Harvard's Gates: Berea Book Award Means the Most Art Jester "I'm a mountaineer." The speaker is Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The place is Berea College. This is the Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard professor. Foremost authority on African American literature. At 44, one of the nation's most celebrated intellectuals. And he wants it known: "I'm a mountaineer." Gates is at Berea to accept the Weatherford Award. Berea gives it to the best book on Appalachia in the preceding year. He's the first African-American winner since the award began in 1971. His book is Colored People, published last year by Alfred A. Knopf and now a Vintage paperback (216 pp. $11.00). It's his memoir of growing up in a segregated mill town—Piedmont, in Mineral County, W.Va. Art Jester is book page editor of the Sunday Lexington Herald-Leader, from which the above is reprinted. Like Gates, it's vivid, spirited, sharp, funny, and loving. Read it and you know for sure that he's proud of where he's from. That's why his simple declaration keeps ringing in your ears: "Fm a mountaineer." To be sure, Gates has traveled far. Summa cum laude from Yale and a doctorate from Cambridge; four of his own books and editor of many others; jobs at Yale, Cornell, and Duke before landing the big one at Harvard, the W.E.B. DuBois professor of humanities and chairman of Afro-American studies. Still, he embraces his roots. How could he not? After all, his wife, Sharon Adams, is a Pike county native who also grew up in West Virginia . Gates wants to tell about his growing up in Appalachia, truthfully, and with love. "Piedmont—snuggled between the Allegheny Mountains and the Potomac River Valley—is life itself." Or, as he also calls it, the "Valley of No Secrets." It is a village, off life's main roads. Everyone knows everyone's business, not all of it pleasant. "Uncle Joe once told Daddy that he never had seen a place where people slept around so much or so openly as they did in Piedmont. . . everyone seemed to be sleeping with somebody, or at least. . .everyone spent lots and lots of time talking about sleeping with somebody." Some home folks accuse him of a "transgression." They ask: "How much do we let them know about us?" One man snapped at Gates: "Don't talk to me about your—book. "I'm writing about a subterranean group in our society," Gates says. "I'm trying to lift the veil of cultural privacy to how we created a nurturing, sustaining culture within segregation. This culture has a life of its own. I think we are mature enough and secure enough to say, 'This is how we function.' " So when a black political scientist scoffs in print that Colored People is " Up From Slavery on Lake Wobegon," you realize that, unwittingly, half of what he says is true. Gates' real-life drama is as endearing as the one in Garrison Keillor's mind—Clarence and Arlene Bunsen, Carl Krebsbach, Pastor Ingqvist, the Chatterbox Cafe. They become part of you, in the same way that Gates' Piedmont does: his beloved Mama and Daddy; his buddies, the Fearsome Foursome ; Mr. Comby Carroll ("Curl"); Mr.Boxie (who knows the secrets of Dent Davis' world-class bologna); Miss Sarah ("Sister Holy Ghost"); Reverend "Mon-roe" and the Heavenly Gospel Choir. Gates touches a common chord. So you tell him: "I know those people." And he nods. "I've gotten hundreds of letters from people who tell me they've read the book. They say, 'It reminds me of the shtetl I grew up in Russia,' or 'the tenement where I live in Harlem,' or 'my building in Chicago.' "This is not a documentary. I was aspiring to create a work of art." Which it is. Thus, Berea, this most Appalachian of colleges, invites this native son to receive its praise and its award. Of all his honors, Gates says as he accepts, "none is more important than this because it recognizes the complexity of my identity. "Thank you for honoring me as a fellow...