In excerpts from his 1994 memoir, Colored People, author Henry Louis Gates Jr., reflects on his childhood in the small rural community of Piedmont, West Virginia, in the years before the civil rights movement brought integration to the United States. His meditations begin with some prefatory remarks addressed to his daughters, and go on to offer a glimpse of a place, with all of its social, political, and geographic implications. In an addendum, Mark Jacobs describes his recent visit to Piedmont and how the town has changed, and not changed, from the time of Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s childhood to the present day.

PREFACE

Dear Maggie and Liza:

I have written to you because a world into which I was born, a world that nurtured and sustained me, has mysteriously disappeared. My darkest fear is that Piedmont, West Virginia, will cease to exist, if some executives on Park Avenue decide that it is more profitable to build a complete new paper mill elsewhere than to overhaul one a century old. Then they would close it, just as they did in Cumberland with Celanese, and Pittsburgh Plate Glass, and the Kelly-Springfield Tire Company. The town will die, but our people will not move. They will not be moved. Because for them, Piedmont—snuggled between the Allegheny Mountains and the Potomac River Valley—is life itself.

I am not Everynegro. I am not native to the great black metropolises: New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles, say. Nor can I claim to be a "citizen of the world." I am from and of a time and a place—Piedmont, West Virginia—and that's a world apart, a world of difference. So this is not a story of a race but a story of a village, a family, and its friends. And of a sort of segregated peace.

In your lifetimes, I suspect, you will go from being African Americans to "people of color," to being, once again, "colored people." (The linguistic trend toward condensation is strong.) I don't mind any of the names myself. But I have to confess that I like "colored" best, maybe because when I hear the word, I hear it in my mother's voice and in the sepia tones of my childhood. As artlessly and honestly as I can, I have tried to evoke a colored world of the fifties, a Negro world of the early sixties, and the advent of a black world of the later sixties, from the point of view of the boy I was.

COLORED PEOPLE

On the side of a hill in the Allegheny Mountains, two and a half hours northwest of Washington and southeast of Pittsburgh, slathered along the ridge of "Old Baldie" mountain like butter on the jagged side of a Parker House roll, sits Piedmont, West Virginia (population 2,565 in 1950, when I was born), the second major city of Mineral County. West Virginia is famous for its hills, the Allegheny Mountains, which run along the Potomac River in the east, the Ohio River along the west, and the Kanawha and Guyandotte rivers in the south. And of all the mountain ranges gazed upon by its riverine mountaineers, none is more beautiful than the south branch of the Potomac Valley, overlooked by Gates Point, the highest promontory in the county, rising above Patterson's Creek.

It was in Piedmont that most of the colored people of Mineral County lived - 351 out of a total population of 22,000.

To my children, Piedmont as a whole must seem to be a graying, desiccated town, rotting away brick by brick, just like my old school. Its population is down to about 1,100 souls, 300 of whom are black, a population whose average age increases each year, so that the spirited figures who dominated my youth - those who survive, anyway - must strike my daughters as grizzled elders. No, my children will never know Piedmont, never experience the magic I can still feel in the place where I learned how to be a colored boy.

The fifties in Piedmont was a sepia time, or at least that's the color my memory has given it. Piedmont was prosperous and growing, a village of undoubted splendors. I say a village, but that's an unpopular usage among some. ("Class Three City" is the official West Virginia state euphemism.)

Village or town, or something in between—no matter. People from Piedmont were always proud to be from Piedmont—nestled against a wall of mountains, smack-dab on the banks of the mighty Potomac. We knew God gave America no more beautiful location.

And its social topography was something we knew like the back of our hands. Piedmont was an immigrant town. White Piedmont was Italian and Irish, with a handful of wealthy WASPs [white Anglo-Saxon Protestants] on East Hampshire Street, and "ethnic" neighborhoods of working-class people everywhere else, colored and white.

For as long as anybody can remember, Piedmont's character has always been completely bound up with the Westvaco paper mill: its prosperous past and its doubtful future. At first glance, Piedmont is a typical dying mill town, with the crumbling infrastructure and the resignation of its people to its gentle decline. Many once beautiful buildings have been abandoned. They stand empty and unkempt, and testify to a bygone time of spirit and pride. The big houses on East Hampshire Street are no longer proud, but they were when I was a kid.

