Show Me the Place, 73

“Show me the place.”

Duke Senior in As You Like It (2.1)

73: Piedmont, West Virginia; July 2002

The home of Henry Louis Gates

When he was but a child.

He wrote a book about the place*—

The calm, the weird, the wild.

I taught that book a decade, and

We went to see the town

Where he had grown—all well before

He’d gained all his renown.

We met him once in Cleveland,** and

To us he was so kind.

It all began in this small town,

Which we had gone to find.

*Colored People, 1994

**September 2003