The Human Stain

by Philip Roth

  “And was it?” I asked.

  “Mr. Zuckerman, there was no repairing it—ever. When she died in the hospital, when she was delirious, do you know what she was saying? She kept calling for the nurse the way the sick patients used to call for her. ‘Oh, nurse,’ she said, ‘oh, nurse—get me to the train. I got a sick baby at home.’ Over and over, ‘I got a sick baby at home.’ Sitting there beside her bed, holding her hand and watching her die, I knew who that sick baby was. So did Walter know. It was Coleman. Whether she would have been better off had Walt not interfered the way he did by banishing Coleman forever like that . . . well, I still hesitate to say. But Walter’s special talent as a man is his decisiveness. That was Coleman’s as well. Ours is a family of decisive men. Daddy had it, and so did his father, who was a Methodist minister down in Georgia. These men make up their minds, and that’s it. Well, there was a price to pay for their decisiveness. One thing is clear, however. And I realized that today. And I wish my parents could know it. We are a family of educators. Beginning with my paternal grandmother. As a young slave girl, taught to read by her mistress, then, after Emancipation, went to what was then called Georgia State Normal and Industrial School for Colored. That’s how it began, and that’s what we have turned out to be. And that is what I realized when I saw Coleman’s children. All but one of them teachers. And all of us—Walt, Coleman, me, all of us teachers as well. My own son is another story. He did not finish college. We had some disagreements, and now he has a significant other, as the expression goes, and we have our disagreement about that. I should tell you that there were no colored teachers in the white Asbury Park school system when Walter arrived there in ’47. You have to remember, he was the first. And subsequently their first Negro principal. And subsequently their first Negro superintendent of schools. That tells you something about Walt. There was already a well-established colored community, but it was not till Walter got there in ’47 that things began to change. And that decisiveness of his had a lot to do with it. Even though you’re a Newark product, I’m not sure you know that up until 1947, legally, constitutionally separate, segregated education was approved in New Jersey. You had, in most communities, schools for colored children and schools for white children. There was a distinct separation of the races in elementary education in south Jersey. From Trenton, New Brunswick, on down, you had separate schools. And in Princeton. And in Asbury Park. In Asbury Park, when Walter arrived there, there was a school called Bangs Avenue, East or West—one of them was for colored children who lived in that Bangs Avenue neighborhood and the other one was for white children who lived in that neighborhood. Now that was one building, but it was divided into two parts. There was a fence between the two sides of the building, and one side was colored kids and on the other was white kids. Likewise, the teachers on one side were white and the teachers on the other side were colored. The principal was white. In Trenton, in Princeton—and Princeton is not considered south Jersey—there were separate schools up until 1948. Not in East Orange and not in Newark, though at one time, even in Newark there was an elementary school for colored children. That was the early 1900s. But in 1947—and I’m getting to Walter’s place in all this, because I want you to understand my brother Walter, I want you to see his relationship to Coleman within the wider picture of what was going on back then. This is years before the civil rights movement. Even what Coleman did, the decision that he made, despite his Negro ancestry, to live as a member of another racial group—that was by no means an uncommon decision before the civil rights movement. There were movies about it. Remember them? One was called Pinky, and there was another, with Mel Ferrer, though I can’t remember the name of it, but it was popular too. Changing your racial group—there was no civil rights to speak of, no equality, so that was on people’s minds, white as well as colored. Maybe more in their minds than happening in reality, but still, it fascinated people in the way they are fascinated by a fairy tale. But then in 1947, the governor called for a constitutional convention to revise the constitution of the state of New Jersey. And that was the beginning of something. One of the constitutional revisions was that there would no longer be separated or segregated National Guard units in New Jersey. The second part, the second change in the new constitution, said that no longer shall children be forced to pass one school to get to another school in their neighborhood. The wording was something like that. Walter could tell it to you verbatim. Those amendments eliminated segregation in the public schools and in the National Guard. The governor and the boards of education were told to implement that. The state board advised all the local boards of education to set into operation plans to integrate the schools. They suggested first integrating the faculties of the schools and then slowly integrating the schools insofar as pupils were concerned. Now, even before Walt went to Asbury Park, even as a student at Montclair State when he came home from the war, he was one of those who were politically concerned—one of those ex-GIs who were already actively fighting for integration of the schools in New Jersey. Even before the constitutional revision, and after it was revised, certainly, Walter remained among the most active in the fight to integrate the schools.”

  Her point was that Coleman was not one of those ex-GIs fighting for integration and equality and civil rights; in Walt’s opinion, he was never fighting for anything other than himself. Silky Silk. That’s who he fought as, who he fought for, and that’s why Walt could never stand Coleman, even when Coleman was a boy. In it for himself, Walt used to say. In it always for Coleman alone. All he ever wanted was out.

