The Human Stain

do Matthew Henson when you do other explorers.”

“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 imagine 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 —