The Human Stain

2. Slipping the Punch

WHEN COLEMAN went down to Athena the next day to ask what could be done to ensure against Farley's ever again trespassing on his property, the lawyer, Nelson Primus, told him what he did not want to hear: that he should consider ending his love affair. He'd first consulted Primus at the outset of the spooks incident and, because of the sound advice Primus had given — and because of a strain of cocky bluntness in the young attorney's manner reminiscent of himself at Primus's age, because of a repugnance in Primus for sentimental nonessentials that he made no effort to disguise behind the regular-guy easygoingness prevailing among the other lawyers in town — it was Primus to whom he'd brought the Delphine Roux letter.

Primus was in his early thirties, the husband of a young Ph.D.—a philosophy professor whom Coleman had hired some four years earlier — and the father of two small children. In a New England college town like Athena, where most all the professionals were outfitted for work by L. L. Bean, this sleekly good-looking, raven-haired young man, tall, trim, athletically flexible, appeared at his office every morning in crisply tailored suits, gleaming black shoes, and starched white shirts discreetly monogrammed, attire that bespoke not only a sweeping self-confidence and sense of personal significance but a loathing for slovenliness of any kind — and that suggested as well that Nelson Primus was hungry for something more than an office above the Talbots shop across from the green. His wife was teaching here, so for now he was here. But not for long. A young panther in cufflinks and a pinstriped suit — a panther ready to pounce.

“I don't doubt that Farley's psychopathic,” Primus told him, measuring each word with staccato exactitude and keeping a sharp watch on Coleman as he spoke. “I'd worry if he were stalking me. But did he stalk you before you took up with his ex-wife? He didn't know who you were. The Delphine Roux letter is something else entirely. You wanted me to write to her — against my better judgment I did that for you. You wanted an expert to analyze the handwriting — against my better judgment I got you somebody to analyze the handwriting. You wanted me to send the handwriting analysis to her lawyer — against my better judgment I sent him the results. Even though I wished you'd had it in you to treat a minor nuisance for what it was, I did whatever you instructed me to do. But Lester Farley is no minor nuisance. Delphine Roux can't hold a candle to Farley, not as a psychopath and not as an adversary. Farley's is the world that Faunia only barely managed to survive and that she can't help but bring with her when she comes through your door. Lester Farley works on the road crew, right? We get a restraining order on Farley and your secret is all over your quiet little backwoods town. Soon it's all over this town, it's all over the college, and what you started out with is going to bear no resemblance to the malevolent puritanism with which you will be tarred and feathered. I remember the precision with which the local comic weekly failed to understand the ridiculous charge against you and the meaning of your resignation. ‘Ex-Dean Leaves College under Racist Cloud.’ I remember the caption below your photograph. A denigrating epithet used in class forces Professor Silk into retirement.' I remember what it was like for you then, I think I know what it's like now, and I believe I know what it will be like in the future, when the whole county is privy to the sexcapades of the guy who left the college under the racist cloud. I don't mean to imply that what goes on behind your bedroom door is anybody's business but yours. I know it should not be like this. It's 1998. It's years now since Janis Joplin and Norman O. Brown changed everything for the better. But we've got people here in the Berkshires, hicks and college professors alike, who just won't bring their values into line and politely give way to the sexual revolution. Narrow-minded churchgoers, sticklers for propriety, all sorts of retrograde folks eager to expose and punish guys like you. They can heat things up for you, Coleman — and not the way your Viagra does.”

Clever boy to come up with the Viagra all on his own. Showing off, but he's helped before, thought Coleman, so don't interrupt, don't put him down, however irritating his being so with-it is. There are no compassionate chinks in his armor? Fine with me. You asked his advice, so hear him out. You don't want to make a mistake for lack of being warned.

“Sure I can get you a restraining order,” Primus told him. “But is that going to restrain him? A restraining order is going to inflame him. I got you a handwriting expert, I can get you your restraining order, I can get you a bulletproof vest. But what I can't provide is what you're never going to know as long as you're involved with this woman: a scandal-free, censure-free, Farley-free life. The peace of mind that comes of not being stalked. Or caricatured. Or snubbed. Or misjudged. Is she HIV negative, by the way? Did you have her tested, Coleman? Do you use a condom, Coleman?”

Hip as he imagines himself, he really can't get this old man and sex, can he? Seems utterly anomalous to him. But who can grasp at thirty-two that at seventy-one it's exactly the same? He thinks, How and why does he do this? My old-fart virility and the trouble it causes. At thirty-two, thought Coleman, I couldn't have understood it either. Otherwise, however, he speaks with the authority of someone ten or twenty years his senior about the way the world works. And how much experience can he have had, how much exposure to life's difficulties, to speak in such a patronizing manner to a man more than twice his age? Very, very little, if not none.