  We had finished lunch at my house several hours earlier, but Ernestine’s energy showed no signs of abating. Everything whirling inside her brain—and not just as a consequence of Coleman’s death but everything about the mystery of him that she had been trying to fathom for the last fifty years—was causing her to speak in a rush that was not necessarily characteristic of the serious small-town schoolteacher she’d been for the whole of her life. She was a very proper-looking woman, seemingly healthy if a bit drawn in the face, whose appetites you couldn’t have imagined to be in any way excessive; from her dress and her posture, from the meticulous way she ate her lunch, even from the way she occupied her chair, it was clear that hers was a personality that had no difficulty subjugating itself to social convention and that her inmost reflex in any conflict would be to act automatically as the mediator—entirely the master of the sensible response, by choice more of a listener than a maker of speeches, and yet the aura of excitement surrounding the death of her self-declared white brother, the special significance of the end of a life that to her family had seemed like one long, perverse, willfully arrogant defection, could hardly be reckoned with by ordinary means.

  “Mother went to her grave wondering why Coleman did it. ‘Lost himself to his own people.’ That’s how she put it. He wasn’t the first in Mother’s family. There’d been others. But they were others. They weren’t Coleman. Coleman never in his life chafed under being a Negro. Not for as long as we knew him. This is true. Being a Negro was just never an issue with him. You’d see Mother sitting in her chair at night, sitting there stock-still, and you knew what she was wondering: could it be this, could it be that? Was it to get away from Daddy? But by the time he did it, Daddy was dead. Mother would propose reasons, but none was ever adequate. Was it because he thought white people were better than us? They had more money than we did, sure—but better? Is that what he believed? We never saw the slightest evidence of that. Now, people grow up and go away and have nothing to do with their families ever again, and they don’t have to be colored to act like that. It happens every day all over the world. They hate everything so much they just disappear. But Coleman as a kid was not a hater. The breeziest, most optimistic child you ever wanted to see. Growing up, I was more unhappy than Coleman. Walt was more unhappy than Coleman. What with all the success he had, with the attention people gave him . . . no, it just never made sense to Mother. The pining never stopped. His photos. H
is report cards. His track medals. His yearbook. The certificate he got as valedictorian. There were even toys of Coleman’s around, toys he’d loved as a small child, and she had all these things and she stared at them the way a mind reader stares into a crystal ball, as if they would unravel everything. Did he ever acknowledge to anyone what he’d done? Did he, Mr. Zuckerman? Did he ever acknowledge it to his wife? To his children?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “I’m sure he didn’t.”

  “So he was Coleman all the way. Set out to do it and did it. That was the extraordinary thing about him from the time he was a boy—that he stuck to a plan completely. There was a dogged commitment he could make to his every decision. All the lying that was necessitated by the big lie, to his family, to his colleagues, and he stuck to it right to the end. Even to be buried as a Jew. Oh, Coleman,” she said sadly, “so determined. Mr. Determined,” and in that moment, she was closer to laughter than to tears.

  Buried as a Jew, I thought, and, if I was speculating correctly, killed as a Jew. Another of the problems of impersonation.

  “If he acknowledged it to anyone,” I said, “maybe it was to the woman he died with. To Faunia Farley.”

  She clearly didn’t want to hear about that woman. But because of her sensibleness, she had to ask, “How do you know that?”

  “I don’t. I don’t know anything. It’s a thought I have,” I said. “It ties into the pact that I sensed was between them—his telling her.” By “the pact between them” I meant their mutual recognition that there was no clean way out, but I didn’t go on to explain myself, not to Ernestine. “Look, learning this from you today, there’s nothing about Coleman I don’t have to rethink. I don’t know what to think about anything.”

