by Philip Roth
“It doesn’t matter how tough they are or how tough they think they are,” he told her. “On the street it matters. But not in the ring. In the street this guy could probably have beat me silly. But in the ring? With rules? With gloves? No, no—he couldn’t land a punch.”
“But what happens when they do hit you? It has to hurt you. The impact. It must. And that’s so dangerous. Your head. Your brain.”
“You’re rolling with the punch, Mom. That’s where they teach you how to roll your head. Like this, see? That reduces the impact. Once, and only once, and only because I was a jerk, only because of my own stupid mistake and because I wasn’t used to fighting a southpaw, did I get a little stunned. And it’s only like if you bang your head against the wall, you feel a little dizzy or shaky. But then all of a sudden your body comes right back. All you have to do is just hold on to the guy or move away, and then your head clears up. Sometimes, you get hit in the nose, your eyes get a little watery for a second, but that’s it. If you know what you’re doing, it’s not dangerous at all.”
With that remark, his father had heard enough. “I’ve seen men get hit with a punch that they never saw coming. And when that happens,” Mr. Silk said, “their eyes don’t get watery—when that happens, it knocks them cold. Even Joe Louis, if you recall, was knocked cold—wasn’t he? Am I mistaken? And if Joe Louis can be knocked cold, Coleman, so can you.”
“Yeah, but Dad, Schmeling, when he fought Louis that first fight, he saw a weakness. And the weakness was that when Louis threw his jab, instead of coming back—” On his feet again, the boy demonstrated to his parents what he meant. “Instead of coming back, he dropped his left hand—see?—and Schmeling kept coming over —see?—and that’s how Schmeling knocked him out. It’s all thinking. Really. It is, Dad. I swear to you.”
“Don’t say that. Don’t say, ‘I swear to you.’”
“I won’t, I won’t. But see, if he doesn’t come back, where he’s back in position, if he comes here instead, then the guy’s going to come over with his right hand and eventually he’s going to catch him. That’s what happened that first time. That’s exactly what happened.”
But Mr. Silk had seen plenty of fights, in the army had seen fights among soldiers staged at night for the troops where fighters were not only knocked out like Joe Louis but so badly cut up nothing could be done to stop the bleeding. On his base he had seen colored fighters who used their heads as their main weapon, who should have had a glove on their heads, tough street fighters, stupid men who butted and butted with their heads until the face of the other fighter was unrecognizable as a face. No, Coleman was to retire undefeated, and if he wanted to box for the enjoyment of it, for the sport, he would do so not at the Newark Boys Club, which to Mr. Silk was for slum kids, for illiterates and hoodlums bound for either the gutter or jail, but right there in East Orange, under the auspices of Doc Chizner, who’d been the dentist for the United Electrical Workers when Mr. Silk was the optician providing the union’s members with eyeglasses before he lost the business. Doc Chizner was still a dentist but after hours taught the sons of the Jewish doctors and lawyers and businessmen the basic skills of boxing, and nobody in his classes, you could be sure, ended up hurt or maimed for life. For Coleman’s father, the Jews, even audaciously unsavory Jews like Dr. Fensterman, were like Indian scouts, shrewd people showing the outsider his way in, showing the social possibility, showing an intelligent colored family how it might be done.
That was how Coleman got to Doc Chizner and became the colored kid whom all the privileged Jewish kids got to know—probably the only one they would ever know. Quickly Coleman came to be Doc’s assistant, teaching these Jewish kids not exactly the fine points of how to economize energy and motion that Mac Machrone had taught his ace student but the basics, which was all they were up to anyway—“I say one, you jab. I say one-one, you double-jab. I say one-two, left jab, right cross. One-two-three, left jab, right cross, left hook.” After the other pupils went home—with the occasional one who got a bloody nose packing it in, never to return—Doc Chizner worked alone with Coleman, some nights building up his endurance mainly by doing infighting with him, where you’re tugging, you’re pulling, you’re hitting, and so afterward, by comparison, sparring is kid’s play. Doc had Coleman up and out doing his roadwork and his shadowboxing even as the milkman’s horse, drawing the wagon, would arrive in the neighborhood with the morning delivery. Coleman would be out there at 5 A.M. in his gray hooded sweatshirt, in the cold, the snow, it made no difference, out there three and a half hours before the first school bell. No one else around, nobody running, long before anybody knew what running was, doing three quick miles, and throwing punches the whole way, stopping only so as not to frighten that big, brown, lumbering old beast when, tucked sinisterly within his monklike cowl, Coleman drew abreast of the milkman and sprinted ahead. He hated the boredom of the running—and he never missed a day.