“Coleman, if you don't,” Primus was saying, “does she use something? And if she says she does, can you be sure it's so? Even down-and-out cleaning women have been known to shade the truth from time to time, and sometimes even to seek remedy for all the shit they've taken. What happens when Faunia Farley gets pregnant? She may think the way a lot of women have been thinking ever since the act of begetting a bastard was destigmatized by Jim Morrison and The Doors. Faunia might very well want to go ahead and become the mother of a distinguished retired professor's child despite all your patient reasoning to the contrary. Becoming the mother of a distinguished professor's child might be an uplifting change after having been the mother of the children of a deranged total failure. And, once she's pregnant, if she decides that she doesn't want to be a menial anymore, that she wishes never again to work at anything, an enlightened court will not hesitate to direct you to support the child and the single mother. Now, I can represent you in the paternity suit, and if and when I have to, I will fight to keep your liability down to half your pension. I will do everything in my power to see that something is left in your bank account as you advance into your eighties. Coleman, listen to me: this is a bad deal. In every possible way, it is a bad deal. If you go to your hedonist counselor, he's going to tell you something else, but I am your counselor at law, and I'm going to tell you that it's a terrible deal. If I were you, I would not put myself in the path of Lester Farley's wild grievance. If I were you, I would rip up the Faunia contract and get out.”

Everything he had to say having been said, Primus got up from behind his desk, a large, well-polished desk conscientiously kept cleared of all papers and files, pointedly bare of everything but the framed photographs of his young professor wife and their two children, a desk whose surface epitomized the unsullied clean slate and could only lead Coleman to conclude that there was nothing disorganized standing in the way of this voluble young man, neither weaknesses of character nor extreme views nor rash compulsions nor even the possibility of inadvertent error, nothing ill or well concealed that would ever crop up to prevent him from attaining every professional reward and bourgeois success. There'll be no spooks in Nelson Primus's life, no Faunia Farleys or Lester Farleys, no Markies to despise him or Lisas to desert him. Primus has drawn the line and no incriminating impurity will be permitted to breach it. But didn't I too draw the line and draw it no less rigorously? Was I less vigilant in the pursuit of legitimate goals and of an estimable, even-keeled life? Was I any less confident marching in step behind my own impregnable scruples? Was I any less arrogant? Isn't this the very way I took on the old guard in my first hundred days as Roberts's strongman? Isn't this how I drove them crazy and pushed them out? Was I any less ruthlessly sure of myself? Yet that one word did it. By no means the English language's most inflammatory, most heinous, most horrifying word, and yet word enough to lay bare, for all to see, to judge, to find wanting the truth of who and what I am.

The lawyer who'd not minced a single word — who'd laced virtually every one of them with a cautionary sarcasm that amounted to outright admonishment, whose purpose he would not disguise from his distinguished elderly client with a single circumlocution — came around from behind his desk to escort Coleman out of the office and then, at the doorway, went so far as to accompany him down the stairway and out onto the sunny street. It was largely on behalf of Beth, his wife, that Primus had wanted to be sure to say everything he could to Coleman as tellingly as he could, to say what had to be said no matter how seemingly unkind, in the hope of preventing this once considerable college personage from disgracing himself any further. That spooks incident — coinciding as it did with the sudden death of his wife — had so seriously unhinged Dean Silk that not only had he taken the rash step of resigning (and just when the case against him had all but run its spurious course), but now, two full years later, he remained unable to gauge what was and wasn't in his long-term interest. To Primus, it seemed almost as though Coleman Silk had not been unfairly diminished enough, as though, with a doomed man's cunning obtuseness, like someone who falls foul of a god, he was in crazy pursuit of a final, malicious, degrading assault, an ultimate injustice that would validate his aggrievement forever. A guy who'd once enjoyed a lot of power in his small world seemed not merely unable to defend himself against the encroachments of a Delphine Roux and a Lester Farley but, what was equally compromising to his embattled self-image, unable to shield himself against the pitiful sorts of temptations with which the aging male will try to compensate for the loss of a spirited, virile manhood. Primus could tell from Coleman's demeanor that he'd guessed right about the Viagra. Another chemical menace, the young man thought. The guy might as well be smoking crack, for all the good that Viagra is doing him.

