The Human Stain

We had finished lunch at my house several hours earlier, but Ernestine's energy showed no signs of abating. Everything whirling inside her brain—and not just as a consequence of Coleman's death but everything about the mystery of him that she had been trying to fathom for the last fifty years—was causing her to speak in a rush that was not necessarily characteristic of the serious smalltown schoolteacher she'd been for the whole of her life. She was a very proper-looking woman, seemingly healthy if a bit drawn in the face, whose appetites you couldn't have imagined to be in any way excessive; from her dress and her posture, from the meticulous way she ate her lunch, even from the way she occupied her chair, it was clear that hers was a personality that had no difficulty subjugating itself to social convention and that her inmost reflex in any conflict would be to act automatically as the mediator—entirely the master of the sensible response, by choice more of a listener than a maker of speeches, and yet the aura of excitement surrounding the death of her self-declared white brother, the special significance of the end of a life that to her family had seemed like one long, perverse, willfully arrogant defection, could hardly be reckoned with by ordinary means.

"Mother went to her grave wondering why Coleman did it. 'Lost himself to his own people.' That's how she put it. He wasn't the first in Mother's family. There'd been others. But they were others. They weren't Coleman. Coleman never in his life chafed under being a Negro. Not for as long as we knew him. This is true. Being a Negro was just never an issue with him. You'd see Mother sitting in her chair at night, sitting there stock-still, and you knew what she was wondering: could it be this, could it be that? Was it to get away from Daddy? But by the time he did it, Daddy was dead. Mother would propose reasons, but none was ever adequate. Was it because he thought white people were better than us? They had more money than we did, sure—but better? Is that what he believed? We never saw the slightest evidence of that. Now, people grow up and go away and have nothing to do with their families ever again, and they don't have to be colored to act like that. It happens every day all over the world. They hate everything so much they just disappear.

But Coleman as a kid was not a hater. The breeziest, most optimistic child you ever wanted to see. Growing up, I was more unhappy than Coleman. Walt was more unhappy than Coleman.

What with all the success he had, with the attention people gave him . . . no, it just never made sense to Mother. The pining never stopped. His photos. His report cards. His track medals. His yearbook.

The certificate he got as valedictorian. There were even toys of Coleman's around, toys he'd loved as a small child, and she had all these things and she stared at them the way a mind reader stares into a crystal ball, as if they would unravel everything. Did he ever acknowledge to anyone what he'd done? Did he, Mr. Zuckerman?

Did he ever acknowledge it to his wife? To his children?"

"I don't think so," I said. "I'm sure he didn't."

"So he was Coleman all the way. Set out to do it and did it. That was the extraordinary thing about him from the time he was a boy—that he stuck to a plan completely. There was a dogged commitment he could make to his every decision. All the lying that was necessitated by the big lie, to his family, to his colleagues, and he stuck to it right to the end. Even to be buried as a Jew. Oh, Coleman," she said sadly, "so determined. Mr. Determined," and in that moment, she was closer to laughter than to tears.

Buried as a Jew, I thought, and, if I was speculating correctly, killed as a Jew. Another of the problems of impersonation.

"If he acknowledged it to anyone," I said, "maybe it was to the woman he died with. To Faunia Farley."

She clearly didn't want to hear about that woman. But because of her sensibleness, she had to ask, "How do you know that?"

"I don't. I don't know anything. It's a thought I have," I said. "It ties into the pact that I sensed was between them—his telling her."

By "the pact between them" I meant their mutual recognition that there was no clean way out, but I didn't go on to explain myself, not to Ernestine. "Look, learning this from you today, there's nothing about Coleman I don't have to rethink. I don't know what to think about anything."

"Well then, you're now an honorary member of the Silk family.

Aside from Walter, in matters pertaining to Coleman none of us has ever known what to think. Why he did it, why he stuck to it, why Mother had to die the way she did. If Walt hadn't laid down the law," she said, "who knows what would have evolved? Who knows if Coleman wouldn't have told his wife as the years passed and he got further from the decision? Maybe even told his children one day.