  “Well then, you’re now an honorary member of the Silk family. Aside from Walter, in matters pertaining to Coleman none of us has ever known what to think. Why he did it, why he stuck to it, why Mother had to die the way she did. If Walt hadn’t laid down the law,” she said, “who knows what would have evolved? Who knows if Coleman wouldn’t have told his wife as the years passed and he got further from the decision? Maybe even told his children one day. Maybe have told the world. But Walt froze everything in time. And that is never a good idea. Coleman did this when he was still in his twenties. A firecracker of twenty-seven. But he wasn’t going to be twenty-seven forever. It wasn’t going to be 1953 forever. People age. Nations age. Problems age. Sometimes they age right out of existence. Yet Walt froze it. Of course, if you look at it narrowly, from the point of view simply of social advantage, of course it was advantageous in the well-spoken Negro middle class to do it Coleman’s way, as it’s advantageous today not to dream of doing it that way. Today, if you’re a middle-class intelligent Negro and you want your kids to go to the best schools, and on full scholarship if you need it, you wouldn’t dream of saying that you’re not colored. That would be the last thing you’d do. White as your skin might be, now it’s advantageous not to do it, just as then it was advantageous to do it. So what is the difference? But can I tell that to Walter? Can I say to him, ‘So what really is the difference?’ First because of what Coleman did to Mother, and second because in Walter’s eyes there was a fight to fight then, and Coleman didn’t want to fight it—for those reasons alone, I most certainly cannot. Though don’t think that over the years I haven’t tried. Because Walter, in fact, is not a harsh man. You want to hear about my brother Walter? In 1944 Walter was a twenty-one-year-old rifleman with a colored infantry company. He was with another soldier from his outfit. They were on a ridge in Belgium overlooking a valley that was cut through by railroad tracks. They saw a German soldier walking east along the tracks. He had a small bag slung over his soldier and he was whistling. The other soldier with Walter took aim. ‘What the hell are you doing?’ Walter said to him. ‘I’m going to kill him.’ ‘Why? Stop! What’s he doing? He’s walking. He’s probably walking home.’ Walter had to wrestle the rifle away from this fellow. A kid from South Carolina. They went down the ridge and they stopped the German and they took him prisoner. Turned out he was walking home. He had a leave, and the only way he knew to get back to Germany was to follow the railroad tracks east. And it was Walter who saved his life. How many soldiers ever did that? My brother Walter is a determined man who can be hard if he has to be, but he is also a human being. It’s because he’s a human being that he believes that what you do, you do to advance the race. And so I have tried with him, tried sometimes by saying things to Walter that I only half believe myself. Coleman was a part of his time, I tell him. Coleman couldn’t wait to go through civil rights to get to his human rights, and so he skipped a step. ‘See him historically,’ I say to Walt. ‘You’re a history teacher—see him as a part of something larger.’ I’ve told him, ‘Neither of you just submitted to what you were given. Both of you are fighters and both of you fought. You did battle your way and Coleman did battle his.’ But that is a line of reasoning that has never worked with Walter. Nothing has ever worked. That was Coleman’s way of becoming a man, I tell him—but he will not buy that. To Walt, that was Coleman’s way of not becoming a man. ‘Sure,’ he says to me, ‘sure. Your brother is more or less as he would have been, except he would have been black. Except? Except? That except would have changed everything.’ Walt cannot see Coleman other than the way he always has. And what can I do about that, Mr. Zuckerman? Hate my brother Walt for what he did to Coleman by freezing our family in time like that? Hate my brother Coleman for what he did to Mother, for how he made the poor woman suffer down to the very last day of her life? Because if I’m going to hate my two brothers, why stop there? Why not hate my father for all the things that he did wrong? Why not hate my late husband? I was not married to a saint, I can assure you. I loved my husband, but I have clear vision. And what about my son? There’s a boy it would not be at all hard to hate. He goes out of his way to make it easy for you. But the danger with hatred is, once you start in on it, you get a hundred times more than you bargained for. Once you start, you can’t stop. I don’t know anything harder to control than hating. Easier to kick drinking than to master hate. And that is saying something.”

  “Did you know before today,” I asked her, “why it was that Coleman had resigned from the college?”

  “I did not. I thought he’d reached a retirement age.”

  “He never told you.”

  “No.”

  “So you couldn’t know what Keble was talking about.”

  “Not entirely.”

  So I told her about the spooks business, told her that whole story then, and when I was finished she shook her head and said, straight out, “I don’t believe I’ve ever heard of anything more foolish being perpetrated by an institution of higher learning. It sounds to me more like a hotbed of ignorance. To persecute a college professor, whoever he is, whatever color he might be, to insult him, to dishonor him, to rob him of his authority and his dignity and his prestige for something as stupid and trivial as that. I am my father’s daughter, Mr. Zuckerman, the daughter of a father who was a stickler for words, and with every passing day, the words that I hear spoken strike me as less and less of a description of what things really are. Sounds from what you’ve told me that anything is possible in a college today. Sounds like the people there forgot what it is to teach. Sounds like what they do is something closer to buffoonery. Every time has its reactionary authorities, and here at Athena they are apparently riding high. One has to be so terribly frightened of every word one uses? What ever happened to the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America? In my childhood, as in yours, it was recommended that each student who graduated from high school in New Jersey get at graduation two things: a diploma and a copy of the Constitution. Do you recall that? You had to take a year of American history and a semester of economics—as, of course, you have to no longer: ‘have to’ is just gone out of the curriculum. At graduation it was traditional in many of our schools in those days for the principal
to hand you your diploma and somebody else to give you a copy of the Constitution of the United States. So few people today have a reasonably clear understanding of the Constitution of the United States. But here in America, as far as I can see, it’s just getting more foolish by the hour. All these colleges starting these remedial programs to teach kids what they should have learned in the ninth grade. In East Orange High they stopped long ago reading the old classics. They haven’t even heard of Moby-Dick, much less read it. Youngsters were coming to me the year I retired, telling me that for Black History Month they would only read a biography of a black by a black. What difference, I would ask them, if it’s a black author or it’s a white author? I’m impatient with Black History Month altogether. I liken having a Black History Month in February and concentrating study on that to milk that’s just about to go sour. You can still drink it, but it just doesn’t taste right. If you’re going to study and find out about Matthew Henson, then it seems to me that you do Matthew Henson when you do other explorers.”