An account of growing up in the black community of the 1950s and 1960s in America, in an atmosphere of segregation and prejudice. Henry Louis Gates grew up in Piedmont, West Virginia, which was a little hill town surrounded by beautiful countryside and a papermill which provided work for the local people. He describes the sense of family that pervaded the community, the traumas of teenage love and the free sexual relations which provided endless gossip. Standards were strictly defined: integrated education was permitted but cross-racial dating was not; Gates's mother was able to become the head of the PTA, but his older brother's scholarly career was affected because of his race. Eventually it is television that brings the civil rights movement to Piedmont and attitudes begin to change: Gates is able to become a celebrated scholar and his mother triumphantly buys the house where she was once employed as a cleaning woman.