The Human Stain

by Philip Roth

  And what about “tell”? How much can she tell to whom? By tell does she mean make—“how much can I make,” et cetera—or does she mean reveal, expose? And what about “I am almost dangerous for this man.” Is “dangerous for” different from “dangerous to”? Either way, what’s the danger?

  Each time he tried to penetrate her meaning, it slipped away. After two frantic minutes on his feet in the hallway, all he could be sure of was his fear. And this astonished him—and, as always with Coleman, his susceptibility, by catching him unprepared, shamed him as well, triggering an SOS, a ringing signal to self-vigilance to take up the slack.

  Bright and game and beautiful as Steena was, she was only eighteen years old and fresh to New York from Fergus Falls, Minnesota, and yet he was now more intimidated by her—and her almost preposterous, unequivocal goldenness—than by anybody he had ever faced in the ring. Even on that night in the Norfolk whorehouse, when the woman who was watching from the bed as he began to peel off his uniform—a big-titted, fleshy, mistrustful whore not entirely ugly but certainly no looker (and maybe herself two thirty-fifths something other than white)—smiled sourly and said, “You’re a black nigger, ain’t you, boy?” and the two goons were summoned to throw him out, only then had he been as undone as he was by Steena’s poem.

  I wonder what he does

  after he swallows me whole.

  Even that he could not understand. At the desk in his room, he battled into the morning with the paradoxical implications of this final stanza, ferreting out and then renouncing one complicated formulation after another until, at daybreak, all he knew for sure was that for Steena, ravishing Steena, not everything he had eradicated from himself had vanished into thin air.

  Dead wrong. Her poem didn’t mean anything. It wasn’t even a poem. Under the pressure of her own confusion, fragments of ideas, raw bits of thought, had all chaotically come tumbling into her head while she was under the shower, and so she’d torn a page from one of his notebooks, scribbled out at his desk whatever words jelled, then jammed the page into the mail slot before rushing off for work. Those lines were just something she’d done—that she’d had to do—with the exquisite newness of her bewilderment. A poet? Hardly, she laughed: just somebody leaping through a ring of fire.

  They were together in the bed in his room every weekend for over a year, feeding on each other like prisoners in solitary madly downing their daily ration of bread and water. She astonished him—astonished herself—with the dance she did one Saturday night, standing at the foot of his foldout sofa bed in her half slip and nothing else. She was getting undressed, and the radio was on—Symphony Sid—and first, to get her moving and in the mood, there was Count Basie and a bunch of jazz musicians jamming on “Lady Be Good,” a wild live recording, and following that, more Gershwin, the Artie Shaw rendition of “The Man I Love” that featured Roy Eldridge steaming everything up. Coleman was lying semi-upright on the bed, doing what he most loved to do on a Saturday night after they’d returned from their five bucks’ worth of Chianti and spaghetti and cannoli in their favorite Fourteenth Street basement restaurant: watch her take her clothes off. All at once, with no prompting from him—seemingly prompted only by Eldridge’s trumpet—she began what Coleman liked to describe as the single most slithery dance ever performed by a Fergus Falls girl after little more than a year in New York City. She could have raised Gershwin himself from the grave with that dance, and with the way she sang the song. Prompted by a colored trumpet player playing it like a black torch song, there to see, plain as day, was all the power of her whiteness. That big white thing. “Some day he’ll come along . . . the man I love . . . and he’ll be big and strong . . . the man I love.” The language was ordinary enough to have been lifted from the most innocent first-grade primer, but when the record was over, Steena put her hands up to hide her face, half meaning, half pretending to cover her shame. But the gesture protected her against nothing, least of all from his enravishment. The gesture merely transported him further. “Where did I find you, Voluptas?” he asked. “How did I find you? Who are you?”

