, without which he believes he would never have gotten out of the community college, no matter his record of straight A's. (He tells how his older brother was demoted from valedictorian to salutatorian so as not to embarrass his high school, and how his friend Governor Jay Rockefeller re-instated his brother's Golden Horseshoe award which a segregated society had been too skittish to bestow on a black man in the 1950's.) As further proof of the need for affirmative action, Gates brought it home by reminding us that Yale had a quota for Roman Catholics until 1963. In 1966, only six Black men graduated from Yale, compared to 96 in his class of '73. "Do you think Black men got that much smarter in ten years?" he asked. He told us something else I never knew about civil rights icon Rosa Parks. He said, "Do you think she was just tired that day on the bus in Montgomery?" On the contrary, Parks' disobedience was carefully stage-managed by civil rights leaders, and Parks was just as carefully chosen for her role. Months before Parks' action, another black woman had taken a seat in the front of the bus, but she was too dark, and too pregnant with an out-of-wedlock child, not the type they wanted for that historic role. Parks had been schooled in the ways of non-violence, and her looks and her manner were just right for her to be able to represent the race. Likewise, Gates said, with Jackie Robinson, James Meredith, and Charlayne Hunter-Gault.

"What has happened since the Sixties?" Gates asks. He thinks if Martin Luther King were alive today he would say that we need another civil rights movement based on class. Gates would like to see the "Let's Read" campaign go national because he says everything comes from literacy. Gates wants a return to the "barbershop values" of the men who encouraged young men like himself and friends Cornell West and Bettye Fletcher and her husband to get a job, avoid having babies out of wedlock, and never show up without your shoes shined, because you've got to represent the race. "We've got too much bling. We've lost our way and we've got to get it back."

When interviewer Reid MacCluggage offered to donate his copy of Gates' documentary series African American Lives (for whose production Gates credits Oprah Winfrey) to the library, Gates told MacCluggage to keep his copy; he would give six copies to the New London Public library. As Gates said, "If I sell 30,000 copies of a book, that reaches a lot of people, but 11 million people saw that documentary." Oprah's Roots is due out in February, 2007, to be followed by a sequel to Lives in 2008. Gates closed with a good humored account of his induction into the Sons of the American Revolution, for which he was declared eligible after tracing his genealogy with the help of DNA testing.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. may look like a pointy headed intellectual from Harvard, but he's still his mother's son who went to Yale and who came to New London so Bettye Fletcher's students and the students who will benefit from the "Let's Read" campaign will get back in touch with those barbershop values. Thanks, Skippy. We needed that, and you.