Out on the street, the two shook hands. “Coleman,” said Primus, whose wife, that very morning, when he'd said that he'd be seeing Dean Silk, had expressed her chagrin about his leavetaking from Athena, again speaking contemptuously of Delphine Roux, whom she despised for her role in the spooks affair—“Coleman,” Primus said, “Faunia Farley is not from your world. You got a good look last night at the world that's shaped her, that's quashed her, and that, for reasons you know as well as I do, she'll never escape. Something worse than last night can come of all this, something much worse. You're no longer battling in a world where they are out to destroy you and drive you from your job so as to replace you with one of their own. You're no longer battling a well-mannered gang of elitist egalitarians who hide their ambition behind high-minded ideals. You're battling now in a world where nobody's ruthlessness bothers to cloak itself in humanitarian rhetoric. These are people whose fundamental feeling about life is that they have been fucked over unfairly right down the line. What you suffered because of how your case was handled by the college, awful as that was, is what these people feel every minute of every hour of...”

That's enough was by now so clearly written in Coleman's gaze that even Primus realized that it was time to shut up. Throughout the meeting, Coleman had silently listened, suppressing his feelings, trying to keep an open mind and to ignore the too apparent delight Primus took in floridly lecturing on the virtues of prudence a professional man nearly forty years his senior. In an attempt to humor himself, Coleman had been thinking, Being angry with me makes them all feel better — it liberates everyone to tell me I'm wrong. But by the time they were out on the street, it was no longer possible to isolate the argument from the utterance — or to separate himself from the man in charge he'd always been, the man in charge and the man deferred to. For Primus to speak directly to the point to his client had not required quite this much satiric ornamentation. If the purpose was to advise in a persuasive lawyerly fashion, a very small amount of mockery would have more effectively done the job. But Primus's sense of himself as brilliant and destined for great things seemed to have got the best of him, thought Coleman, and so the mockery of a ridiculous old fool made potent by a pharmaceutical compound selling for ten dollars a pill had known no bounds.

“You're a vocal master of extraordinary loquaciousness, Nelson. So perspicacious. So fluent. A vocal master of the endless, ostentatiously overelaborate sentence. And so rich with contempt for every last human problem you've never had to face.” The impulse was overwhelming to grab the lawyer by the shirt front and slam the insolent son of a bitch through Talbots's window. Instead, drawing back, reining himself in, strategically speaking as softly as he could — yet not nearly so mindfully as he might have — Coleman said, “I never again want to hear that self-admiring voice of yours or see your smug fucking lily-white face.”

“‘Lily-white’?” Primus said to his wife that evening. “Why ‘lily-white’? One can never hold people to what they lash out with when they think they've been made use of and deprived of their dignity. But did I mean to seem to be attacking him? Of course not. It's worse than that. Worse because this old guy has lost his bearings and I wanted to help him. Worse because the man is on the brink of carrying a mistake over into a catastrophe and I wanted to stop him. What he took to be an attack on him was actually a wrong-headed attempt to be taken seriously by him, to impress him. I failed, Beth, completely mismanaged it. Maybe because I was intimidated. In his slight, little-guy way, the man is a force. I never knew him as the big dean. I've known him only as someone in trouble. But you feel the presence. You see why people were intimidated by him. Somebody's there when he's sitting there. Look, I don't know what it is. It's not easy to know what to make of somebody you've seen half a dozen times in your life. Maybe it's primarily something stupid about me. But whatever caused it, I made every amateurish mistake in the book. Psychopathology, Viagra, The Doors, Norman O. Brown, contraception, AIDS. I knew everything about everything. Particularly if it happened before I was born, I knew everything that could possibly be known. I should have been concise, matter-of-fact, unsubjective; instead I was provocative. I wanted to help him and instead I insulted him and made things worse for him. No, I don't fault him for unloading on me like that. But, honey, the question remains: why white?”

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. My father was a saloon keeper, but he insisted on precision in my language, and I have kept the faith with him. Words have meanings — with only a seventh-grade education, even my father knew that much. Back of the bar, he kept two things to help settle arguments among his patrons: a blackjack and a dictionary. My best friend, he told me, the dictionary — and so it is for me today. Because if we look in the dictionary, what do we find as the first meaning of ‘spook’? The primary meaning. ‘1.Informal. a ghost; specter.’” “But Dean Silk, that is not the way it was taken. Let me read to you the second dictionary meaning. ‘2.Disparaging. A Negro.’ That's the way it was taken — and you can see the logic of that as well: Does anybody know them, or are they blacks whom you don't know?” “Sir, if my intention was to say, ‘Does anybody know them, or do you not know them because they are black?’ that is what I would have said. ‘Does anybody know them, or do none of you know them because these happen to be two black students? Does anybody know them, or are they blacks whom nobody knows?’ If I had meant that, I would have said it just like that. But how could I know they were black students if I had never laid eyes on them and, other than their names, had no knowledge of them? What I did know, indisputably, was that they were invisible students — and the word for invisible, for a ghost, for a specter, is the word that I used in its primary meaning: spook. Look at the adjective ‘spooky,’ which is the next dictionary entry after ‘spook.’ Spooky. A word we all remember from childhood, and what does it mean? According to the unabridged dictionary: ‘Informal. 1. like or befitting a spook or ghost; suggestive of spooks. 2. eerie; scary. 3. (esp. of horses) nervous; skittish.’ Especially of horses. Now, would anyone care to suggest that my two students were being characterized by me as horses as well? No? But why not? While you're at it, why not that, too?”