  It was during this, the headiest of times that Coleman gave up his evening workout at the Chinatown gym and cut back his early morning five-mile run and, in the end, relinquished in any way taking seriously his having turned pro. He had fought and won a total of four professional bouts, three four-rounders and then, his finale, a six-rounder, all of them Monday night fights at the old St. Nicholas Arena. He never told Steena about the fights, never told anyone at NYU, and certainly never let on to his family. For those first few years of college, that was one more secret, even though at the arena he boxed under the name of Silky Silk and the results from St. Nick’s were printed in small type in a box on the sports page of the tabloids the next day. From the first second of the first round of the first thirty-five-dollar four-round fight, he went into the ring as a pro with an attitude different from that of his amateur days. Not that he had ever wanted to lose as an amateur. But as a pro he put out twice as hard, if only to prove to himself that he could stay there if he wanted to. None of the fights went the distance, and in the last fight, the six-rounder—with Beau Jack at the top of the card—and for which he got one hundred dollars, he stopped the guy in two minutes and some-odd seconds and was not even tired when it was over. Walking down the aisle for the six-rounder, Coleman had had to pass the ringside seat of Solly Tabak, the promoter, who was already dangling a contract in front of Coleman to sign away a third of his earnings for the next ten years. Solly slapped him on the behind and, in his meaty whisper, told him, “Feel the nigger out in the first round, see what he’s got, Silky, and give the people their money’s worth.” Coleman nodded at Tabak and smiled but, while climbing into the ring, thought, Fuck you. I’m getting a hundred dollars, and I’m going to let some guy hit me to give the people their money’s worth? I’m supposed to give a shit about some jerk-off sitting in the fifteenth row? I’m a hundred and thirty-nine pounds and five foot eight and a half, he’s a hundred and forty-five and five foot ten, and I’m supposed to let the guy hit me in the head four, five, ten extra times in order to put on a show? Fuck the show.

  After the fight Solly was not happy with Coleman’s behavior. It struck him as juvenile. “You could have stopped the nigger in the fourth round instead of the first and gave the people their money’s worth. But you didn’t. I ask you nicely, and you don’t do what I ask you. Why’s that, wise guy?”

  “Because I don’t carry no nigger.” That’s what he said, the classics major from NYU and valedictorian son of the late optician, dining car waiter, amateur linguist, grammarian, disciplinarian, and student of Shakespeare Clarence Silk. That’s how obstinate he was, that’s how secretive he was—no matter what he undertook, that’s how much he meant business, this colored kid from East Orange High.

  He stopped fighting because of Steena. However mistaken he was about the ominous meaning hidden in her poem, he remained convinced that the mysterious forces that made their sexual ardor inexhaustible—that transformed them into lovers so unbridled that Steena, in a neophyte’s distillation of self-marveling self-mockery, midwesternly labeled them “two mental cases”—would one day work to dissolve his story of himself right before her eyes. How this would happen he did not know, and how he could forestall it he did not know. But the boxing wasn’t going to help. Once she found out about Silky Silk, questions would be raised that would inevitably lead her to stumble on the truth. She knew that he had a mother in East Orange who was a registered nurse and a regular churchgoer, that he had an older brother who’d begun teaching seventh and eighth grades in Asbury Park and a sister finishing up for her teaching certificate from Montclair State, and that once each month the Sunday in his Sullivan Street bed had to be cut short because Coleman was expected in East Orange for dinner. She knew that his father had been an optician—just that, an optician—and even that he’d come originally from Georgia. Coleman was scrupulous in seeing that she had no reason to doubt t
he truth of whatever she was told by him, and once he’d given up the boxing for good, he didn’t even have to lie about that. He didn’t lie to Steena about anything. All he did was to follow the instructions that Doc Chizner had given him the day they were driving up to West Point (and that already had gotten him through the navy): if nothing comes up, you don’t bring it up.

