Philip Roth - The Human Stain

“I know he meant the best,” Ernestine said. “Walt thought this was the only way to protect Mother from being hurt. From being hurt by Coleman every time there was a birthday, every time there was a holiday, every time it was Christmas. He believed that if the line of communication remained open, Coleman was going to break Mother's heart a thousand times over, exactly the way he did it that day. Walt was enraged at Coleman for coming over to East Orange without any preparation, without warning any of us, and to tell an elderly woman, a widow like that, just what the law was going to be. Fletcher, my husband, always had a psychological reason for Walt's doing what he did. But I don't think Fletcher was right. I don't think Walt was ever truly jealous of Coleman's place in Mother's heart. I don't accept that. I think he was insulted and flared up — not just for Mother but for all of us. Walt was the political member of the family; of course he was going to get mad. I myself wasn't mad that way and I never have been, but I can understand Walter. Every year, on Coleman's birthday, I phoned Athena to talk to him. Right down to three days ago. That was his birthday. His seventy-second birthday. I would think that when he got killed, he was driving home from his birthday dinner. I phoned to wish him a happy birthday. There was no answer and so I called the next day. And that's how I found out he was dead. Somebody there at the house picked up the phone and told me. I realize now that it was one of my nephews. I only began calling the house after Coleman's wife died and he left the college and was living alone. Before that, I phoned the office. Never told anybody about it. Didn't see any reason to. Phoned on his birthdays. Phoned when Mother died. Phoned when I got married. Phoned when I had my son. I phoned him when my husband died. We always had a good talk together. He always wanted to hear the news, even about Walter and his promotions. And then each of the times that Iris gave birth, with Jeffrey, with Michael, then with the twins, I got a call from Cole man. He'd call me at school. That was always a great trial for him. He was testing fate with so many kids. Because they were genetically linked to the past he had repudiated, there was always the chance, you see, that they might be a throwback in some distinguishing way. He worried a lot about that. It could have happened — it sometimes does happen. But he went ahead and had them anyway. That was a part of the plan too. The plan to lead a full and regular and productive life. Still, I believe that, in those first years especially, and certainly whenever a new child came along, Coleman suffered for his decision. Nothing ever escaped Coleman's attention, and that held true for his own feelings. He could cut himself away from us, but not from his feelings. And that was most true where the children were concerned. I think he himself came to believe that there was something awful about withholding something so crucial to what a person is, that it was their birthright to know their genealogy. And there was something dangerous too. Think of the havoc he could create in their lives if their children were born recognizably Negro. So far he has been lucky, and that goes for the two grandchildren out in California. But think of his daughter, who isn't married yet. Suppose one day she has a white husband, as more than likely she will, and she gives birth to a Negroid child, as she can — as she may. How does she explain this? And what will her husband assume? He will assume that another man fathered her child. A black man at that. Mr. Zuckerman, it was frighteningly cruel for Coleman not to tell his children. That is not Walter's judgment — that is mine. If Coleman was intent on keeping his race his secret, then the price he should have paid was not to have children. And he knew that. He had to know that. Instead, he has planted an unexploded bomb. And that bomb seemed to me always in the background when he talked about them. Especially when he talked about, not the twin girl, but the twin boy, Mark, the boy he had all the trouble with. He said to me that Markie probably hated him for his own reasons, yet it was as though he had figured out the truth. ‘I got there what I produced,’ he said, 'even if for the wrong reason. Markie doesn't even have the luxury of hating his father for the real thing. I robbed him,‘ Coleman said, of that part of his birthright, too.’ And I said, ‘But he might not have hated you at all for that, Coleman.’ And he said, 'You don't follow me. Not that he would have hated me for being black. That's not what I mean by the real thing. I mean that he would have hated me for never telling him and because he had a right to know.' And then, because there was so much there to be misunderstood, we just let the subject drop. But it was clear that he could never forget that there was a lie at the foundation of his relationship to his children, a terrible lie, and that Markie had intuited it, somehow understood that the children, who carried their father's identity in their genes and who would pass that identity on to their children, at least genetically, and perhaps even physically, tangibly, never had the complete knowledge of who they are and who they were. This is somewhat in the nature of speculation, but I sometimes think that Coleman saw Markie as the punishment for what he had done to his own mother. Though that,” Ernestine added, scrupulously, “is not something he ever said. As for Walter, what I was getting at about Walter is that all he was trying to do was to fill our father's shoes by making sure that Mother's heart would not be broken time and again.”

