The Human Stain

This was it. He'd serve out his stint, do his time as a white man, and this would be it. Because I can't pull it off, he thought—I don't even want to. He'd never before known real disgrace. He'd never before known what it was to hide from the police. Never before had he bled from taking a blow—in all those rounds of amateur boxing he had not lost a drop of blood or been hurt or damaged in any way. But now the jumper of his whites was as red as a surgical dressing, his pants were soggy with caking blood and, from where he'd landed on his knees in the gutter, they were torn and dark with grime. And his wrist had been injured, maybe even shattered, from when he'd broken the fall with his hand—he couldn't move it or bear to touch it. He drank off the beer and then got another in order to try to deaden the pain.

This was what came of failing to fulfill his father's ideals, of flouting his father's commands, of deserting his dead father altogether.

If only he'd done as his father had, as Walter had, everything would be happening another way. But first he had broken the law by lying to get into the navy, and now, out looking for a white woman to fuck, he had plunged into the worst possible disaster. "Let me get through to my discharge. Let me get out. Then I'll never lie again.

Just let me finish my time, and that's it!" It was the first he'd spoken to his father since he'd dropped dead in the dining car.

If he kept this up, his life would amount to nothing. How did Coleman know that? Because his father was speaking back to him WHAT DO YOU DO. . . ? —the old admonishing authority rumbling up once again from his father's chest, resonant as always with the unequivocal legitimacy of an upright man. If Coleman kept on like this, he'd end up in a ditch with his throat slit. Look at where he was now. Look where he had come to hide. And how? Why? Because of his credo, because of his insolent, arrogant "I am not one of you, I can't bear you, I am not part of your Negro we" credo. The great heroic struggle against their we—and look at what he now looked like! The passionate struggle for precious singularity, his revolt of one against the Negro fate—and just look where the defiant great one had ended up! Is this where you've come, Coleman, to seek the deeper meaning of existence? A world of love, that's what you had, and instead you forsake it for this! The tragic, reckless thing that you've done! And not just to yourself—to us all. To Ernestine. To Walt. To Mother. To me.

To me in my grave. To my father in his. What else grandiose are you planning, Coleman Brutus? Whom next are you going to mislead and betray?

Still, he couldn't leave for the street because of his fear of the Shore Patrol, and of the court-martial, and of the brig, and of the dishonorable discharge that would hound him forever. Everything in him was too stirred up for him to do anything but keep on drinking until, of course, he was joined on the bench by a prostitute who was openly of his own race.

When the Shore Patrol found him in the morning, they attributed the bloody wounds and the broken wrist and the befouled, disheveled uniform to his having spent a night in niggertown, another swingin' white dick hot for black poon who—having got himself reamed, steamed, and dry-cleaned (as well as properly tattooed in the bargain)—had been deposited for the scavengers to pick over in that glass-strewn lot back of the ferry slip.

"U.S. Navy" is all the tattoo said, the words, no more than a quarter inch high, inscribed in blue pigment between the blue arms of a blue anchor, itself a couple inches long. A most unostentatious design as military tattoos go and, discreetly positioned just below the joining of the right arm to the shoulder, a tattoo certainly easy enough to hide. But when he remembered how he'd got it, it was the mark evocative not only of the turbulence of the worst night of his life but of all that underlay the turbulence—it was the sign of the whole of his history, of the indivisibility of the heroism and the disgrace. Embedded in that blue tattoo was a true and total image of himself. The ineradicable biography was there, as was the prototype of the ineradicable, a tattoo being the very emblem of what cannot ever be removed. The enormous enterprise was also there.

The outside forces were there. The whole chain of the unforeseen, all the dangers of exposure and all the dangers of concealment-even the senselessness of life was there in that stupid little blue tattoo.

His difficulties with Delphine Roux had begun the first semester he was back in the classroom, when one of his students who happened to be a favorite of Professor Roux's went to her, as department chair, to complain about the Euripides plays in Coleman's Greek tragedy course. One play was Hippolytus, the other Alcestis; the student, Elena Mitnick, found them "degrading to women."

"So what shall I do to accommodate Miss Mitnick? Strike Euripides from my reading list?"