The Human Stain

cold, Coleman, so can you.”

“Yeah, but Dad, Schmeling, when he fought Louis that first fight, he saw a weakness. And the weakness was that when Louis threw his jab, instead of coming back—” On his feet again, the boy demonstrated to his parents what he meant. “Instead of coming back, he dropped his left hand — see?—and Schmeling kept coming over — see? — and that's how Schmeling knocked him out. It's all thinking. Really. It is, Dad. I swear to you.”

“Don't say that. Don't say, ‘I swear to you.’”

“I won't, I won't. But see, if he doesn't come back, where he's back in position, if he comes here instead, then the guy's going to come over with his right hand and eventually he's going to catch him. That's what happened that first time. That's exactly what happened.”

But Mr. Silk had seen plenty of fights, in the army had seen fights among soldiers staged at night for the troops where fighters were not only knocked out like Joe Louis but so badly cut up nothing could be done to stop the bleeding. On his base he had seen colored fighters who used their heads as their main weapon, who should have had a glove on their heads, tough street fighters, stupid men who butted and butted with their heads until the face of the other fighter was unrecognizable as a face. No, Coleman was to retire undefeated, and if he wanted to box for the enjoyment of it, for the sport, he would do so not at the Newark Boys Club, which to Mr. Silk was for slum kids, for illiterates and hoodlums bound for either the gutter or jail, but right there in East Orange, under the auspices of Doc Chizner, who'd been the dentist for the United Electrical Workers when Mr. Silk was the optician providing the union's members with eyeglasses before he lost the business. Doc Chizner was still a dentist but after hours taught the sons of the Jewish doctors and lawyers and businessmen the basic skills of boxing, and nobody in his classes, you could be sure, ended up hurt or maimed for life. For Coleman's father, the Jews, even audaciously unsavory Jews like Dr. Fensterman, were like Indian scouts, shrewd people showing the outsider his way in, showing the social possibility, showing an intelligent colored family how it might be done.

That was how Coleman got to Doc Chizner and became the colored kid whom all the privileged Jewish kids got to know — probably the only one they would ever know. Quickly Coleman came to be Doc's assistant, teaching these Jewish kids not exactly the fine points of how to economize energy and motion that Mac Machrone had taught his ace student but the basics, which was all they were up to anyway—“I say one, you jab. I say one-one, you double-jab. I say one-two, left jab, right cross. One-two-three, left jab, right cross, left hook.” After the other pupils went home — with the occasional one who got a bloody nose packing it in, never to return — Doc Chizner worked alone with Coleman, some nights building up his endurance mainly by doing infighting with him, where you're tugging, you're pulling, you're hitting, and so afterward, by comparison, sparring is kid's play. Doc had Coleman up and out doing his roadwork and his shadowboxing even as the milkman's horse, drawing the wagon, would arrive in the neighborhood with the morning delivery. Coleman would be out there at 5 A.M. in his gray hooded sweatshirt, in the cold, the snow, it made no difference, out there three and a half hours before the first school bell. No one else around, nobody running, long before anybody knew what running was, doing three quick miles, and throwing punches the whole way, stopping only so as not to frighten that big, brown, lumbering old beast when, tucked sinisterly within his monklike cowl, Coleman drew abreast of the milkman and sprinted ahead. He hated the boredom of the running — and he never missed a day.

Some four months before Dr. Fensterman came to the house to make his offer to Coleman's parents, Coleman found himself one Saturday in Doc Chizner's car being driven up to West Point, where Doc was going to referee a match between Army and the University of Pittsburgh. Doc knew the Pitt coach and he wanted the coach to see Coleman fight. Doc was sure that, what with Coleman's grades, the coach could get him a four-year scholarship to Pitt, a bigger scholarship than he could ever get for track, and all he'd have to do was box for the Pitt team.

Now, it wasn't that on the way up Doc told him to tell the Pitt coach that he was white. He just told Coleman not to mention that he was colored.

“If nothing comes up,” Doc said, “you don't bring it up. You're neither one thing or the other. You're Silky Silk. That's enough. That's the deal.” Doc's favorite expression: that's the deal. Something else Coleman's father would not allow him to repeat in the house.

