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The Valley and the Mill
A thousand souls, one paper mill, and a boy born at the edge of the Alleghenies, inside the last
decade of a word the world was about to retire.
enry Louis Gates Jr. was born on September 16, 1950, in Keyser, West Virginia, and
grew up a few miles south in Piedmont, a town of scarcely more than a thousand
people wedged between the Potomac River and the Allegheny ridges. Pulp and paper were
the town's reason for being. The West Virginia Pulp and Paper Company — Westvaco — paid
nearly everyone's wages, and its mill, with its sulfurous sweetness, was simply the smell of
home. His father, Henry Louis Gates Sr., loaded paper at the mill. His mother, Pauline
Augusta Coleman Gates, kept house and, at times, cleaned the kitchens of white families in
town. By the standards of the valley they were respectable, churchgoing, and proud.
Piedmont was an anomaly in the segregated America of the 1950s — a border town where
Black and white children attended the same schools and families lived side by side on the
same streets. Proximity, however, did not mean equality. The mill's job ladder had a color,
and the town's social life followed unwritten rules that every Black child learned early: a
grammar of small courtesies and small humiliations, practiced daily, never discussed.
The center of Black Piedmont was the church — choir, deacons, homecoming Sundays —
and, after services, the porches and kitchens where the older generation traded the stories
that never reached the textbooks: who had married whom, who had been cheated, who had
crossed the mountains to the North and written back.
Television brought the larger world into that living room. The murder of Medgar Evers in
June 1963, the March on Washington in August, the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist
Church in September: Gates watched them all with his family. He has said that his mother's
grief at Evers's death was his first political memory — the moment he understood that the
violence on the screen was not happening in some other country. It was happening in the
country that still called his people
colored
.
That word was the quiet subject of his childhood. In his household it was not an insult but a
claim of belonging, the old coin of the community's self-respect, already being replaced by
Negro
and then
Black
as he grew. When he came to write his memoir, he chose the word as
his title, deliberately: to hold it up to the light and ask what it had really meant, and what
had been lost when it fell away.
The mill town gave him a voice pitched somewhere between the pulpit and the seminar
room, an ear for the music in ordinary speech, and the stubborn conviction that his
people's story was worth writing down. He would spend the rest of his life proving it.
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