  His decision to invite her to East Orange for Sunday dinner, like all his other decisions now—even the decision at St. Nick’s to silently say fuck you to Solly Tabak by taking out the other guy in the first round—was based on nobody’s thinking but his own. It was close to two years since they’d met, Steena was twenty and he was twenty-four, and he could no longer envision himself walking down Eighth Street, let alone proceeding through life, without her. Her undriven, conventional daily demeanor in combination with the intensity of her weekend abandon—all of it subsumed by a physical incandescence, a girlish American flashbulb radiance that was practically voodooish in its power—had achieved a startling supremacy over a will as ruthlessly independent as Coleman’s: she had not only severed him from boxing and the combative filial defiance encapsulated in being Silky Silk the undefeated welterweight pro, but had freed him from the desire for anyone else.

  Yet he couldn’t tell her he was colored. The words he heard himself having to speak were going to make everything sound worse than it was—make him sound worse than he was. And if he then left it to her to imagine his family, she was going to picture people wholly unlike what they were. Because she knew no Negroes, she would imagine the kind of Negroes she saw in the movies or knew from the radio or heard about in jokes. He realized by now that she was not prejudiced and that if only she were to meet Ernestine and Walt and his mother, she would recognize right off how conventional they were and how much they happened to have in common with the tiresome respectability she had herself been all too glad to leave behind in Fergus Falls. “Don’t get me wrong—it’s a lovely city,” she hastened to tell him, “it’s a beautiful city. It’s unusual, Fergus Falls, because it has the Otter Tail Lake just to the east, and not far from our house it has the Otter Tail River. And it’s, I suppose, a little more sophisticated than other towns out there that size, because it’s just south and to the east of Fargo-Moorhead, which is the college town in that section of the country.” Her father owned a hardware supply store and a small lumberyard. “An irrepressible, gigantic, amazing person, my father. Huge. Like a slab of ham. He drinks in one night an entire container of whatever alcohol you have around. I could never believe it. I still can’t. He just keeps going. He gets a big gash in his calf muscle wrestling with a piece of machinery—he just leaves it there, he doesn’t wash it. They tend to be like this, the Icelanders. Bulldozer types. What’s interesting is his personality. Most astonishing person. My father in a conversation takes over the whole room. And he’s not the only one. My Palsson grandparents, too. His father is that way. His mother is that way.” “Icelanders. I didn’t even know you call them Icelanders. I didn’t even know they were here. I don’t know anything about Icelanders at all. When,” Coleman asked, “did they come to Minnesota?” She shrugged and laughed. “Good question. I’m going to say after the dinosaurs. That’s what it seems like.” “And it’s him you’re escaping?” “I guess. Hard to be the daughter of that sort of feistiness. He kind of submerges you.” “And your mother? He submerges her?” “That’s the Danish side of the family. That’s the Rasmussens. No, she’s unsubmergeable. My mother’s too practical to be submerged. The characteristics of her family—and I don’t think it’s peculiar to that family, I think Danes are this way, and they’re not too different from Norwegians in this way either—they’re interested in objects. Objects. Tablecloths. Dishes. Vases. They talk endlessly about how much each object costs. My mother’s father is like this too, my grandfather Rasmussen. Her whole family. They don’t have any dreams in them. They don’t have any unreality. Everything is made up of objects and what they cost and how much you can get them for. She goes into people’s houses and examines all the objects and knows where they got half of them and tells them where they could have got them for less. And clothing. Each object of clothing. Same thing. Practicality. A bare-boned practicality about the whole bunch of them. Thrifty. Extremely thrifty. Clean. Extremely clean. She’ll notice, when I come home from school, if I have one bit of ink under one fingernail from filling a fountain pen. When she’s having guests on a Saturday evening, she sets the table Friday night at about five o’clock. It’s there, every glass, every piece of silver. And then she throws a light gossamer thing over it so it won’t get dust specks on it. Everything organized perfectly. And a fantastically good cook if you don’t like any spices or salt or pepper. Or taste of any kind. So that’s my parents. I can’t get to the bottom with her particularly. On anything. It’s all surface. She’s organizing everything and my father’s disorganizing everything, and so I got to be eighteen and graduated high school and came here. Since if I’d gone up to Moorhead or North Dakota State, I’d still have to be living at home, I said the heck with college and came to New York. And so here I am. Steena.”