Some four months before Dr. Fensterman came to the house to make his offer to Coleman’s parents, Coleman found himself one Saturday in Doc Chizner’s car being driven up to West Point, where Doc was going to referee a match between Army and the University of Pittsburgh. Doc knew the Pitt coach and he wanted the coach to see Coleman fight. Doc was sure that, what with Coleman’s grades, the coach could get him a four-year scholarship to Pitt, a bigger scholarship than he could ever get for track, and all he’d have to do was box for the Pitt team.
Now, it wasn’t that on the way up Doc told him to tell the Pitt coach that he was white. He just told Coleman not to mention that he was colored.
“If nothing comes up,” Doc said, “you don’t bring it up. You’re neither one thing or the other. You’re Silky Silk. That’s enough. That’s the deal.” Doc’s favorite expression: that’s the deal. Something else Coleman’s father would not allow him to repeat in the house.
“He won’t know?” Coleman asked.
“How? How will he know? How the hell is he going to know? Here is the top kid from East Orange High, and he is with Doc Chizner. You know what he’s going to think, if he thinks anything?”
“What?”
“You look like you look, you’re with me, and so he’s going to think that you’re one of Doc’s boys. He’s going to think that you’re Jewish.”
Coleman never regarded Doc as much of a comedian—nothing like Mac Machrone and his stories about being a Newark cop—but he laughed loudly at that one and then reminded him, “I’m going to Howard. I can’t go to Pitt. I’ve got to go to Howard.” For as long as Coleman could remember, his father had been determined to send him, the brightest of the three kids, to a historically black college along with the privileged children of the black professional elite.
“Coleman, box for the guy. That’s all. That’s the whole deal. Let’s see what happens.”
Except for educational trips to New York City with his family, Coleman had never been out of Jersey before, and so first he spent a great day walking around West Point pretending he was at West Point because he was going to go to West Point, and then he boxed for the Pitt coach against a guy like the guy he’d boxed at the Knights of Pythias—slow, so slow that within seconds Coleman realized that there was no way this guy was going to beat him, even if he was twenty years old and a college boxer. Jesus, Coleman thought at the end of the first round, if I could fight this guy for the rest of my life, I’d be better than Ray Robinson. It wasn’t just that Coleman weighed some seven pounds more than when he’d boxed on the amateur card at the Knights of Pythias. It was that something he could not even name made him want to be more damaging than he’d ever dared before, to do something more that day than merely win. Was it because the Pitt coach didn’t know he was colored? Could it be because who he really was was entirely his secret? He did love secrets. The secret of nobody’s knowing what was going on in your head, thinking whatever you wanted to think with no way of anybody’s knowing. All the other kids were always blabbing about themselves. But that wasn’t where
the power was or the pleasure either. The power and pleasure were to be found in the opposite, in being counterconfessional in the same way you were a counterpuncher, and he knew that with nobody having to tell him and without his having to think about it. That’s why he liked shadowboxing and hitting the heavy bag: for the secrecy in it. That’s why he liked track, too, but this was even better. Some guys just banged away at the heavy bag. Not Coleman. Coleman thought, and the same way that he thought in school or in a race: rule everything else out, let nothing else in, and immerse yourself in the thing, the subject, the competition, the exam—whatever’s to be mastered, become that thing. He could do that in biology and he could do it in the dash and he could do it in boxing. And not only did nothing external make any difference, neither did anything internal. If there were people in the fight crowd shouting at him, he could pay no attention to that, and if the guy he was fighting was his best friend, he could pay no attention to that. After the fight there was plenty of time for them to be friends again. He managed to force himself to ignore his feelings, whether of fear, uncertainty, even friendship—to have the feelings but have them separately from himself. When he was shadowboxing, for instance, he wasn’t just loosening up. He was also imagining another guy, in his head fighting through a secret fight with another guy. And in the ring, where the other guy was real—stinky, snotty, wet, throwing punches as real as could be—the guy still could have no idea what you were thinking. There wasn’t a teacher to ask for the answer to the question. All the answers that you came up with in the ring, you kept to yourself, and when you let the secret out, you let it out through everything but your mouth.
