The Human Stain

"I was wrong. I should never have said to my friend, 'I can't be with you on this.' I should have said, 'I must be with you.' I should have worked to oppose his enemies not insidiously and misguidedly from within but forthrightly and honestly from without-from where he could have taken heart at the expression of support instead of being left to nurse the crushing sense of abandonment that festered into the wound that led to his alienation from his colleagues, to his resignation from the college, and from there to the self-destructive isolation which, I am convinced—horrible as believing this is for me—led not too circuitously to his dying as tragically, wastefully, and unnecessarily as he did in that car the other night. I should have spoken up to say what I want to say now in the presence of his former colleagues, associates, and staff, and to say, especially, in the presence of his children, Jeff and Mike, who are here from California, and Mark and Lisa, who are here from New York—and to say, as the senior African American member of the Athena faculty: "Coleman Silk never once deviated in any way from totally fair conduct in his dealings with each and every one of his students for as long as he served Athena College. Never.

"The alleged misconduct never took place. Never.

"What he was forced to undergo—the accusations, the interviews, the inquiry—remains a blight on the integrity of this institution to this day, and on this day, more than ever. Here, in the New England most identified, historically, with the American individualist's resistance to the coercions of a censorious community-Hawthorne, Melville, and Thoreau come to mind—an American individualist who did not think that the weightiest thing in life were the rules, an American individualist who refused to leave unexamined the orthodoxies of the customary and of the established truth, an American individualist who did not always live in compliance with majority standards of decorum and taste—an American individualist par excellence was once again so savagely traduced by friends and neighbors that he lived estranged from them until his death, robbed of his moral authority by their moral stupidity. Yes, it is we, the morally stupid censorious community, who have abased ourselves in having so shamefully besmirched Coleman Silk's good name. I speak particularly of those like myself, who knew from close contact the depth of his commitment to Athena and the purity of his dedication as an educator, and who, out of whatever deluded motive, betrayed him nonetheless. I say it again: we betrayed him. Betrayed Coleman and betrayed Iris. "Iris's death, the death of Iris Silk, coming in the midst of..." Two seats to my left, Smoky Hollenbeck's wife was in tears, as were several other of the women nearby. Smoky was himself leaning forward, his forehead resting lightly on his two hands, which were entwined at the top of the pew in front of us in a vaguely ecclesiastical manner. I suppose he wanted me or his wife or whoever else might be watching him to believe that the injustice done to Coleman Silk was unendurable to think about. I supposed he was meant to appear to be overcome by compassion, yet knowing what I did about all that he concealed, as a model family man, of the Dio-nysian substrata of his life, it was an inference hard to swallow.

But, Smoky aside, the attention, the concentration, the acuity of the concentration focused on Herb Keble's every word seemed genuine enough for me to imagine that any number of people present would be finding it difficult not to lament what Coleman Silk had unfairly endured. I wondered, of course, if Keble's rationalization for why he hadn't stood beside Coleman at the time of the spooks incident was of his own devising or one that the Silk boys had come up with so as to enable him to do as they demanded while still saving face. I wondered whether the rationalization could be an accu-rate description of his motives when he'd said the words that Coleman bitterly repeated to me so many times: "I can't be with you on this."

Why was I unwilling to believe this man? Because, by a certain age, one's mistrust is so exquisitely refined that one is unwilling to believe anybody? Surely, two years back, when he was silent and didn't rise to Coleman's defense, it was for the reason that people are always silent: because it is in their interest to be silent. Expediency is not a motive that is steeped in darkness. Herb Keble was just another one out trying to kosher the record, albeit in a bold, even an interesting way, by taking the guilt upon himself, but the fact remained that he couldn't act when it mattered, and so I thought, on Coleman's behalf, Fuck him.