On still days, when the air is heavy, Piedmont has the rotten-egg smell of a chemistry class. The acrid, sulfurous odor of the bleaches used in the paper mill drifts along the valley, penetrating walls and clothing, furnishings, and skin. No perfume can fully mask it. It is as much a part of the valley as is the river, and the people who live there are not overly disturbed by it. "Smells like money to me," we were taught to say in its defense, even as children. Just below East Hampshire, as if a diagonal had been drawn from it downward at a 30-degree angle, was Pearl Street, which the colored people called "Rat Tail Road," because it snaked down around the hill to the bottom of the valley, where the tracks of the B&O railroad run on their way to Keyser, the county seat. Poor white people like Bonnie Gilroy's family lived down there, and five black families. We moved there when I was four.

Like the Italians and the Irish, most of the colored people migrated to Piedmont at the turn of the 20th century to work at the paper mill, which opened in 1888.
Nearly everybody in the Tri-Towns worked there. The Tri-Towns—three towns of similar size—were connected by two bridges across sections of the Potomac less than a mile apart: Piedmont, West Virginia; Luke, Maryland; and Westernport, Maryland, the westernmost navigable point on the river, between Pittsburgh and the Chesapeake Bay. The Italians and the Irish ... along with a few of the poorer white people, worked the good jobs in the paper mill, including all those in the craft unions. That mattered, because crafts demanded skill and training, and craftsmen commanded high wages. It was not until 1968 that the craft unions at the mill were integrated.

Until the summer of 1968, all the colored men at the paper mill worked on "the platform"—loading paper into trucks. ... The end product of the paper mill was packaged in skids, big wooden crates of paper, which could weigh as much as 7,000 pounds [3,150 kilograms] each. The skids had to be forklifted from the mill onto the shipping platform and then loaded into the huge tractor-trailers that took them to Elsewhere. Loading is what Daddy did every working day of his working life. That's what almost every colored grown-up I knew did. Every day at 6:30 a.m., Daddy would go off to the mill, and he'd work until 3:30 p.m., when the mill whistle would blow. So important was the mill to the life of the town that school let out at the same time. We would eat dinner at 4:00, so that Pop could get to his second job, as a janitor at the telephone company, by 4:30. His workday ended at 7:30, except when there was a baseball game, over in the Orchard or at the park in Westernport, in which case he would cut out early.

Almost all the colored people in Piedmont worked at the paper mill and made the same money, because they all worked at the same job, on the platform.

The colored world was not so much a neighborhood as a condition of existence. And though our own world was seemingly self-contained, it impinged upon the white world of Piedmont in almost every direction.

When Daddy was a teenager, dance bands used to come to the Crystal Palace Ballroom in Cumberland, Maryland. They'd play a set or two in the evening for white people and then a special midnight show for the colored. Daddy says everybody would be there—the maimed, the sick, the dying, and the dead. Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway. And Piedmont's own Don Redman. Later, we had our own places to dance—the colored American Legion, and then the VFW (Veterans of Foreign Wars).

It was amazing to me how new dances would spread in the black community, even to small towns like ours. Somebody'd be visiting his relatives somewhere, go to a party, and that would be that. He'd bring it back and teach everyone, showing it off in the streets in the evenings or at a party in somebody's basement.

Before 1955, most white people were only shadowy presences in our world, vague figures of power like remote bosses at the mill or tellers at the bank. There were exceptions, of course, the white people who would come into our world in ritualized, everyday ways we all understood. Mr. Mail Man, Mr. Insurance Man, Mr. White-and-Chocolate Milk Man, Mr. Landlord Man, Mr. Police Man: We called white people by their trade, like allegorical characters in a mystery play. Mr. Insurance Man would come by every other week to collect premiums on college or death policies, sometimes 50 cents or less. But my favorite white visitor was the Jewel Tea Man, who arrived in his dark-brown helmet-shaped truck, a sort of modified jeep, and, like the Sears Man, brought new appliances to our house. I loved looking at his catalogues. Mr. Jewel Tea Man, may I see your catalogues? Please?