  That’s how she explained who she was and where she came from and why she’d left. For him it was not going to be so simple. After-ward, he told himself. Afterward—that’s when he could make his explanations and ask her to understand how he could not allow his prospects to be unjustly limited by so arbitrary a designation as race. If she was calm enough to hear him out, he was sure he could make her see why he had chosen to take the future into his own hands rather than to leave it to an unenlightened society to determine his fate—a society in which, more than eighty years after the Emancipation Proclamation, bigots happened to play too large a role to suit him. He would get her to see that far from there being anything wrong with his decision to identify himself as white, it was the most natural thing for someone with his outlook and temperament and skin color to have done. All he’d ever wanted, from earliest childhood on, was to be free: not black, not even white—just on his own and free. He meant to insult no one by his choice, nor was he trying to imitate anyone whom he took to be his superior, nor was he staging some sort of protest against his race or hers. He recognized that to conventional people for whom everything was ready-made and rigidly unalterable what he was doing would never look correct. But to dare to be nothing more than correct had never been his aim. The objective was for his fate to be determined not by the ignorant, hate-filled intentions of a hostile world but, to whatever degree humanly possible, by his own resolve. Why accept a life on any other terms?

  This is what he would tell her. And wouldn’t it all strike her as nonsense, like one big sales pitch of a pretentious lie? Unless she had first met his family—confronted head-on the fact that he was as much a Negro as they were, and that they were as unlike what she might imagine Negroes to be as he was—these words or any others would seem to her only another form of concealment. Until she sat down to dinner with Ernestine, Walt, and his mother, and they all took a turn over the course of a day at swapping reassuring banalities, whatever explanation he presented to her would sound like so much preening, self-glorifying, self-justifying baloney, high-flown, highfalutin talk whose falseness would shame him in her eyes no less than in his own. No, he couldn’t speak this shit either. It was beneath him. If he wanted this girl for good, then it was boldness that was required now and not an elocutionary snow job, à la Clarence Silk.

  In the week before the visit, though he didn’t prepare anyone else, he readied himself in the same concentrated way he used to prepare mentally for a fight, and when they stepped off the train at the Brick Church Station that Sunday, he even summoned up the phrases that he always chanted semi-mystically in the seconds before the bell sounded: “The task, nothing but the task. At one with the task. Nothing else allowed in.” Only then, at the bell, breaking from his corner—or here, starting up the porch stairs to the front door—did he add the ordinary Joe’s call to arms: “Go to work.”


  The Silks had been in their one-family house since 1925, the year before Coleman was born. When they got there, the rest of the street was white, and the small frame house was sold to them by a couple who were mad at the people next door and so were determined to sell it to colored to spite them. But no one in the private houses ran because they’d moved in, and even if the Silks never socialized with their neighbors, everyone was agreeable on that stretch of street leading up toward the Episcopal rectory and church. Agreeable even though the rector, when he arrived some years earlier, had looked around, seen a fair number of Bajians and Barbadians, who were Church of England—many of them domestics working for East Orange’s white rich, many of them island people who knew their place and sat at the back and thought they were accepted—leaned on his pulpit, and, before beginning the sermon on his first Sunday, said, “I see we have some colored families here. We’ll have to do something about that.” After consulting with the seminary in New York, he had seen to it that various services and Sunday schools for the colored were conducted, outside basic church law, in the colored families’ houses. Later, the swimming pool at the high school was shut down by the school superintendent so that the white kids wouldn’t have to swim with the colored kids. A big swimming pool, used for swimming classes and a swimming team, a part of the physical education program for years, but since there were objections from some of the white kids’ parents who were employers of the black kids’ parents—the ones working as maids and housemen and chauffeurs and gardeners and yardmen—the pool was drained and covered over.