One last look at Athena, and then let the disgrace be complete.

Silky. Silky Silk. The name by which he had not been known for over fifty years, and yet he all but expected to hear someone shouting, “Hey, Silky!” as though he were back in East Orange, walking up Central Avenue after school — instead of crossing Athena's Town Street and, for the first time since his resignation, starting up the hill to the campus — walking up Central Avenue with his sister, Ernestine, listening to that crazy story she had to tell about what she'd overheard the evening before when Dr. Fensterman, the Jewish doctor, the big surgeon from Mom's hospital down in Newark, had come to call on their parents. While Coleman had been at the gym working out with the track team, Ernestine was home in the kitchen doing her homework and from there could hear Dr. Fensterman, seated in the living room with Mom and Dad, explaining why it was of the utmost importance to him and Mrs. Fensterman that their son Bertram graduate as class valedictorian. As the Silks knew, it was now Coleman who was first in their class, with Bert second, though behind Coleman by a single grade. The one B that Bert had received on his report card the previous term, a B in physics that by all rights should have been an A — that B was all that was separating the top two students in the senior class. Dr. Fensterman explained to Mr. and Mrs. Silk that Bert wanted to follow his father into medicine, but that to do so it was essential for him to have a perfect record, and not merely perfect in college but extraordinary going back to kindergarten. Perhaps the Silks were not aware of the discriminatory quotas that were designed to keep Jews out of medical school, especially the medical schools at Harvard and Yale, where Dr. and Mrs. Fensterman were confident that, were Bert given the opportunity, he could emerge as the brightest of the brightest. Because of the tiny Jewish quotas in most medical schools, Dr. Fensterman had had himself to go down to Alabama for his schooling, and there he'd seen at first hand all that colored people have to strive against. Dr. Fensterman knew that prejudice in academic institutions against colored students was far worse than it was against Jews. He knew the kind of obstacles that the Silks themselves had had to overcome to achieve all that distinguished them as a model Negro family. He knew the tribulations that Mr. Silk had had to endure ever since the optical shop went bankrupt in the Depression. He knew that Mr. Silk was, like himself, a college graduate, and he knew that in working for the railroad as a steward—“That's what he called a waiter, Coleman, a ‘steward’”—he was employed at a level in no way commensurate with his professional training. Mrs. Silk he of course knew from the hospital. In Dr. Fensterman's estimation, there was no finer nurse on the hospital staff, no nurse more intelligent, knowledgeable, reliable, or capable than Mrs. Silk — and that included the nursing supervisor herself. In his estimation, Gladys Silk should long ago have been appointed the head nurse on the medical-surgical floor; one of the promises that Dr. Fensterman wanted to make to the Silks was that he was prepared to do everything he could with the chief of staff to procure that very position for Mrs. Silk upon the retirement of Mrs. Noonan, the current medical-surgical head nurse. Moreover, he was prepared to assist the Silks with an interest-free, nonreturnable “loan” of three thousand dollars, payable in a lump sum when Coleman would be off to college and the family was sure to be incurring additional expenses. And in exchange he asked not so much as they might think. As salutatorian, Coleman would still be the highest-ranking colored student in the 1944 graduating class, not to mention the highest-ranking colored student ever to graduate E. O. With his grade average, Coleman would more than likely be the highest-ranking colored student in the county, even in the state, and his having finished high school as salutatorian rather than as valedictorian would make no difference whatsoever when he enrolled at Howard University. The chances were negligible of his suffering the slightest hardship with a ranking like that. Coleman would lose nothing, while the Silks would have three thousand dollars to put toward the children's college expenses; in addition, with Dr. Fensterman's support and backing, Gladys Silk could very well rise, in just a few years, to become the first colored head nurse on any floor of any hospital in the city of Newark. And from Coleman nothing more was required than his choosing his two weakest subjects and, instead of getting As on the final exams, getting B's. It would then be up to Bert to get an A in all his subjects — doing that would constitute holding up his end of the bargain. And should Bert let everyone down by not working hard enough to get all those As, then the two boys would finish in a flat-footed tie — or Coleman could even emerge as valedictorian, and Dr. Fensterman would still make good on his promises. Needless to say, the arrangement would be kept confidential by everyone involved.

