The Human Stain

guy was easy and when Coleman saw that early, he could always be a more aggressive fighter and begin to pound away. And that's what happened at West Point. Before you turned around, he had cut the guy's eyes, the guy's nose was bleeding, and he was knocking him all over the place. And then something happened that had never happened before. He threw a hook, one that seemed to go three-quarters of the way into the guy's body. It went so deep he was astonished, though not half as astonished as the Pitt guy. Coleman weighed a hundred and twenty- eight pounds, hardly a young boxer who knocked people out. He never really planted his feet to throw that one good shot, that was not his style; and still this punch to the body went so deep that the guy just folded forward, a college boxer already twenty years old, and Coleman caught him in what Doc Chizner called “the labonz.” Right in the labonz, and the guy folded forward, and for a moment Coleman thought the guy was even going to throw up, and so before he threw up and before he went down, Coleman set himself to whack him with the right one more time — all he saw as this white guy was going down was somebody he wanted to beat the living shit out of — but suddenly the Pitt coach, who was the referee, called, “Don't, Silky!” and as Coleman started to throw that last right, the coach grabbed him and stopped the fight.

“And that kid,” said Doc on the drive home, “that kid was a goddamn good fighter, too. But when they dragged him back to his corner, they had to tell him the fight was over. This kid is already back in his corner, and still he didn't know what hit him.”

Deep in the victory, in the magic, in the ecstasy of that last punch and of the sweet flood of fury that had broken out and into the open and overtaken him no less than its victim, Coleman said — almost as though he were speaking in his sleep rather than aloud in the car as he replayed the fight in his head—“I guess I was too quick for him, Doc.”

“Sure, quick. Of course quick. I know you're quick. But also strong. That is the best hook you ever threw, Silky. My boy, you were too strong for him.”

Was he? Truly strong?

He went to Howard anyway. Had he not, his father would — with words alone, with just the English language — have killed him. Mr. Silk had it all figured out: Coleman was going to Howard to become a doctor, to meet a light-skinned girl there from a good Negro family, to marry and settle down and have children who would in turn go to Howard. At all-Negro Howard, Coleman's tremendous advantages of intellect and of appearance would launch him into the topmost ranks of Negro society, make of him someone people would forever look up to. And yet within his first week at Howard, when he eagerly went off on Saturday with his roommate, a lawyer's son from New Brunswick, to see the Washington Monument, and they stopped in Woolworth's to get a hot dog, he was called a nigger. His first time. And they wouldn't give him the hot dog. Refused a hot dog at Woolworth's in downtown Washington, on the way out called a nigger, and, as a result, unable to divorce himself from his feelings as easily as he did in the ring. At East Orange High the class valedictorian, in the segregated South just another nigger. In the segregated South there were no separate identities, not even for him and his roommate. No such subtleties allowed, and the impact was devastating. Nigger — and it meant him.

Of course, even in East Orange he had not escaped the minimally less malevolent forms of exclusion that socially separated his family and the small colored community from the rest of East Orange — everything that flowed from what his father called the country's “Negrophobia.” And he knew, too, that working for the Pennsylvania Railroad, his father had to put up with insults in the dining car and, union or no union, prejudicial treatment from the company that were far more humbling than anything Coleman would have known as an East Orange kid who was not only as light-skinned as a Negro could get but a bubbling, enthusiastic, quickwitted boy who happened also to be a star athlete and a straight-A student. He would watch his father do everything he could so as not to explode when he came home from work after something had happened on the job about which, if he wanted to keep the job, he could do nothing but meekly say, “Yes, suh.” That Negroes who were lighter were treated better didn't always hold true. “Any time a white deals with you,” his father would tell the family, “no matter how well intentioned he may be, there is the presumption of intellectual inferiority. Somehow or other, if not directly by his words then by his facial expression, by his tone of voice, by his impatience, even by the opposite — by his forbearance, by his wonderful display of humaneness—he will always talk to you as though you are dumb, and then, if you're not, he will be astonished.” “What happened, Dad?” Coleman would ask. But, as much out of pride as disgust, rarely would his father elucidate. To make the pedagogical point was enough. “What happened,” Coleman's mother would explain, “is beneath your father even to repeat.”

At East Orange High, there were teachers from whom Coleman sensed an unevenness of acceptance, an unevenness of endorsement compared to what they lavished on the smart white kids, but never to the degree that the unevenness was able to block his aims. No matter what the slight or the obstacle, he took it the way he took the low hurdles. If only to feign impregnability, he shrugged things off that Walter, say, could not and would not. Walt played varsity football, got good grades, as a Negro was no less anomalous in his skin color than Coleman, and yet he was always a little angrier about everything. When, for instance, he didn't get invited into a white kid's house but was made to wait outside, when he wasn't asked to the birthday party of a white teammate whom he'd been foolish enough to consider a buddy, Coleman, who shared a bedroom with him, would hear about it for months. When Walt didn't get his A in trigonometry, he went right to the teacher and stood there and, to the man's white face, said, “I think you made a mistake.” When the teacher went over his grade book and looked again at Walt's test scores, he came back to Walt and, even while allowing his mistake, had the nerve to say, “I couldn't believe your grades were as high as they were,” and only after a remark like that made the change from a B to an A. Coleman wouldn't have dreamed of asking a teacher to change a grade, but then he'd never had to. Maybe because he didn't have Walt's brand of bristling defiance, or maybe because he was lucky, or maybe because he was smarter and excelling academically wasn't the same effort for him that it was for Walt, he got the A in the first place. And when, in the seventh grade, he didn't get invited to some white friend's birthday party (and this was somebody who lived just down the block in the corner apartment house, the little white son of the building's super who'd been walking back and forth to school with Coleman since they'd started kindergarten), Coleman didn't take it as rejection by white people — after his initial mystification, he took it as rejection by Dicky Watkin's stupid mother and father. When he taught Doc Chizner's class, he knew there were kids who were repelled by him, who didn't like to be touched by him or to come in contact with his sweat, there was occasionally a kid who dropped out — again, probably because of parents who didn't want him taking boxing instruction, or any instruction, from a colored boy — and yet, unlike Walt, on whom no slight failed to register, Coleman, in the end, could forget it, dismiss it, or decide to appear to. There was the time one of the white runners on the track team was injured seriously in a car crash and guys from the team rushed to offer blood to the family for the transfusions, and Coleman was one of them, yet his was the blood the family didn't take. They thanked him and told him that they had enough, but he knew what the real reason was. No, it wasn't that he didn't know what was going on. He was too smart not to know. He competed against plenty of white Newark guys at track meets, Italians from Barringer, Poles from East Side, Irish from Central, Jews from Weequahic. He saw, he heard — he overheard. Coleman knew what was going on. But he also knew what wasn't going on, at the center of his life anyway. The protection of his parents, the protection provided by Walt as his older, six-foot- two-and-a-half-inch brother, his own innate confidence, his bright charm, his running prowess (“the fastest kid in the Oranges”), even his color, which made of him someone that people sometimes couldn't quite figure out — all this combined to mute for Coleman the insults that Walter found intolerable. Then there was the difference of personality: Walt was Walt, vigorously Walt, and Coleman was vigorously not. There was probably no better explanation than that for their different responses.

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 naive 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