The Human Stain

by Philip Roth

  But “nigger”—directed at him? That infuriated him. And yet, unless he wanted to get in serious trouble, there was nothing he could do about it except to keep walking out of the store. This wasn’t the amateur boxing card at the Knights of Pythias. This was Woolworth’s in Washington, D.C. His fists were useless, his footwork was useless, so was his rage. Forget Walter. How could his father have taken this shit? In one form or another taken shit like this in that dining car every single day! Never before, for all his precocious cleverness, had Coleman realized how protected his life had been, nor had he gauged his father’s fortitude or realized the powerful force that man was—powerful not merely by virtue of being his father. At last he saw all that his father had been condemned to accept. He saw all his father’s defenselessness, too, where before he had been a naïve enough youngster to imagine, from the lordly, austere, sometimes insufferable way Mr. Silk conducted himself, that there was nothing vulnerable there. But because somebody, belatedly, had got around to calling Coleman a nigger to his face, he finally recognized the enormous barrier against the great American menace that his father had been for him.

  But that didn’t make life better at Howard. Especially when he began to think that there was something of the nigger about him even to the kids in his dorm who had all sorts of new clothes and money in their pockets and in the summertime didn’t hang around the hot streets at home but went to “camp”—and not Boy Scout camp out in the Jersey sticks but fancy places where they rode horses and played tennis and acted in plays. What the hell was a “cotillion”? Where was Highland Beach? What were these kids talking about? He was among the very lightest of the light-skinned in the freshman class, lighter even than his tea-colored roommate, but he could have been the blackest, most benighted field hand for all they knew that he didn’t. He hated Howard from the day he arrived, within the week hated Washington, and so in early October, when his father dropped dead serving dinner on the Pennsylvania Railroad dining car that was pulling out of 30th Street Station in Philadelphia for Wilmington, and Coleman went home for the funeral, he told his mother he was finished with that college. She pleaded with him to give it a second chance, assured him that there had to be boys from something like his own modest background, scholarship boys like him, to mix with and befriend, but nothing his mother said, however true, could change his mind. Only two people were able to get Coleman to change his mind once he’d made it up, his father and Walt, and even they had to all but break his will to do it. But Walt was in Italy with the U.S. Army, and the father whom Coleman had to placate by doing as he was told was no longer around to sonorously dictate anything.

  Of course he wept at the funeral and knew how colossal this thing was that, without warning, had been taken away. When the minister read, along with the biblical stuff, a selection from Julius Caesar out of his father’s cherished volume of Shakespeare’s plays—the oversized book with the floppy leather binding that, when Coleman was a small boy, always reminded him of a cocker spaniel—the son felt his father’s majesty as never before: the grandeur of both his rise and his fall, the grandeur that, as a college freshman away for barely a month from the tiny enclosure of his East Orange home, Coleman had begun faintly to discern for what it was.

  Cowards die many times before their deaths;

  The valiant never taste of death but once.

  Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,

  It seems to me most strange that men should fear;

  Seeing that death, a necessary end,

  Will come when it will come.

  The word “valiant,” as the preacher intoned it, stripped away Coleman’s manly effort at sober, stoical self-control and laid bare a child’s longing for that man closest to him that he’d never see again, the mammoth, secretly suffering father who talked so easily, so sweepingly, who with just his powers of speech had inadvertently taught Coleman to want to be stupendous. Coleman wept with the most fundamental and copious of all emotions, reduced helplessly to everything he could not bear. As an adolescent complaining about his father to his friends, he would characterize him with far more scorn than he felt or had the capacity to feel—pretending to an impersonal way of judging his own father was one more method he’d devised to invent and claim impregnability. But to be no longer circumscribed and defined by his father was like finding that all the clocks wherever he looked had stopped, and all the watches, and that there was no way of knowing what time it was. Down to the day he arrived in Washington and entered Howard, it was, like it or not, his father who had been making up Coleman’s story for him; now he would have to make it up himself, and the prospect was terrifying. And then it wasn’t. Three terrible, terrifying days passed, a terrible week, two terrible weeks, until, out of nowhere, it was exhilarating.

  “What can be avoided / Whose end is purposed by the mighty gods?” Lines also from Julius Caesar, quoted to him by his father, and yet only with his father in the grave did Coleman at last bother to hear them—and when he did, instantaneously to aggrandize them. This had been purposed by the mighty gods! Silky’s freedom. The raw I. All the subtlety of being Silky Silk.

  At Howard he’d discovered that he wasn’t just a nigger to Washington, D.C.—as if that shock weren’t strong enough, he discovered at Howard that he was a Negro as well. A Howard Negro at that. Overnight the raw I was part of a we with all of the we’s overbearing solidity, and he didn’t want anything to do with it or with the next oppressive we that came along either. You finally leave home, the Ur of we, and you find another we? Another place that’s just like that, the substitute for that? Growing up in East Orange, he was of course a Negro, very much of their small community of five thousand or so, but boxing, running, studying, at everything he did concentrating and succeeding, roaming around on his own all over the Oranges and, with or without Doc Chizner, down across the Newark line, he was, without thinking about it, everything else as well. He was Coleman, the greatest of the great pioneers of the I.