So delighted was he by what he heard that Coleman broke loose from Ernestine's grasp and burst away up the street, in exuberant delight running up Central to Evergreen and then back, crying aloud, “My two weakest subjects — which are those?” It was as though in attributing to Coleman an academic weakness, Dr. Fensterman had told the most hilarious joke. “What'd they say, Ern? What did Dad say?” “I couldn't hear. He said it too low.” “What did Mom say?” “I don't know. I couldn't hear Mom either. But what they were saying after the doctor left, I heard that.” “Tell me! What?” “Daddy said, ‘I wanted to kill that man.’” “He did?” “Really. Yes.” “And Mom?” “‘I just bit my tongue.’ That's what Mom said—‘I just bit my tongue.’” “But you didn't hear what they said to him?” “No.” “Well, I'll tell you one thing — I'm not going to do it.” “Of course not,” Ernestine said. “But suppose Dad told him I would?” “Are you crazy, Coleman?” “Ernie, three thousand dollars is more than Dad makes in a whole year. Ernie, three thousand dollars!” And the thought of Dr. Fensterman handing over to his father a big paper bag stuffed with all that money set him running again, goofily taking the imaginary low hurdles (for successive years now, he had been Essex County high school champ in low hurdles and run second in the hundred-yard dash) up to Evergreen and back. Another triumph — that's what he was thinking. Yet another record-breaking triumph for the great, the incomparable, the one and only Silky Silk! He was class valedictorian, all right, as well as a track star, but as he was also only seventeen, Dr. Fensterman's proposal meant no more to him than that he was of the greatest importance to just about everyone. The larger picture he didn't get yet.

In East Orange, where mostly everyone was white, either poor Italian — and living up at the Orange edge of town or down by Newark's First Ward — or Episcopalian and rich — and living in the big houses out by Upsala or around South Harrison — there were fewer Jews even than there were Negroes, and yet it was the Jews and their kids who these days loomed larger than anyone in Coleman's extracurricular life. First there was Doc Chizner, who had as good as adopted him the year before, when Coleman joined his evening boxing class, and now there was Dr. Fensterman offering three thousand dollars for Coleman to place second academically so as to enable Bert to come in first. Doc Chizner was a dentist who loved boxing. Went to the fights whenever he had a chance — in Jersey at Laurel Garden and at the Meadowbrook Bowl, to New York to the Garden and out to St. Nick's. People would say, “You think you know fights until you sit next to Doc. Sit next to Doc Chizner, and you realize you're not watching the same fight.” Doc officiated at amateur fights all over Essex County, including the Golden Gloves in Newark, and to his local classes in boxing Jewish parents from all over the Oranges, from Maplewood, from Irvington — from as far away as the Weequahic section over at Newark's southwest corner — sent their sons to learn how to defend themselves. Coleman had wound up in Doc Chizner's class not because he didn't know how but because his own father had found out that since his second year of high school, after track practice, all on his own — and as often sometimes as three times a week — Coleman had been sneaking down to the Newark Boys Club, below High Street in the Newark slums to Morton Street, and secretly training to be a fighter. Fourteen years old when he began, a hundred and eleven pounds, and he would work out there for two hours, loosen up, spar three rounds, hit the heavy bag, hit the speed bag, skip rope, do his exercises, and then head home to do his homework. A couple of times he even got to spar with Cooper Fulham, who the year before had won the National Championships up in Boston. Coleman's mother was working a shift and a half, even two shifts running at the hospital, his father was waiting tables on the train and hardly at home other than to sleep, his older brother, Walt, was away first at college, then in the army, and so Coleman came and went as he liked, swearing Ernestine to secrecy and making sure not to let his grades slip, in study hall, at night in bed, on the buses back and forth to Newark — two buses each way — plugging away even harder than usual at his schoolwork to be sure nobody found out about Morton Street.