So at magic, mythical West Point, where it looked to him that day as though there were more of America in every square inch of the flag flapping on the West Point flagpole than in any flag he’d ever seen, and where the iron faces of the cadets had for him the most powerful heroic significance, even here, at the patriotic center, the marrow of his country’s unbreakable spine, where his sixteen-year-old’s fantasy of the place matched perfectly the official fantasy, where everything he saw made him feel a frenzy of love not only for himself but for all that was visible, as if everything in nature were a manifestation of his own life—the sun, the sky, the mountains, the river, the trees, just Coleman Brutus “Silky” Silk carried to the millionth degree—even here nobody knew his secret, and so he went out there in the first round and, unlike Mac Machrone’s undefeated counterpuncher, started hitting this guy with everything he had. When the guy and he were of the same caliber, he would have to use his brains, but when the guy was easy and when Coleman saw that early, he could always be a more aggressive fighter and begin to pound away. And that’s what happened at West Point. Before you turned around, he had cut the guy’s eyes, the guy’s nose was bleeding, and he was knocking him all over the place. And then something happened that had never happened before. He threw a hook, one that seemed to go three-quarters of the way into the guy’s body. It went so deep he was astonished, though not half as astonished as the Pitt guy. Coleman weighed a hundred and twenty-eight pounds, hardly a young boxer who knocked people out. He never really planted his feet to throw that one good shot, that was not his style; and still this punch to the body went so deep that the guy just folded forward, a college boxer already twenty years old, and Coleman caught him in what Doc Chizner called “the labonz.” Right in the labonz, and the guy folded forward, and for a moment Coleman thought the guy was even going to throw up, and so before he threw up and before he went down, Coleman set himself to whack him with the right one more time—all he saw as this white guy was going down was somebody he wanted to beat the living shit out of—but suddenly the Pitt coach, who was the referee, called, “Don’t, Silky!” and as Coleman started to throw that last right, the coach grabbed him and stopped the fight.
“And that kid,” said Doc on the drive home, “that kid was a goddamn good fighter, too. But when they dragged him back to his corner, they had to tell him the fight was over. This kid is already back in his corner, and still he didn’t know what hit him.”
Deep in the victory, in the magic, in the ecstasy of that last punch and of the sweet flood of fury that had broken out and into the open and overtaken him no less than its victim, Coleman said—almost as though he were speaking in his sleep rather than aloud in the car as he replayed the fight in his head—“I guess I was too quick for him, Doc.”
“Sure, quick. Of course quick. I know you’re quick. But also strong. That is the best hook you ever threw, Silky. My boy, you were too strong for him.”
Was he? Truly strong?
He went to Howard anyway. Had he not, his father would—with words alone, with just the English language—have killed him. Mr. Silk had it all figured out: Coleman was going to Howard to become a doctor, to meet a light-skinned girl there from a good Negro family, to marry and settle down and have children who would in turn go to Howard. At all-Negro Howard, Coleman’s tremendous advantages of intellect and of appearance would launch him into the topmost ranks of Negro society, make of him someone people would forever look up to. And yet within his first week at Howard, when he eagerly went off on Saturday with his roommate, a lawyer’s son from New Brunswick, to see the Washington Monument, and they stopped in Woolworth’s to get a hot dog, he was called a nigger. His first time. And they wouldn’t give him the hot dog. Refused a hot dog at Woolworth’s in downtown Washington, on the way out called a nigger, and, as a result, unable to divorce himself from his feelings as easily as he did in the ring. At East Orange High the class valedictorian, in the segregated South just another nigger. In the segregated South there were no separate identities, not even for him and his roommate. No such subtleties allowed, and the impact was devastating. Nigger—and it meant him.
