by Philip Roth
“I don’t know who Matthew Henson is,” I said to Ernestine, wondering if Coleman had known, if he had wanted to know, if not wanting to know was one of the reasons he had made his decision.
“Mr. Zuckerman . . . ,” she said, gently enough, but to shame me nonetheless.
“Mr. Zuckerman was not exposed to Black History Month as a youngster,” I said.
“Who discovered the North Pole?” she asked me.
I suddenly liked her enormously, and the more so the more pedantically teacherish she became. Though for different reasons, I was beginning to like her as much as I had liked her brother. And I saw now that if you’d put them side by side, it wouldn’t have been at all difficult to tell what Coleman was. Everyone knows . . . Oh, stupid, stupid, stupid Delphine Roux. One’s truth is known to no one, and frequently—as in Delphine’s very own case—to oneself least of all. “I forget whether it was Peary or Cook,” I said. “I forget which one got to the North Pole first.”
“Well, Henson got there before him. When it was reported in the New York Times, he was given full credit. But now when they write the history, all you hear about is Peary. It would have been the same sort of thing if Sir Edmund Hillary were said to have gotten to the top of Mount Everest and you didn’t hear a word about Tenzing Norkay. My point,” said Ernestine, in her element now, all professional correctitude and instruction—and, unlike Coleman, everything her father ever wanted her to be—“my point is, if you have a course on health and whatever, then you do Dr. Charles Drew. You’ve heard of him?”
“No.”
“Shame on you, Mr. Zuckerman. I’ll tell you in a minute. But you do Dr. Drew when you have health. You don’t put him in February. You understand what I mean?”
“Yes.”
“You learn about them when you study explorers and health people and all the other people. But everything there now is black this and black that. I let it wash over me the best I could, but it wasn’t easy. Years ago, East Orange High was excellent. Kids coming out of East Orange High, especially out of the honors program, would have their choice of colleges. Oh, don’t get me started on this subject. What happened to Coleman with that word ‘spooks’ is all a part of the same enormous failure. In my parents’ day and well into yours and mine, it used to be the person who fell short. Now it’s the discipline. Reading the classics is too difficult, therefore it’s the classics that are to blame. Today the student asserts his incapacity as a privilege. I can’t learn it, so there is something wrong with it. And there is something especially wrong with the bad teacher who wants to teach it. There are no more criteria, Mr. Zuckerman, only opinions. I often wrestle with this question of what everything used to be. What education used to be. What East Orange High used to be. What East Orange used to be. Urban renewal destroyed East Orange, there’s no doubt in my mind. They—the city fathers—talked about all the great things that were going to happen because of this urban renewal. It scared the merchants to death and the merchants left, and the more the merchants left, the less business there was. Then 280 and the parkway cut our little town in quarters. The parkway eliminated Jones Street—the center of our colored community the parkway eliminated altogether. Then 280. A devastating intrusion. What that did to that community! Because the highway had to come through, the nice houses along Oraton Parkway, Elmwood Avenue, Maple Avenue, the state just bought them up and they disappeared overnight. I used to be able to do all my Christmas shopping on Main Street. Well, Main Street and Central Avenue. Central Avenue was called the Fifth Avenue of the Oranges then. You know what we’ve got today? We’ve got a ShopRite. And we’ve got a Dunkin’ Donuts. And there was a Domino’s Pizza, but they closed. Now they’ve got another food place. And there’s a cleaners. But you can’t compare quality. It’s not the same. In all honesty, I drive up the hill to West Orange to shop. But I didn’t then. There was no reason to. Every night when we went out to walk the dog, I’d go with my husband, unless the weather was real bad—walk to Central Avenue, which is two blocks, then down Central Avenue for four blocks, cross over, then window-shop back, and home. There was a B. Altman. A Russek’s. There was a Black, Starr, and Gorham. There was a Bachrach, the photographer. A very nice men’s store, Minks, that was Jewish, that was over on Main Street. Two theaters. There was the Hollywood Theater on Central Avenue. There was the Palace Theater on Main Street. All of life was there in little East Orange . . .”
All of life was there in East Orange. And when? Before. Before urban renewal. Before the classics were abandoned. Before they stopped giving out the Constitution to high school graduates. Before there were remedial classes in the colleges teaching kids what they should have learned in ninth grade. Before Black History Month. Before they built the parkway and brought in 280. Before they persecuted a college professor for saying “spooks” to his class. Before she drove up the hill to West Orange to shop. Before everything changed, including Coleman Silk. That’s when it all was different—before. And, she lamented, it will never be the same again, not in East Orange or anywhere else in America.
At four, when I started out of my drive for the College Arms, where she was staying, the afternoon light was ratcheting rapidly down and the day, heavy now with fearsome clouds, had turned into gusty November. That morning they’d buried Coleman—and the morning before buried Faunia—in springlike weather, but now everything was intent on announcing winter. And winter twelve hundred feet up. Here it comes.