“He won't know?” Coleman asked.

“How? How will he know? How the hell is he going to know? Here is the top kid from East Orange High, and he is with Doc Chizner. You know what he's going to think, if he thinks anything?”

“What?”

“You look like you look, you're with me, and so he's going to think that you're one of Doc's boys. He's going to think that you're Jewish.”

Coleman never regarded Doc as much of a comedian — nothing like Mac Machrone and his stories about being a Newark cop — but he laughed loudly at that one and then reminded him, “I'm going to Howard. I can't go to Pitt. I've got to go to Howard.” For as long as Coleman could remember, his father had been determined to send him, the brightest of the three kids, to a historically black college along with the privileged children of the black professional elite.

“Coleman, box for the guy. That's all. That's the whole deal. Let's see what happens.”

Except for educational trips to New York City with his family, Coleman had never been out of Jersey before, and so first he spent a great day walking around West Point pretending he was at West Point because he was going to go to West Point, and then he boxed for the Pitt coach against a guy like the guy he'd boxed at the Knights of Pythias — slow, so slow that within seconds Coleman realized that there was no way this guy was going to beat him, even if he was twenty years old and a college boxer. Jesus, Coleman thought at the end of the first round, if I could fight this guy for the rest of my life, I'd be better than Ray Robinson. It wasn't just that Coleman weighed some seven pounds more than when he'd boxed on the amateur card at the Knights of Pythias. It was that something he could not even name made him want to be more damaging than he'd ever dared before, to do something more that day than merely win. Was it because the Pitt coach didn't know he was colored? Could it be because who he really was was entirely his secret? He did love secrets. The secret of nobody's knowing what was going on in your head, thinking whatever you wanted to think with no way of anybody's knowing. All the other kids were always blabbing about themselves. But that wasn't where the power was or the pleasure either. The power and pleasure were to be found in the opposite, in being counterconfessional in the same way you were a counterpuncher, and he knew that with nobody having to tell him and without his having to think about it. That's why he liked shadowboxing and hitting the heavy bag: for the secrecy in it. That's why he liked track, too, but this was even better. Some guys just banged away at the heavy bag. Not Coleman. Coleman thought, and the same way that he thought in school or in a race: rule everything else out, let nothing else in, and immerse yourself in the thing, the subject, the competition, the exam — whatever's to be mastered, become that thing. He could do that in biology and he could do it in the dash and he could do it in boxing. And not only did nothing external make any difference, neither did anything internal. If there were people in the fight crowd shouting at him, he could pay no attention to that, and if the guy he was fighting was his best friend, he could pay no attention to that. After the fight there was plenty of time for them to be friends again. He managed to force himself to ignore his feelings, whether of fear, uncertainty, even friendship — to have the feelings but have them separately from himself. When he was shadowboxing, for instance, he wasn't just loosening up. He was also imagining another guy, in his head fighting through a secret fight with another guy. And in the ring, where the other guy was real — stinky, snotty, wet, throwing punches as real as could be — the guy still could have no idea what you were thinking. There wasn't a teacher to ask for the answer to the question. All the answers that you came up with in the ring, you kept to yourself, and when you let the secret out, you let it out through everything but your mouth.

So at magic, mythical West Point, where it looked to him that day as though there were more of America in every square inch of the flag flapping on the West Point flagpole than in any flag he'd ever seen, and where the iron faces of the cadets had for him the most powerful heroic significance, even here, at the patriotic center, the marrow of his country's unbreakable spine, where his sixteen-year-old's fantasy of the place matched perfectly the official fantasy, where everything he saw made him feel a frenzy of love not only for himself but for all that was visible, as if everything in nature were a manifestation of his own life — the sun, the sky, the mountains, the river, the trees, just Coleman Brutus “Silky” Silk carried to the millionth degree — even here nobody knew his secret, and so he went out there in the first round and, unlike Mac Machrone's undefeated counterpuncher, started hitting this guy with everything he had. When the guy and he were of the same caliber, he would have to use his brains, but when the