Of course, even in East Orange he had not escaped the minimally less malevolent forms of exclusion that socially separated his family and the small colored community from the rest of East Orange—everything that flowed from what his father called the country’s “Negrophobia.” And he knew, too, that working for the Pennsylvania Railroad, his father had to put up with insults in the dining car and, union or no union, prejudicial treatment from the company that were far more humbling than anything Coleman would have known as an East Orange kid who was not only as light-skinned as a Negro could get but a bubbling, enthusiastic, quick-witted boy who happened also to be a star athlete and a straight-A student. He would watch his father do everything he could so as not to explode when he came home from work after something had happened on the job about which, if he wanted to keep the job, he could do nothing but meekly say, “Yes, suh.” That Negroes who were lighter were treated better didn’t always hold true. “Any time a white deals with you,” his father would tell the family, “no matter how well intentioned he may be, there is the presumption of intellectual inferiority. Somehow or other, if not directly by his words then by his facial expression, by his tone of voice, by his impatience, even by the opposite—by his forbearance, by his wonderful display of humaneness—he will always talk to you as though you are dumb, and then, if you’re not, he will be astonished.” “What happened, Dad?” Coleman would ask. But, as much out of pride as disgust, rarely would his father elucidate. To make the pedagogical point was enough. “What happened,” Coleman’s mother would explain, “is beneath your father even to repeat.”
At East Orange High, there were teachers from whom Coleman sensed an unevenness of acceptance, an unevenness of endorsement compared to what they lavished on the smart white kids, but never to the degree that the unevenness was able to block his aims. No matter what the slight or the obstacle, he took it the way he took the low hurdles. If only to feign impregnability, he shrugged things off that Walter, say, could not and would not. Walt played varsity football, got good grades, as a Negro was no less anomalous in his skin color than Coleman, and yet he was always a little angrier about everything. When, for instance, he didn’t get invited into a white kid’s house but was made to wai
t outside, when he wasn’t asked to the birthday party of a white teammate whom he’d been foolish enough to consider a buddy, Coleman, who shared a bedroom with him, would hear about it for months. When Walt didn’t get his A in trigonometry, he went right to the teacher and stood there and, to the man’s white face, said, “I think you made a mistake.” When the teacher went over his grade book and looked again at Walt’s test scores, he came back to Walt and, even while allowing his mistake, had the nerve to say, “I couldn’t believe your grades were as high as they were,” and only after a remark like that made the change from a B to an A. Coleman wouldn’t have dreamed of asking a teacher to change a grade, but then he’d never had to. Maybe because he didn’t have Walt’s brand of bristling defiance, or maybe because he was lucky, or maybe because he was smarter and excelling academically wasn’t the same effort for him that it was for Walt, he got the A in the first place. And when, in the seventh grade, he didn’t get invited to some white friend’s birthday party (and this was somebody who lived just down the block in the corner apartment house, the little white son of the building’s super who’d been walking back and forth to school with Coleman since they’d started kindergarten), Coleman didn’t take it as rejection by white people—after his initial mystification, he took it as rejection by Dicky Watkin’s stupid mother and father. When he taught Doc Chizner’s class, he knew there were kids who were repelled by him, who didn’t like to be touched by him or to come in contact with his sweat, there was occasionally a kid who dropped out—again, probably because of parents who didn’t want him taking boxing instruction, or any instruction, from a colored boy—and yet, unlike Walt, on whom no slight failed to register, Coleman, in the end, could forget it, dismiss it, or decide to appear to. There was the time one of the white runners on the track team was injured seriously in a car crash and guys from the team rushed to offer blood to the family for the transfusions, and Coleman was one of them, yet his was the blood the family didn’t take. They thanked him and told him that they had enough, but he knew what the real reason was. No, it wasn’t that he didn’t know what was going on. He was too smart not to know. He competed against plenty of white Newark guys at track meets, Italians from Barringer, Poles from East Side, Irish from Central, Jews from Weequahic. He saw, he heard—he over-heard. Coleman knew what was going on. But he also knew what wasn’t going on, at the center of his life anyway. The protection of his parents, the protection provided by Walt as his older, six-foot-two-and-a-half-inch brother, his own innate confidence, his bright charm, his running prowess (“the fastest kid in the Oranges”), even his color, which made of him someone that people sometimes couldn’t quite figure out—all this combined to mute for Coleman the insults that Walter found intolerable. Then there was the difference of personality: Walt was Walt, vigorously Walt, and Coleman was vigorously not. There was probably no better explanation than that for their different responses.