And, of course, we would bump into the white world at the hospital in Keyser or at the credit union in Westernport or in one of the stores downtown. But our neighborhoods were clearly demarcated, as if by ropes or turnstiles. Welcome to the Colored Zone, a large stretched banner could have said. And it felt good in there, like walking around your house in bare feet and underwear, or snoring right out loud on the couch in front of the TV—swaddled by the comforts of home, the warmth of those you love.

People in Piedmont were virulent nationalists—Piedmont nationalists. And this was our credo:

All New York's got that Piedmont's got is more of what we got. Same, but bigger. And, if you were a student: You can get a good education anywhere. They got the same books, ain't they? Just bigger classes, 'at's all.

Otherwise, the advantage was all to Piedmont. Did you know that Kenny House Hill was written about in Ripley's Believe It or Not as the only street in the world from which you can enter all three stories of the same building? That made it the most famous place in this Class Three City; other of our attractions were less well publicized.

Like Dent Davis's bologna, which was so good that when colored people came home to Piedmont for the mill picnic each Labor Day, they would take pounds of it back to whatever sorry homes they had forsaken Piedmont for, along with the bright-red cans of King Syrup...with the inset metal circle for a lid, the kind that you had to pry open with the back of a claw hammer. ... Some of them, those whose tastes were most rarefied, would take home a few jars of our tap water. And that was before anybody thought of buying water in bottles. People in Piedmont can't imagine that today. A dollar for a bottle of water! We had some good water in Piedmont, the best drinking water in the world, if you asked any of us.

Dent's bologna, and our water, and our King Syrup, and the paper mill's annual pic-a-nic, all helped account for Piedmont's tenacious grip upon its inhabitants, even those in diaspora. And then there was our Valley. I never knew colored people anywhere who were crazier about mountains and water, flowers and trees, fishing and hunting. For as long as anyone could remember, we could outhunt, outshoot, and outswim the white boys in the Valley. We didn't flaunt our rifles and shotguns, though, because that might make the white people too nervous. Pickup trucks and country music - now that was going too far, at least in the fifties. But that would come, too, over time, once integration had hit the second generation. The price of progress, I
suppose.

Originally puiblished in U.S. Society and Values, USIA Electronic Journals, Vol. 1, No. 10, August 1996.

Reprinted courtesy of Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Piedmont is a small town in the northeastern corner of West Virginia that has gotten smaller since the eminent scholar Henry Louis Gates grew up there. When Gates was born in 1950, the population of Piedmont was 2,565. Today, according to the most recent estimate from the U.S. Census Bureau, 1,014 people make their home there. With just over 27,000 residents, the whole of Mineral County, where Piedmont is located, is quite sparsely populated.

Gates was among the first African-American students to attend the newly desegregated public schools of Piedmont following the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954. He took an interest in local civil rights issues and, as part of a group that became known as the "Fearsome Foursome," pressured the Blue Jay restaurant and nightclub to integrate.

Relatively little has changed since Gates's memoir of growing up in Piedmont was published in 1996. No new large employers have appeared. The Westvaco paper plant is still in operation. Like most men of his time, Gates's father worked at Westvaco. Owned by the Mead Westvaco Corporation, the plant continues to be the major source of jobs for Piedmont residents, black and white.

The Reverend Bart Thompson, pastor of the Trinity United Methodist Church in Piedmont, speaks about the need for the town to change with the nation's "changing economy." Police Chief Paul Karalewitz, who has lived in Piedmont for 28 years, points to a number of new small businesses as a sign of progress. At the Piedmont Herald, Mary Lou Kady was equally optimistic. She says that the town is "basically the same" as it was when Gates's memoir was published. Kady, who was born and raised in Piedmont, says, "I wouldn't live anywhere else. It's a great little city … with a small-town atmosphere."

Because of their location in the Allegheny Mountains, Piedmont and Mineral County are known for their rugged natural beauty. To those who know it, this rural region of West Virginia continues to exert the powerful appeal to the eye and to memory that it exerted on the author of Colored People.

Henry Louis Gates Jr., is the W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University and the chairman of Harvard's Department of African and African American Studies program. A prominent essayist, critic, and social commentator, his books include Figures in Black and The Signifying Monkey.

The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.