The Human Stain

Because you know better. Because in France surely nobody from the École Normale would dream of taking this stuff seriously. Or would they? To read two plays like Hippolytus and Alcestis, then to listen to a week of classroom discussion on each, then to have nothing to say about either of them other than that they are 'degrading to women,' isn't a 'perspective,' for Christ's sake—it's mouthwash.

It's just the latest mouthwash."

"Elena's a student. She's twenty years old. She's learning."

"Sentimentalizing one's students ill becomes you, my dear. Take them seriously. Elena's not learning. She's parroting. Why she ran directly to you is because it's more than likely you she's parroting."

"That is not true, though if it pleases you to culturally frame me like that, that is okay too, and entirely predictable. If you feel safely superior putting me in that silly frame, so be it, my dear," she delighted now in saying with a smile of her own. "Your treatment of WHAT DO YOU D O. . . ?

Elena was offensive to her. That was why she ran to me. You frightened her. She was upset."

"Well, I develop irritating personal mannerisms when I am confronting the consequences of my ever having hired someone like you."

"And," she replied, "some of our students develop irritating personal mannerisms when they are confronting fossilized pedagogy.

If you persist in teaching literature in the tedious way you are used to, if you insist on the so-called humanist approach to Greek tragedy you've been taking since the 1950s, conflicts like this are going to arise continually."

"Good," he said. "Let them come." And walked out. And then that very next semester when Tracy Cummings ran to Professor Roux, close to tears, barely able to speak, baffled at having learned that, behind her back, Professor Silk had employed a malicious racial epithet to characterize her to her classmates, Delphine decided that asking Coleman to her office to discuss the charge could only be a waste of time. Since she was sure that he would behave no more graciously than he had the last time a female student had complained—and sure from past experience that should she call him in, he would once again condescend to her in his patronizing way, yet another upstart female daring to inquire into his conduct, yet another woman whose concerns he must trivialize should he deign even to address them—she had turned the matter over to the accessible dean of faculty who had succeeded him. From then on she was able to spend her time more usefully with Tracy, steadying, comforting, as good as taking charge of the girl, a parentless black youngster so badly demoralized that, in the first few weeks after the episode, to prevent her from picking up and running away-and running away to nothing—Delphine had gained permission to move her out of the dormitory into a spare room in her own apartment and to take her on, temporarily, as a kind of ward. Though by the end of the academic year, Coleman Silk, by removing himself from the faculty voluntarily, had essentially confessed to his malice in the spooks affair, the damage done Tracy proved too debilitating for someone so uncertain to begin with: unable to concentrate on her work because of the investigation and frightened of Professor Silk's prejudicing other teachers against her, she had failed all her courses. Tracy packed up not only to leave the college but to pull out of town altogether—out of Athena, where Delphine had been hoping to find her a job and get her tutored and keep an eye on her till she could get back into school. One day Tracy took a bus to Oklahoma, to stay with a half-sister in Tulsa, yet using the Tulsa address, Delphine had been unable to locate the girl ever again.