The impulse I had then, to tell Ernestine about the summer day a mere four months earlier when Coleman had driven me out to the dairy farm to watch Faunia do the five o’clock milking in the late afternoon heat—that is, to watch him watching Faunia do the milking—did not require much wisdom to suppress. Whatever was missing from Ernestine’s sense of Coleman’s life, she was not driven to discover. Intelligent as she was, she hadn’t asked a single question about how he had lived out his last months, let alone about what might have caused him to die in the circumstance he did; good and virtuous woman that she was, she preferred not to contemplate the specific details of his destruction. Nor did she wish to inquire into any biographical connection between the injunction to revolt that had severed him from his family in his twenties and the furious determination, some forty years on, with which he had disassociated himself from Athena, as its pariah and renegade. Not that I was sure there was any connection, any circuitry looping the one decision to the other, but we could try to look and see, couldn’t we? How did such a man as Coleman come to exist? What is it that he was? Was the idea he had for himself of lesser validity or of greater validity than someone else’s idea of what he was supposed to be? Can such things even be known? But the concept of life as something whose purpose is concealed, of custom as something that may not allow for thought, of society as dedicated to a picture of itself that may be badly flawed, of an individual as real apart and beyond the social determinants defining him, which may indeed be what to him seem most unreal—in short, every perplexity pumping the human imagination seemed to lie somewhat outside her own unswerving allegiance to a canon of time-honored rules.
“I have not read any of your books,” she told me in the car. “I tend to lean toward mysteries these days, and English mysteries. But when I get home, I plan to take out something of yours.”
“You haven’t told me who Dr. Charles Drew was.”
“Dr. Charles Drew,” she told me, “discovered how to prevent blood from clotting so it could be banked. Then he was injured in an automobile accident, and the hospital that was nearest would not take colored, and he died by bleeding to death.”
That was the whole of our conversation during the twenty minutes it took to drive down the mountain and into town. The torrent of disclosure was over. Ernestine had said all there was to say. With the result that the harshly ironic fate of Dr. Drew took on a significance—a seemingly special relevance to Coleman and his harshly ironic fate—that was no less disturbing for being imponderable.
I couldn’t imagin
e anything that could have made Coleman more of a mystery to me than this unmasking. Now that I knew everything, it was as though I knew nothing, and instead of what I’d learned from Ernestine unifying my idea of him, he became not just an unknown but an uncohesive person. In what proportion, to what degree, had his secret determined his daily life and permeated his everyday thinking? Did it alter over the years from being a hot secret to being a cool secret to being a forgotten secret of no importance, something having to do with a dare he’d taken, a wager made to himself way back when? Did he get, from his decision, the adventure he was after, or was the decision in itself the adventure? Was it the misleading that provided his pleasure, the carrying off of the stunt that he liked best, the traveling through life incognito, or had he simply been closing the door to a past, to people, to a whole race that he wanted nothing intimate or official to do with? Was it the social obstruction that he wished to sidestep? Was he merely being another American and, in the great frontier tradition, accepting the democratic invitation to throw your origins overboard if to do so contributes to the pursuit of happiness? Or was it more than that? Or was it less? How petty were his motives? How pathological? And suppose they were both—what of it? And suppose they weren’t—what of that? By the time I met him, was the secret merely the tincture barely tinting the coloration of the man’s total being or was the totality of his being nothing but a tincture in the shoreless sea of a lifelong secret? Did he ever relax his vigilance, or was it like being a fugitive forever? Did he ever get over the fact that he couldn’t get over the fact that he was pulling it off—that he could meet the world with his strength intact after doing what he had done, that he could appear to everyone, as he did appear, to be so easily at home in his own skin? Assume that, yes, at a certain point the balance shifted toward the new life and the other one receded, but did he ever completely get over the fear of exposure and the sense that he was going to be found out? When he had come to me first, crazed with the sudden loss of his wife, the murder of his wife as he conceived it, the formidable wife with whom he’d always struggled but to whom his devotion once again became profound in the instant of her death, when he came barging through my door in the clutches of the mad idea that because of her death I should write his book for him, was his lunacy not itself in the nature of a coded confession? Spooks! To be undone by a word that no one even speaks anymore. To hang him on that was, for Coleman, to banalize everything—the elaborate clockwork of his lie, the beautiful calibration of his deceit, everything. Spooks! The ridiculous trivialization of this masterly performance that had been his seemingly conventional, singularly subtle life—a life of little, if anything excessive on the surface because all the excess goes into the secret. No wonder the accusation of racism blew him sky high. As though his accomplishment were rooted in nothing but shame. No wonder all the accusations blew him sky high. His crime exceeded anything and everything they wanted to lay on him. He said “spooks,” he has a girlfriend half his age—it’s all kid stuff. Such pathetic, such petty, such ridiculous transgressions, so much high school yammering to a man who, on his trajectory outward, had, among other things, done what he’d had to do to his mother, to go there and, in behalf of his heroic conception of his life, to tell her, “It’s over. This love affair is over. You’re no longer my mother and never were.” Anybody who has the audacity to do that doesn’t just want to be white. He wants to be able to do that. It has to do with more than just being blissfully free. It’s like the savagery in The Iliad, Coleman’s favorite book about the ravening spirit of man. Each murder there has its own quality, each a more brutal slaughter than the last.
