The Human Stain

and east to the Delaware.

Fenwick's nineteen-year-old granddaughter, Elizabeth Adams, married a colored man, Gould. “That black that hath been the ruin of her” was her grandfather's description of Gould in the will from which he excluded Elizabeth from any share of his estate until such time as “the Lord open her eyes to see her abominable transgression against Him.” As the story had it, only one son of the five sons of Gould and Elizabeth survived to maturity, and he was Benjamin Gould, who married a Finn, Ann. Benjamin died in 1777, the year after the signing of the Declaration of Independence across the Delaware in Philadelphia, leaving a daughter, Sarah, and four sons, Anthony, Samuel, Abijah, and Elisha, from whom Gouldtown took its name.

Through his mother, Coleman learned the maze of family history going back to the days of aristocratic John Fenwick, who was to that southwestern region of New Jersey what William Penn was to the part of Pennsylvania that encompassed Philadelphia — and from whom it sometimes seemed all of Gouldtown had descended — and then he heard it again, though never the same in all its details, from great-aunts and great-uncles, from great- grear-aunts and -uncles, some of them people close to a hundred, when, as children, he, Walt, and Ernestine went with their parents down to Gouldtown for the annual reunion — almost two hundred relatives from southwest Jersey, from Philadelphia, from Atlantic City, from as far off as Boston, eating fried bluefish, stewed chicken, fried chicken, homemade ice cream, sugared peaches, pies, and cakes — eating favorite family dishes and playing baseball and singing songs and reminiscing all day long, telling stories about the women way back spinning and knitting, boiling fat pork and baking huge breads for the men to take to the fields, making the clothes, drawing the water from the well, administering medicines obtained mainly from the woods, herb infusions to treat measles, the syrups of molasses and onions to counter whooping cough. Stories about family women who kept a dairy making fine cheeses, about women who went to the city of Philadelphia to become housekeepers, dressmakers, and schoolteachers, and about women at home of remarkable hospitality. Stories about the men in the woods, trapping and shooting the winter game for meat, about the farmers plowing the fields, cutting the cordwood and the rails for fences, buying, selling, slaughtering the cattle, and the prosperous ones, the dealers, selling tons of salt hay for packing to the Trenton pottery works, hay cut from the salt marsh they owned along the bay and river shores. Stories about the men who left the woods, the farm, the marsh, and the cedar swamp to serve — some as white soldiers, some as black — in the Civil War. Stories about men who went to sea to become blockade runners and who went to Philadelphia to become undertakers, printers, barbers, electricians, cigar makers, and ministers in the African Methodist Episcopal Church — one who went to Cuba to ride with Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders, and a few men who got in trouble, ran away, and never came back. Stories about family children like themselves, often dressed poorly, without shoes sometimes or coats, asleep on winter nights in the freezing rooms of simple houses, in the heat of summer pitching, loading, and hauling hay with the men, but taught manners by their parents, and catechized in the schoolhouse by the Presbyterians — where they also learned to spell and read — and always eating all they wanted, even in those days, of pork and potatoes and bread and molasses and game, and growing up strong and healthy and honest.

But one no more decides not to become a boxer because of the history of Lawnside's runaway slaves, the abundance of everything at the Gouldtown reunions, and the intricacy of the family's American genealogy — or not to become a teacher of classics because of the history of Lawnside's runaway slaves, the abundance of the Gouldtown reunions, and the intricacy of the family's American genealogy — than one decides not to become anything else for such reasons. Many things vanish out of a family's life. Lawnside is one, Gouldtown another, genealogy a third, and Coleman Silk was a fourth.

Over these last fifty years or more, he was not the first child, either, who'd heard about the harvesting of the salt hay for the Trenton pottery works or eaten fried bluefish and sugared peaches at the Gouldtown reunions and grown up to vanish like this — to vanish, as they used to say in the family, “till all trace of him was lost.” “Lost himself to all his people” was another way they put it.