  Then he went off to Washington and, in the first month, he was a nigger and nothing else and he was a Negro and nothing else. No. No. He saw the fate awaiting him, and he wasn’t having it. Grasped it intuitively and recoiled spontaneously. You can’t let the big they impose its bigotry on you any more than you can let the little they become a we and impose its ethics on you. Not the tyranny of the we and its we-talk and everything that the we wants to pile on your head. Never for him the tyranny of the we that is dying to suck you in, the coercive, inclusive, historical, inescapable moral we with its insidious E pluribus unum. Neither the they of Woolworth’s nor the we of Howard. Instead the raw I with all its agility. Self-discovery—that was the punch to the labonz. Singularity. The passionate struggle for singularity. The singular animal. The sliding relationship with everything. Not static but sliding. Self-knowledge but concealed. What is as powerful as that?

  “Beware the ides of March.” Bullshit—beware nothing. Free. With both bulwarks gone—the big brother overseas and the father dead—he is repowered and free to be whatever he wants, free to pursue the hugest aim, the confidence right in his bones to be his particular I. Free on a scale unimaginable to his father. As free as his father had been unfree. Free now not only of his father but of all that his father had ever had to endure. The impositions. The humiliations. The obstructions. The wound and the pain and the posturing and the shame—all the inward agonies of failure and defeat. Free instead on the big stage. Free to go ahead and be stupendous. Free to enact the boundless, self-defining drama of the pronouns we, they, and I.

  The war was still on, and unless it ended overnight he was going to be drafted anyway. If Walt was in Italy fighting Hitler, why shouldn’t he fight the bastard too? It was October of 1944, and he was still a month shy of being eighteen. But he could easily lie about his age—to move his birth date back by a month, from November 12 to October 12, was no problem at all. And dealing as he was with his mother’s grief—and with her shock at his quitting college—it didn’t immediate
ly occur to him that, if he chose to, he could lie about his race as well. He could play his skin however he wanted, color himself just as he chose. No, that did not dawn on him until he was seated in the federal building in Newark and had all the navy enlistment forms spread out in front of him and, before filling them out, and carefully, with the same meticulous scrutiny that he’d studied for his high school exams—as though whatever he was doing, large or small, was, for however long he concentrated on it, the most important thing in the world—began to read them through. And even then it didn’t occur to him. It occurred first to his heart, which began banging away like the heart of someone on the brink of committing his first great crime.

  In ’46, when Coleman came out of the service, Ernestine was already enrolled in the elementary education program at Montclair State Teachers College, Walt was at Montclair State finishing up, and both of them were living at home with their widowed mother. But Coleman, determined to live by himself, on his own, was across the river in New York, enrolled at NYU. He wanted to live in Greenwich Village far more than to go to NYU, wanted to be a poet or a playwright far more than to study for a degree, but the best way he could think to pursue his goals without having to get a job to support himself was by cashing in on the GI Bill. The problem was that as soon as he started taking classes, he wound up getting A’s, getting interested, and by the end of his first two years he was on the track for Phi Beta Kappa and a summa cum laude degree in classics. His quick mind and prodigious memory and classroom fluency made his performance at school as outstanding as it had always been, with the result that what he had come to New York wanting most was displaced by his success at what everybody else thought he should do and encouraged him to do and admired him for doing brilliantly. This was beginning to look like a pattern: he kept getting co-opted because of his academic prowess. Sure, he could take it all in and even enjoy it, the pleasure of being conventional unconventionally, but that wasn’t really the idea. He had been a whiz at Latin and Greek in high school and gotten the Howard scholarship when what he wanted was to box in the Golden Gloves; now he was no less a whiz in college, while his poetry, when he showed it to his professors, didn’t kindle any enthusiasm. At first he kept up his roadwork and his boxing for the fun of it, until one day at the gym he was approached to fight a four-rounder at St. Nick’s Arena, offered thirty-five dollars to take the place of a fighter who’d pulled out, and mostly to make up for all he’d missed at the Golden Gloves, he accepted and, to his delight, secretly turned pro.