And yet, after that, he had the system beat. After that, he’d done it: never again lived outside the protection of the walled city that is convention. Or, rather, lived, at the same moment, entirely within and, surreptitiously, entirely beyond, entirely shut out—that was the fullness of his particular life as a created self. Yes, he’d had it beat for so very long, right down to all the kids being born white—and then he didn’t. Blindsided by the uncontrollability of something else entirely. The man who decides to forge a distinct historical destiny, who sets out to spring the historical lock, and who does so, brilliantly succeeds at altering his personal lot, only to be ensnared by the history he hadn’t quite counted on: the history that isn’t yet history, the history that the clock is now ticking off, the history proliferating as I write, accruing a minute at a time and grasped better by the future than it will ever be by us. The we that is inescapable: the present moment, the common lot, the current mood, the mind of one’s country, the stranglehold of history that is one’s own time. Blindsided by the terrifyingly provisional nature of everything.
When we reached South Ward Street and I parked the car outside the College Arms, I said, “I’d like to meet Walter sometime. I’d like to talk to Walter about Coleman.”
“Walter hasn’t mentioned Coleman’s name since nineteen hundred and fifty-six. He won’t talk about Coleman. As white a college as there was in New England, and that’s where Coleman made his career. As white a subject as there was in the curriculum, and that’s what Coleman chose to teach. To Walter, Coleman is more white than the whites. There is nothing beyond that for him to say.”
“Will you tell him Coleman’s dead? Will you tell him where you’ve been?”
“No. Not unless he asks.”
“Will you contact Coleman’s children?”
“Why would I?” she asked. “It was for Coleman to tell them. It’s not up to me.”
“Why did you tell me, then?”
“I didn’t tell you. You introduced yourself at the cemetery. You said to me, ‘You’re Coleman’s sister.’ I said yes. I simply spoke the truth. I’m not the one with something to hide.” This was as severe as she had been with me all afternoon—and with Coleman. Till that moment she had balanced herself scrupulously between the ruination of the mother and the outrage of the brother.
Here she drew a wallet out of her handbag. She unfolded the wallet to show me one of the snapshots that were tucked into a plastic sleeve. “My parents,” she said. “After World War I. He’d just come back from France.”
Two young people in front of a brick stoop, the petite young woman in a large hat and a long summer dress and the tall young man in his full-dress army uniform, with visored cap, leather bandoleer, leather gloves, and high sleek leather boots. They were pale but they were Negroes. How could you tell they were Negroes? By little more than that they had nothing to hide.
“Handsome young fellow. Especially in that outfit,” I said. “Could be a cavalry uniform.”
“Straight infantry,” she said.
“Your mother I can’t see as well. Your mother’s a bit shaded by the hat.”
“One can do only so much to control one’s life,” Ernestine said, and with that, a summary statement as philosophically potent as any she cared to make, she returned the wallet to her handbag, thanked me for lunch, and, gathering herself almost visibly back into that orderly, ordinary existence that rigorously distanced itself from delusionary thinking, whether white or black or in between, she left the car. Instead of my then heading home, I drove cross-town to the cemetery and, after parking on the street, walked in through the gate, and not quite knowing what was happening, standing in the falling darkness beside the uneven earth mound roughly heaped over Coleman’s coffin, I was completely seized by his story, by its end and by its beginning, and, then and there, I began this book.
I began by wondering what it had been like when Coleman had told Faunia the truth about that beginning—assuming that he ever had; assuming, that is, that he had to have. Assuming that what he could not outright say to me on the day he burst in all but shouting, “Write my story, damn you!” and what he could not say to me when he had to abandon (because of the secret, I now realized) writing the story himself, he could not in the end resist confessing to her, to the college cleaning woman who’d become his comrade-in-arms, the first and last person s
ince Ellie Magee for whom he could strip down and turn around so as to expose, protruding from his naked back, the mechanical key by which he had wound himself up to set off on his great escapade. Ellie, before her Steena, and finally Faunia. The only woman never to know his secret is the woman he spent his life with, his wife. Why Faunia? As it is a human thing to have a secret, it is also a human thing, sooner or later, to reveal it. Even, as in this case, to a woman who doesn’t ask questions, who, you would think, would be quite a gift to a man in possession of just such a secret. But even to her—especially to her. Because her not asking questions isn’t because she’s dumb or doesn’t want to face things; her not asking him questions is, in Coleman’s eyes, at one with her devastated dignity.
“I admit that may not be at all correct,” I said to my utterly transformed friend, “I admit that none of it may be. But here goes anyway: when you were trying to find out if she’d been a hooker . . . when you were trying to uncover her secret . . .” Out there at his grave, where everything he ever was would appear to have been canceled out by the weight and mass of all that dirt if by nothing else, I waited and I waited for him to speak until at last I heard him asking Faunia what was the worst job she’d ever had. Then I waited again, waited some more, until little by little I picked up the sassy vibrations of that straight-out talk that was hers. And that is how all this began: by my standing alone in a darkening graveyard and entering into professional competition with death.