If you wanted to box amateur, the Newark Boys Club was where you went, and if you were good and you were between thirteen and eighteen, you got matched up against guys from the Boys Club in Paterson, in Jersey City, in Butler, from the Ironbound PAL, and so on. There were loads of kids down at the Boys Club, some from Rahway, from Linden, from Elizabeth, a couple from as far away as Morristown, there was a deaf-mute they called Dummy who came from Belleville, but mostly they were from Newark and all of them were colored, though the two guys who ran the club were white. One was a cop in West Side Park, Mac Machrone, and he had a pistol, and he told Coleman that if he ever found out Coleman wasn't doing his roadwork, he'd shoot him. Mac believed in speed, and that's why he believed in Coleman. Speed and pacing and counter-punching. Once he'd taught Coleman how to stand and how to move and how to throw the punches, once Mac saw how quickly the boy learned and how smart he was and how quick his reflexes were, he began to teach him the finer things. How to move his head. How to slip punches. How to block punches. How to counter. To teach him the jab, Mac repeated, “It's like you flick a flea off your nose. Just flick it off him.” He taught Coleman how to win a fight by using only his jab. Throw the jab, knock the punch down, counter. A jab comes, you slip it, come over with the right counter. Or you slip it inside, you come over with a hook. Or you just duck down, hit him a right to the heart, a left hook to the stomach. Slight as he was, Coleman would sometimes quickly grab the jab with both his hands, pull the guy and then hook him to the stomach, come up, hook him to the head. “Knock the punch down. Counterpunch. You're a counterpuncher, Silky. That's what you are, that's all you are.” Then they went to Paterson. His first amateur tournament fight. This kid would throw a jab and Coleman would lean back, but his feet would be planted and he could come back and counter the kid with a right, and he kept catching him like that for the whole fight. The kid kept doing it, so Coleman kept doing it and won all three rounds. At the Boys Club, that became Silky Silk's style. When he threw punches, it was so nobody could say he was standing there doing nothing. Mostly he would wait for the other guy to throw, then he'd throw two, three back, and then he'd get out and wait again. Coleman could hit his opponent more by waiting for him to lead than by leading him. The result was that by the time Coleman was sixteen, in Essex and Hudson counties alone, at amateur shows at the armory, at the Knights of Pythias, at exhibitions for the veterans at the veterans hospital, he must have beaten three guys who were Golden Gloves champs. As he figured it, he could by then have won 112,118,126 ... except there was no way he could fight in the Golden Gloves without its getting in the papers and his family finding out. And then they found out anyway. He didn't know how. He didn't have to. They found out because somebody told them. Simple as that.

They were all sitting down to dinner on a Sunday, after church, when his father said, “How did you do, Coleman?”

“How did I do at what?”

“Last night. At the Knights of Pythias. How did you do?”

“What's the Knights of Pythias?” Coleman asked.

“Do you think I was born yesterday, son? The Knights of Pythias is where they had the tournament last night. How many fights on the card?”

“Fifteen.”

“And how did you do?”

“I won.”

“How many fights have you won so far? In tournaments. In exhibitions. How many since you began?”

“Eleven.”

“And how many have you lost?”

“So far, none.”

“And how much did you get for the watch?”

“What watch?”

“The watch you won at the Lyons Veterans Hospital. The watch the vets gave you for winning the fight. The watch you hocked on Mulberry Street. Down in Newark, Coleman — the watch you hocked in Newark last week.”

The man knew everything.

“What do you think I got?” Coleman dared to reply, though not looking up as he spoke — instead looking at the embroidered design on the good Sunday tablecloth.

“You got two dollars, Coleman. When are you planning on turning pro?”

“I don't do it for money,” he said, still with his eyes averted. “I don't care about money. I do it for enjoyment. It's not a sport you take up if you don't enjoy it.”

“You know, if I were your father, Coleman, you know what I'd tell you now?”

“You are my father,” Coleman said.

“Oh, am I?” his father said.

“Well, sure...”

“Well — I'm not sure at all. I was thinking that maybe Mac Machrone, at the Newark Boys Club, was your father.”

“Come on, Dad. Mac's my trainer.”

“I see. So who then is your father, if I may ask?”

“You know. You are. You are, Dad.”

“I am? Yes?”

“No!” Coleman shouted. “No, you're not!” And here, at the very start of Sunday dinner, he ran out of the house and for nearly an hour he did his roadwork, up Central Avenue and over the Orange line, and then through Orange all the way to the West Orange line, and then crossing over on Watchung Avenue to Rosedale Cemetery, and then turning south down Washington to Main, running and throwing punches, sprinting, then just running, then just sprinting, then shadowboxing all the way back to Brick Church Station, and finally sprinting the stretch, sprinting to the house, going back inside to where the family was eating their dessert and where he knew to sit back down at his place, far calmer than when he had bolted, and to wait for his father to resume where he had left off. The father who never lost his temper. The father who had another way of beating you down. With words. With speech. With what he called “the language of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Dickens.” With the English language that no one could ever take away from you and that Mr. Silk richly sounded, always with great fullness and clarity and bravado, as though even in ordinary conversation he were reciting Marc Antony's speech over the body of Caesar. Each of his three children had been given a middle name drawn from Mr. Silk's best-memorized play, in his view English literature's high point and the most educational study of treason ever written: the eldest Silk son was Walter Antony, the second son, Coleman Brutus; Ernestine Calpurnia, their younger sister, took her middle name from Caesar's loyal wife.

