The Human Stain

Silk was for slum kids, for illiterates and hoodlums bound for either the gutter or jail, but right there in East Orange, under the auspices of Doc Chizner, who'd been the dentist for the United Electrical Workers when Mr. Silk was the optician providing the union's members with eyeglasses before he lost the business. Doc Chizner was still a dentist but after hours taught the sons of the Jewish doctors and lawyers and businessmen the basic skills of boxing, and nobody in his classes, you could be sure, ended up hurt or maimed for life. For Coleman's father, the Jews, even audaciously unsavory Jews like Dr. Fensterman, were like Indian scouts, shrewd people showing the outsider his way in, showing the social possibility, showing an intelligent colored family how it might be done.

That was how Coleman got to Doc Chizner and became the colored kid whom all the privileged Jewish kids got to know—probably the only one they would ever know. Quickly Coleman came to be Doc's assistant, teaching these Jewish kids not exactly the fine points of how to economize energy and motion that Mac Machrone had taught his ace student but the basics, which was all they were up to anyway—"I say one, you jab. I say one-one, you double-jab. I say one-two, left jab, right cross. One-two-three, left jab, right cross, left hook." After the other pupils went home—with the occasional one who got a bloody nose packing it in, never to return—Doc Chizner worked alone with Coleman, some nights building up his endurance mainly by doing infighting with him, where you're tugging, you're pulling, you're hitting, and so afterward, by comparison, sparring is kid's play. Doc had Coleman up and out doing his roadwork and his shadowboxing even as the milkman's horse, drawing the wagon, would arrive in the neighborhood with the morning delivery. Coleman would be out there at

5 A.M. in his gray hooded sweatshirt, in the cold, the snow, it made no difference, out there three and a half hours before the first school bell. No one else around, nobody running, long before anybody knew what running was, doing three quick miles, and throwing punches the whole way, stopping only so as not to frighten that big, brown, lumbering old beast when, tucked sinisterly within his monklike cowl, Coleman drew abreast of the milkman and sprinted ahead. He hated the boredom of the running—and he never missed a day.

Some four months before Dr. Fensterman came to the house to make his offer to Coleman's parents, Coleman found himself one Saturday in Doc Chizner's car being driven up to West Point, where Doc was going to referee a match between Army and the University of Pittsburgh. Doc knew the Pitt coach and he wanted the coach to see Coleman fight. Doc was sure that, what with Coleman's grades, the coach could get him a four-year scholarship to Pitt, a bigger scholarship than he could ever get for track, and all he'd have to do was box for the Pitt team.

Now, it wasn't that on the way up Doc told him to tell the Pitt coach that he was white. He just told Coleman not to mention that he was colored.

"If nothing comes up," Doc said, "you don't bring it up. You're neither one thing or the other. You're Silky Silk. That's enough.

That's the deal." Doc's favorite expression: that's the deal. Something else Coleman's father would not allow him to repeat in the house.

"He won't know?" Coleman asked.

"How? How will he know? How the hell is he going to know?

Here is the top kid from East Orange High, and he is with Doc Chizner. You know what he's going to think, if he thinks anything?"

"What?"

"You look like you look, you're with me, and so he's going to think that you're one of Doc's boys. He's going to think that you're Jewish."

Coleman never regarded Doc as much of a comedian—nothing like Mac Machrone and his stories about being a Newark cop—but he laughed loudly at that one and then reminded him, "I'm going to Howard. I can't go to Pitt. I've got to go to Howard." For as long as Coleman could remember, his father had been determined to send him, the brightest of the three kids, to a historically black college along with the privileged children of the black professional elite.

"Coleman, box for the guy. That's all. That's the whole deal. Let's see what happens."