Ancestor worship — that's how Coleman put it. Honoring the past was one thing — the idolatry that is ancestor worship was something else. The hell with that imprisonment.

That night after coming back to the Village from East Orange, Coleman got a call from his brother in Asbury Park that took things further faster than he had planned. “Don't you ever come around her,” Walt warned him, and his voice was resonant with something barely suppressed — all the more frightening for being suppressed — that Coleman hadn't heard since his father's time. There's another force in that family, pushing him now all the way over on the other side. The act was committed in 1953 by an audacious young man in Greenwich Village, by a specific person in a specific place at a specific time, but now he will be over on the other side forever. Yet that, as he discovers, is exactly the point: freedom is dangerous. Freedom is very dangerous. And nothing is on your own terms for long. “Don't you even try to see her. No contact. No calls. Nothing. Never. Hear me?” Walt said. “Never. Don't you dare ever show your lily-white face around that house again!”

3. What Do You Do with the Kid Who Can't Read?

“IF CLINTON had fucked her in the ass, she might have shut her mouth. Bill Clinton is not the man they say he is. Had he turned her over in the Oval Office and fucked her in the ass, none of this would have happened.”

“Well, he never dominated her. He played it safe.”

“You see, once he got to the White House, he didn't dominate anymore. Couldn't. He didn't dominate Willey either. That's why she got angry with him. Once he became president, he lost his Arkansas ability to dominate women. So long as he was attorney general and governor of an obscure little state, that was perfect for him.”

“Sure. Gennifer Flowers.”

“What happens in Arkansas? If you fall when you're still back in Arkansas, you don't fall from a very great height.”

“Right. And you're expected to be an ass man. There's a tradition.”

“But when you get to the White House, you can't dominate. And when you can't dominate, then Miss Willey turns against you, and Miss Monica turns against you. Her loyalty would have been earned by fucking her in the ass. That should be the pact. That should seal you together. But there was no pact.”

“Well, she was frightened. She was close to not saying anything, you know. Starr overwhelmed her. Eleven guys in the room with her at that hotel? Hitting on her? It was a gang bang. It was a gang rape that Starr staged there at that hotel.”

“Yeah. True. But she was talking to Linda Tripp.”

“Oh, right.”

“She was talking to everybody. She's part of that dopey culture. Yap, yap, yap. Part of this generation that is proud of its shallowness. The sincere performance is everything. Sincere and empty, totally empty. The sincerity that goes in all directions. The sincerity that is worse than falseness, and the innocence that is worse than corruption. All the rapacity hidden under the sincerity. And under the lingo. This wonderful language they all have — that they appear to believe—about their ‘lack of self-worth,’ all the while what they actually believe is that they're entitled to everything. Their shamelessness they call lovingness, and the ruthlessness is camouflaged as lost ‘self-esteem.’ Hitler lacked self-esteem too. That was his problem. It's a con these kids have going. The hyperdramatization of the pettiest emotions. Relationship. My relationship. Clarify my relationship. They open their mouths and they send me up the wall. Their whole language is a summation of the stupidity of the last forty years. Closure. There's one. My students cannot stay in that place where thinking must occur. Closure! They fix on the conventionalized narrative, with its beginning, middle, and end — every experience, no matter how ambiguous, no matter how knotty or mysterious, must lend itself to this normalizing, conventionalizing, anchorman cliche. Any kid who says ‘closure’ I flunk. They want closure, there's their closure.”

“Well, whatever she is — a total narcissist, a conniving little bitch, the most exhibitionistic Jewish girl in the history of Beverly Hills, utterly corrupted by privilege — he knew it all beforehand. He could read her. If he can't read Monica Lewinsky, how can he read Saddam Hussein? If he can't read and outfox Monica Lewinsky, the guy shouldn't be president. There's genuine grounds for impeachment. No, he saw it. He saw it all. I don't think he was hypnotized by her cover story for long. That she was totally corrupt and totally innocent, of course he saw it. The extreme innocence was the corruption — it was her corruption and her madness and her cunning. That was her force, that combination. That