Mr. Silk's life in business for himself had come to a bitter end with the closing of the banks. It had taken him quite a time to get over losing the optician's store up in Orange, if he ever did. Poor Daddy, Mother would say, he always wanted to work for himself. He'd attended college in the South, in Georgia where he came from — Mother was from New Jersey — and took farming and animal husbandry. But then he quit and up north, in Trenton, he went to optician's school. Then he was drafted into the army for World War I, then he met Mother, moved with her to East Orange, opened the store, bought the house, then there was the crash, and now he was a waiter on a dining car. But if he couldn't in the dining car, at least at home he was able to speak with all his deliberateness and precision and directness and could wither you with words. He was very fussy about his children's speaking properly. Growing up, they never said, “See the bow-wow.” They didn't even say, “See the doggie.” They said, “See the Doberman. See the beagle. See the terrier.” They learned things had classifications. They learned the power of naming precisely. He was teaching them English all the time. Even the kids who came into the house, his children's friends, had their English corrected by Mr. Silk.

When he was an optician and wore a white medical smock over a ministerial dark suit and was working more or less regular hours, he would sit after dessert and read the newspaper at the dinner table. They all would read from it. Each one of the children, even the baby, even Ernestine, would have to take a turn at the Newark Evening News, and not with the funnies. His mother, Coleman's grandmother, had been taught to read by her mistress and after Emancipation had gone to what was then called Georgia State Normal and Industrial School for Colored. His father, Coleman's paternal grandfather, had been a Methodist minister. In the Silk family they had read all the old classics. In the Silk family the children were not taken to prizefights, they were taken to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to see the armor. They were taken to the Hayden Planetarium to learn about the solar system. Regularly they were taken to the Museum of Natural History. And then in 1937, on the Fourth of July, despite the cost, they were all taken by Mr. Silk to the Music Box Theatre on Broadway to see George M. Cohan in I'd Rather Be Right. Coleman still remembered what his father told his brother, Uncle Bobby, on the phone the next day. “When the curtain came down on George M. Cohan after all his curtain calls, do you know what the man did? He came out for an hour and sang all his songs. Every one of them. What better introduction could a child have to the theater?”

“If I were your father,” Coleman's father resumed, while the boy sat solemnly before his empty plate, “you know what I would tell you now?”

“What?” said Coleman, speaking softly, and not because he was winded from all the roadwork but because he was chastened by having told his own father, who was no longer an optician but a dining car waiter and who would remain a dining car waiter till he died, that he was not his father.

“I would say, You won last night? Good. Now you can retire undefeated. You're retired.' That's what I'd say, Coleman.”

It was much easier when Coleman spoke to him later, after he had spent the afternoon doing his homework and after his mother had a chance to talk and reason with his father. They were all able to sit more or less peaceably together then in the living room and listen to Coleman describe the glories of boxing and how, given all the resources you had to call on to excel, they exceeded even winning at track.

It was his mother who asked the questions now, and answering her was no problem. Her younger son was wrapped like a gift in every ameliorating dream Gladys Silk had ever had, and the handsomer he became and the smarter he became, the more difficult it was for her to distinguish the child from the dreams. As sensitive and gentle as she could be with the patients at the hospital, she could also be, with the other nurses, even with the doctors, with the white doctors, exacting and stern, imposing on them a code of conduct no less stringent than the one she imposed on herself. She could be that way with Ernestine as well. But never with Coleman. Coleman got what the patients got: her conscientious kindness and care. Coleman got just about anything he wanted. The father leading the way, the mother feeding the love. The old one-two.

“I don't see how you get mad at somebody you don't know. You especially,” she said, “with your happy nature.”

“You don't get mad. You just concentrate. It's a sport. You warm up before a fight. You shadowbox. You get yourself ready for whatever is going to come at you.”

“If you've never seen the opponent before?” asked his father, with all the restraint on his sarcasm he could muster.

“All I mean,” Coleman said, “is you don't have to get mad.”

“But,” his mother asked, “what if the other boy is mad?”

