The Human Stain

Or so I was able to believe until the next afternoon, just before they left town, when—no less bluntly persuasive with me than I'd imagined them to have been with Keble—they let me know that I was to knock it off: to forget about Les Farley and the circumstances of the accident and about urging any further investigation by the police. They could not have made clearer that their disapproval would be boundless if their father's affair with Faunia Farley were to become the focal point of a courtroom trial instigated by my importuning. Faunia Farley's was a name they never wanted to hear again, least of all in a scandalous trial that would be written up sensationally in the local papers and lodged indelibly in local memory and that would leave Coleman Silk Hall forever a dream.

"She is not the ideal woman to have linked with our father's legacy," Jeffrey told me. "Our mother is," said Michael. "This cheap little cunt has nothing to do with anything." "Nothing," Jeffrey reiterated.

It was hard to believe, given the ardor and the resolve, that out in California they were college science professors. You would have thought they ran Twentieth Century Fox.

Herb Keble was a slender, very dark man, elderly now, a bit stiffgaited, though seemingly in no way stooped or hobbled by illness, and with something of the earnestness of the black preacher in both the stern bearing and the ominous, hanging-judge voice. He had only to say "My name is Herbert Keble" to cast his spell; he had only, from behind the podium, to stare silently at Coleman's coffin and then to turn to the congregation and announce who he was to invoke that realm of feeling associated with the declamation of the holy psalms. He was austere in the way the edge of a blade is austere —menacing to you if you don't handle it with the utmost care.

Altogether the man was impressive, in demeanor and appearance both, and one could see where Coleman might have hired him to break the color barrier at Athena for something like the same reasons that Branch Rickey had hired Jackie Robinson to be organized baseball's first black. Imagining the Silk boys browbeating Herb Keble into doing their bidding wasn't that easy, at first, not until you took into account the appeal of self-drama to a personality marked so clearly by the vanity of those authorized to administer the sacraments. He very much displayed the authority of the second in power to the sovereign.

"My name is Herbert Keble," he began. "I am chairman of the Political Science Department. In 1996, I was among those who did not see fit to rise to Coleman's defense when he was accused of racism —I, who had come to Athena sixteen years earlier, the very year that Coleman Silk was appointed dean of faculty; I, who was Dean Silk's first academic appointment. Much too tardily, I stand before you to censure myself for having failed my friend and patron, and to do what I can—again, much too tardily—to begin to attempt to right the wrong, the grievous, the contemptible wrong, that was done to him by Athena College.

"At the time of the alleged racist incident, I told Coleman, 'I can't be with you on this.' I said it to him deliberately, though perhaps not entirely for the opportunistic, careerist, or cowardly reasons that he was so quick to assume to be mine. I thought then that I could do more for Coleman's cause by working behind the scenes to defuse the opposition than by openly allying myself with him in public, and being rendered impotent, as I surely would have been, by that all-purpose, know-nothing weapon of a sobriquet, 'Uncle Tom.' I thought that I could be the voice of reason from within-rather than without—the ranks of those whose outrage over Coleman's alleged racist remark provoked them into unfairly defaming him and the college for what were the failures of two students. I thought that if I was shrewd enough and patient enough I could cool the passions, if not of the most extreme of his adversaries, then of those thoughtful, level-headed members of our local African American community and their white sympathizers, whose antagonism was never really more than reflexive and ephemeral. I thought that, in time—and, I hoped, in less time rather than more—I could initiate a dialogue between Coleman and his accusers that would lead to the promulgation of a statement identifying the nature of the misunderstanding that had given rise to the conflict, and thereby bring this regrettable incident to something like a just conclusion.