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the full meaning of your new life to you, but we would like to share just a little of it with you. Please make a special effort to write us often—to your mother especially. I don't think this is too much to ask.
    Good luck—all our love!!!
Ansel
    H ENRY L OUIS G ATES, J R., TO
M AGGIE AND L IZA G ATES
    â€œI hope that it brings you even a small measure of
understanding, at long last, of why we see
the world with such different eyes . . .”
    With a rare combination of intellect and entrepreneurial spirit, Henry Louis Gates, the W. E. B. Du Bois Professor at Harvard, has worked tirelessly and successfully to elevate African-American studies to the scholarly level of an independent academic discipline. He is a writer, a teacher, a literary critic, an outspoken educational reformer, and through his scholarship we now have the earliest known literary works by African-American women—two novels written in the 1850s—Hannah Crafts's
The Bondswoman's Narrative
and Harriet Wilson's
Our Nig.
    We study literature, culture, and history so that we may better understand. In 1994 Gates published a book about his growing-up years in the 1950s and 1960s in West Virginia. The book began as a series of letters to his two young daughters—letters written so they might better understand from where and from whom they had come. The following letter to Maggie and Liza Gates is also the introduction to Gates's memoir,
Colored People.

    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 completely 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 have written to you because of the day when we were driving home and you asked your mother and me just exactly what the civil rights movement had been all about and I pointed to a motel on Route 2 and said that at one time I could not have stayed there. Your mother could have stayed there, but your mother couldn't have stayed there with me. And you kids looked at us like we were telling you the biggest lie you had ever heard. So I thought about writing to you.
    I have written for another reason, as well. I remember that once we were walking in Washington, D.C., heading for the National Zoo, and you asked me if I had known the man to whom I had just spoken. I said no. And, Liza, you volunteered that you found it embarrassing that I would speak to a complete stranger on the street. It called to mind a trip I'd made to Pittsburgh with my father. On the way from his friend Mr. Ozzie Washington's sister's house, I heard Daddy speak to a colored man, then saw him tip his hat to the man's wife. (Daddy liked nice hats: Caterpillar hats for work, Dobbs hats for Sunday.) It's just something that you do, he said, when I asked him if he had known those people and why had he spoken to them.
    Last summer, I sat at a sidewalk café in Italy, and three or four “black” Italians walked casually by, as well as a dozen or more blacker Africans. Each spoke to me, rather, each nodded his head slightly or acknowledged me by a glance, ever so subtly. When I was growing up, we always did this with each other, passing boats in a sea of white folk.
    Yet there were certain Negroes who would avoid acknowledging you in this way in an integrated setting, especially if the two of you were the ones doing the integrating. Don't go over there with those white people if all you're going to do is Jim Crow