“And was it?” I asked.

“Mr. Zuckerman, there was no repairing it — ever. When she died in the hospital, when she was delirious, do you know what she was saying? She kept calling for the nurse the way the sick patients used to call for her. ‘Oh, nurse,’ she said, ‘oh, nurse — get me to the train. I got a sick baby at home.’ Over and over, ‘I got a sick baby at home.’ Sitting there beside her bed, holding her hand and watching her die, I knew who that sick baby was. So did Walter know. It was Coleman. Whether she would have been better off had Walt not interfered the way he did by banishing Coleman forever like that ... well, I still hesitate to say. But Walter's special talent as a man is his decisiveness. That was Coleman's as well. Ours is a family of decisive men. Daddy had it, and so did his father, who was a Methodist minister down in Georgia. These men make up their minds, and that's it. Well, there was a price to pay for their decisiveness. One thing is clear, however. And I realized that today. And I wish my parents could know it. We are a family of educators. Beginning with my paternal grandmother. As a young slave girl, taught to read by her mistress, then, after Emancipation, went to what was then called Georgia State Normal and Industrial School for Colored. That's how it began, and that's what we have turned out to be. And that is what I realized when I saw Coleman's children. All but one of them teachers. And all of us — Walt, Coleman, me, all of us teachers as well. My own son is another story. He did not finish college. We had some disagreements, and now he has a significant other, as the expression goes, and we have our disagreement about that. I should tell you that there were no colored teachers in the white Asbury Park school system when Walter arrived there in '47. You have to remember, he was the first. And subsequently their first Negro principal. And subsequently their first Negro superintendent of schools. That tells you something about Walt. There was already a well-established colored community, but it was not till Walter got there in '47 that things began to change. And that decisiveness of his had a lot to do with it. Even though you're a Newark product, I'm not sure you know that up until 1947, legally, constitutionally separate, segregated education was approved in New Jersey. You had, in most communities, schools for colored children and schools for white children. There was a distinct separation of the races in elementary education in south Jersey. From Trenton, New Brunswick, on down, you had separate schools. And in Princeton. And in Asbury Park. In Asbury Park, when Walter arrived there, there was a school called Bangs Avenue, East or West — one of them was for colored children who lived in that Bangs Avenue neighborhood and the other one was for white children who lived in that neighborhood. Now that was one building, but it was divided into two parts. There was a fence between the two sides of the building, and one side was colored kids and on the other was white kids. Likewise, the teachers on one side were white and the teachers on the other side were colored. The principal was white. In Trenton, in Princeton — and Princeton is not considered south Jersey — there were separate schools up until 1948. Not in East Orange and not in Newark, though at one time, even in Newark there was an elementary school for colored children. That was the early 1900s. But in 1947 — and I'm getting to Walter's place in all this, because I want you to understand my brother Walter, I want you to see his relationship to Coleman within the wider picture of what was going on back then. This is years before the civil rights movement. Even what Coleman did, the decision that he made, despite his Negro ancestry, to live as a member of another racial group — that was by no means an uncommon decision before the civil rights movement. There were movies about it. Remember them? One was called Pinky, and there was another, with Mel Ferrer, though I can't remember the name of it, but it was popular too. Changing your racial group — there was no civil rights to speak of, no equality, so that was on people's minds, white as well as colored. Maybe more in their minds than happening in reality, but still, it fascinated people in the way they are fascinated by a fairy tale. But then in 1947, the governor called for a constitutional convention to revise the constitution of the state of New Jersey. And that was the beginning of something. One of the constitutional revisions was that there would no longer be separated or segregated National Guard units in New Jersey. The second part, the second change in the new constitution, said that no longer shall children be forced to pass one school to get to another school in their neighborhood. The wording was something like that. Walter could tell it to you verbatim. Those amendments eliminated segregation in the public schools and in the National Guard. The governor and the boards of education were told to implement that. The state board advised all the local boards of education to set into operation plans to integrate the schools. They suggested first integrating the faculties of the schools and then slowly integrating the schools insofar as pupils were concerned. Now, even before Walt went to Asbury Park, even as a student at Montclair State when he came home from the war, he was one of those who were politically concerned — one of those ex-GIs who were already actively fighting for integration of the schools in New Jersey. Even before the constitutional revision, and after it was revised, certainly, Walter remained among the most active in the fight to integrate the schools.”