The Human Stain

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 since Elbe 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.

“After the kids, after the fire,” I heard her telling him, “I was taking any job I could. I didn't know what I was doing back then. I was in a fog. Well, there was this suicide,” Faunia said. “This was up in the woods outside of Blackwell. With a shotgun. Bird shot. Body was gone. A woman I knew, this boozer, Sissie, called me to come up and help her. She was going up there to clean the place out. ‘I know this is going to sound odd,’ Sissie says to me, ‘but I know you have a strong stomach and you can handle things. Can you help me do this?’ There was a man and woman living there, and their children, and they had an argument, and he went in the other room and blew his brains out. 'I'm going up there to clean it out,' Sissie says, so I went up there with her. I needed the money, and I didn't know what I was doing anyway, so I went. The smell of death. That's what I remember. Metallic. Blood. The smell. It came out only when we started cleaning. You couldn't get the full effect until the warm water hit the