The Human Stain

Coleman hadn't been on the Athena campus for two years and by now no longer went to town at all if he could help it. He didn't any longer hate each and every member of the Athena faculty, he just wanted nothing to do with them, fearful that should he stop to chat, even idly, he'd be incapable of concealing his pain or concealing himself concealing his pain—unable to prevent himself from standing there seething or, worse, from coming apart and breaking unstoppably into an overly articulate version of the wronged man's blues. A few days after his resignation, he'd opened new accounts at the bank and the supermarket up in Blackwell, a depressed mill town on the river some eighteen miles from Athena, and even got a card for the local library there, determined to use it, however meager the collection, rather than to wander ever again through the stacks at Athena. He joined the YMCA in Blackwell, and instead of taking his swim at the Athena college pool at the end of the day or exercising on a mat in the Athena gym as he'd done after work for nearly thirty years, he did his laps a couple of times a week at the less agreeable pool of the Blackwell Y—he even went upstairs to the rundown gym and, for the first time since graduate school, began, at a far slower pace than back in the forties, to work out with the speed bag and to hit the heavy bag. To go north to Blackwell took twice as long as driving down the mountain to Athena, but in Blackwell he was unlikely to run into ex-colleagues, and when he did, it was less self-consciously fraught with feeling for him to nod unsmilingly and go on about his business than it would have been on the pretty old streets of Athena, where there was not a street sign, a bench, a tree, not a monument on the green, that didn't somehow remind him of himself before he was the college racist and everything was different. The string of shops across from the green hadn't even been there until his tenure as dean had brought all sorts of new people to Athena as staff and as students and as parents of students, and so, over time, he'd wound up changing the community no less than he had shaken up the college. The moribund antique shop, the bad restaurant, the subsistence-level grocery store, the provincial liquor store, the hick-town barbershop, the nineteenth-century haberdasher, the understocked bookshop, the genteel tearoom, the dark pharmacy, the depressing tavern, the newspaperless newsdealer, the empty, enigmatic magic shop—all of them had disappeared, to be replaced by establishments where you could eat a decent meal and get a good cup of coffee and have a prescription filled and buy a good bottle of wine and find a book about something other than the Berkshires and also find something other than long underwear to keep you warm in wintertime. The "revolution of quality" that he had once been credited with imposing on the Athena faculty and curriculum, he had, albeit inadvertently, bestowed on Town Street as well. Which only added to the pain and surprise of being the alien he was.

By now, two years down the line, he felt himself besieged not so much by them—apart from Delphine Roux, who at Athena cared any longer about Coleman Silk and the spooks incident?—as by weariness with his own barely submerged, easily galvanized bitterness; down in the streets of Athena, he now felt (to begin with) a greater aversion to himself than to those who, out of indifference or cowardice or ambition, had failed to mount the slightest protest in his behalf. Educated people with Ph.D.s, people he had himself hired because he believed that they were capable of thinking reasonably and independently, had turned out to have no inclination to weigh the preposterous evidence against him and reach an appropriate conclusion. Racist: at Athena College, suddenly the most emotionally charged epithet you could be stuck with, and to that emotionalism (and to fear for their personnel files and future promotions) his entire faculty had succumbed. "Racist" spoken with the official-sounding resonance, and every last potential ally had scurried for cover.

Walk up to the campus? It was summer. School was out. After nearly four decades at Athena, after all that had been destroyed and lost, after all that he had gone through to get there, why not? First "spooks," now "lily-white"—who knows what repellent deficiency will be revealed with the next faintly antiquated locution, the next idiom almost charmingly out of time that comes flying from his mouth? How one is revealed or undone by the perfect word. What burns away the camouflage and the covering and the concealment?

This, the right word uttered spontaneously, without one's even having to think.

"For the thousandth time: I said spooks because I meant spooks.