  So there was school, poetry, professional boxing, and there were girls, girls who knew how to walk and how to wear a dress, how to move in a dress, girls who conformed to everything he’d been imagining when he’d set out from the separation center in San Francisco for New York—girls who put the streets of Greenwich Village and the crisscrossing walkways of Washington Square to their proper use. There were warm spring afternoons when nothing in triumphant postwar America, let alone in the world of antiquity, could be of more interest to Coleman than the legs of the girl walking in front of him. Nor was he the only one back from the war beset by this fixation. In those days in Greenwich Village there seemed to be no more engrossing off-hours entertainment for NYU’s ex-GIs than appraising the legs of the women who passed by the coffeehouses and cafés where they congregated to read the papers and play chess. Who knows why sociologically, but whatever the reason, it was the great American era of aphrodisiacal legs, and once or twice a day at least, Coleman followed a pair of them for block after block so as not to lose sight of the way they moved and how they were shaped and what they looked like at rest while the corner light was changing from red to green. And when he gauged the moment was right—having followed behind long enough to become both verbally poised and insanely ravenous—and quickened his pace so as to catch up, when he spoke and ingratiated himself enough so as to be allowed to fall in step beside her and to ask her name and to make her laugh and to get her to accept a date, he was, whether she knew it or not, proposing the date to her legs.

  And the girls, in turn, liked Coleman’s legs. Steena Palsson, the eighteen-year-old exile from Minnesota, even wrote a poem about Coleman that mentioned his legs. It was handwritten on a sheet of lined notebook paper, signed “S,” then folded in quarters and stuck into his mail slot in the tiled hallway above his basement room. It had been two weeks since they’d first flirted at the subway station, and this was the Monday after the Sunday of their first twenty-four-hour marathon. Coleman had rushed off to his morning class while Steena was still making up in the bathroom; a few minutes later, she herself set out for work, but not before leaving him the poem that, in spite of all the stamina they’d so conscientiously demonstrated over the previous day, she’d been too shy to hand him directly. Since Coleman’s schedule took him from his classes to the library to his late evening workout in the ring of a rundown Chinatown gym, he didn’t find the poem jutting from the mail slot until he got back to Sullivan Street at eleven-thirty that night.

  He has a body.

  He has a beautiful body—

  the muscles on the backs of his legs and the back of his neck.

  Also he is bright and brash.

  He’s four years older,

  but sometimes I feel he is younger.

  He is sweet, still, and romantic,

  though he says he is not romantic.

  I am almost dangerous for this man.

  How much can I tell

  of what I see in him?

  I wonder what he does

  after he swallows me whole.

  Rapidly reading Steena’s handwriting by the dim hall light, he at first mistook “neck” for “negro”—and the back of his negro . . . His negro what? Till then he’d been surprised by how easy it was. What was supposed to be hard and somehow shaming or destructive was not only easy but without consequences, no price paid at all. But now the sweat was pouring off him. He kept reading, faster even than before, but the words formed themselves into no combination that made sense. His negro WHAT? They had been naked together a whole day and night, for most of that time never more than inches apart. Not since he was an infant had anyone other than himself had so much time to study how he was made. Since there was nothing about her long pale body that he had not observed and nothing that she had concealed and nothing now that he could not picture with a painterlike awareness, a lover’s excited, meticulous connoisseurship, and since he had spent all day stimulated no less by her presence in his nostrils than by her legs spread-eagled in his mind’s eye, it had to follow that there was nothing about his body that she had not microscopically absorbed, nothing about that extensive surface imprinted with his self-cherishing evolutionary uniqueness, nothing about his singular configuration as a man, his skin, his pores, his whiskers, his teeth, his hands, his nose, his ears, his lips, his tongue, his feet, his balls, his veins, his prick, his armpits, his ass, his tangle of pubic hair, the hair on his head, the fuzz on his frame, nothing about the way he laughed, slept, breathed, moved, smelled, nothing about the way he shuddered convulsively when he came that she had not registered. And remembered. And pondered.

  Was it the act itself that did it, the absolute intimacy of it, when you are not just inside the body of the other person but she is tightly enveloping you? Or was it the physical nakedness? You take off your clothes and you’re in bed with somebody, and that is indeed where whatever you’ve concealed, your particularity, whatever it may be, however encrypted, is going to be found out, and that’s what the shyness is all about and what everybody fears. In that anarchic crazy place, how much of me is being seen, how much of me is being discovered? Now I know who you are. I see clear through to the back of your negro.

  But how, by seeing what? What could it have been? Was it seeable to her, whatever it was, because she was a blond Icelandic Dane from a long line of blond Icelanders and Danes, Scandinavian-raised, at home, in school, at church, in the company all her life of nothing but . . . and then Coleman recognized th
e word in the poem as a four- and not a five-letter word. What she’d written wasn’t “negro.” It was “neck.” Oh, my neck! It’s only my neck! . . . the muscles on the backs of his legs and the back of his neck.

  But what then did this mean: “How much can I tell / of what I see in him?” What was so ambiguous about what she saw in him? If she’d written “tell from” instead of “tell of,” would that have made her meaning clearer? Or would that have made it less clear? The more he reread that simple stanza, the more opaque the meaning became—and the more opaque the meaning, the more certain he was that she distinctly sensed the problem that Coleman brought to her life. Unless she meant by “what I see in him” no more than what is colloquially meant by skeptical people when they ask someone in love, “What can you possibly see in him?”