“It doesn't matter. It's brains that win, not getting mad. Let him get mad. Who cares? You have to think. It's like a chess game. Like a cat and a mouse. You can lead a guy. Last night, I had this guy, he was about eighteen or nineteen and he was sort of slow. He hit me with a jab on the top of my head. So the next time he did it, I was ready for it, and boom. I came over with the right counter and he didn't know where it came from. I knocked him down. I don't knock guys down, but I knocked this guy down. And I did it because I got him into thinking that he could catch me again with this punch.”

“Coleman,” his mother said, “I do not like the sound of what I'm hearing.”

He stood up to demonstrate for her. “Look. It was a slow punch. You see? I saw his jab was slow and he wasn't catching me. It was nothing that hurt me, Mom. I just was thinking that if he does it again, I'll slip it and bang over with the right. So when he threw it again, I saw it coming because it was so slow, and I was able to counter and catch him. I knocked him down, Mom, but not because I was angry. Because I box better.”

“But these Newark boys you fight. They're nothing like the friends you have,” and, with affection, she mentioned the names of the two other best-behaved, brightest Negro boys in his year at East Orange High, who were indeed the pals he had lunch with and hung around with at school. “I see these Newark boys on the street. These boys are so tough,” she said. “Track is so much more civilized than boxing, so much more like you, Coleman. Dear, you run so beautifully.”

“It doesn't matter how tough they are or how tough they think they are,” he told her. “On the street it matters. But not in the ring. In the street this guy could probably have beat me silly. But in the ring? With rules? With gloves? No, no — he couldn't land a punch.”

“But what happens when they do hit you? It has to hurt you. The impact. It must. And that's so dangerous. Your head. Your brain?”

“You're rolling with the punch, Mom. That's where they teach you how to roll your head. Like this, see? That reduces the impact. Once, and only once, and only because I was a jerk, only because of my own stupid mistake and because I wasn't used to fighting a southpaw, did I get a little stunned. And it's only like if you bang your head against the wall, you feel a little dizzy or shaky. But then all of a sudden your body comes right back. All you have to do is just hold on to the guy or move away, and then your head clears up. Sometimes, you get hit in the nose, your eyes get a little watery for a second, but that's it. If you know what you're doing, it's not dangerous at all.”

With that remark, his father had heard enough. “I've seen men get hit with a punch that they never saw coming. And when that happens,” Mr. Silk said, “their eyes don't get watery — when that happens, it knocks them cold. Even Joe Louis, if you recall, was knocked cold — wasn't he? Am I mistaken? And if Joe Louis can be knocked cold, Coleman, so can you.”

“Yeah, but Dad, Schmeling, when he fought Louis that first fight, he saw a weakness. And the weakness was that when Louis threw his jab, instead of coming back—” On his feet again, the boy demonstrated to his parents what he meant. “Instead of coming back, he dropped his left hand — see?—and Schmeling kept coming over — see? — and that's how Schmeling knocked him out. It's all thinking. Really. It is, Dad. I swear to you.”

“Don't say that. Don't say, ‘I swear to you.’”

“I won't, I won't. But see, if he doesn't come back, where he's back in position, if he comes here instead, then the guy's going to come over with his right hand and eventually he's going to catch him. That's what happened that first time. That's exactly what happened.”

But Mr. Silk had seen plenty of fights, in the army had seen fights among soldiers staged at night for the troops where fighters were not only knocked out like Joe Louis but so badly cut up nothing could be done to stop the bleeding. On his base he had seen colored fighters who used their heads as their main weapon, who should have had a glove on their heads, tough street fighters, stupid men who butted and butted with their heads until the face of the other fighter was unrecognizable as a face. No, Coleman was to retire undefeated, and if he wanted to box for the enjoyment of it, for the sport, he would do so not at the Newark Boys Club, which to Mr. 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.”

Except for educational trips to New York City with his family, Coleman had never been out of Jersey before, and so first he spent a great day walking around West Point pretending he was at West Point because he was going to go to West Point, and then he boxed for the Pitt coach against a guy like the guy he'd boxed at the Knights of Pythias — slow, so slow that within seconds Coleman realized that there was no way this guy was going to beat him, even if he was twenty years old and a college boxer. Jesus, Coleman thought at the end of the first round, if I could fight this guy for the rest of my life, I'd be better than Ray Robinson. It wasn't just that Coleman weighed some seven pounds more than when he'd boxed on the amateur card at the Knights of Pythias. It was that something he could not even name made him want to be more damaging than he'd ever dared before, to do something more that day than merely win. Was it because the Pitt coach didn't know he was colored? Could it be because who he really was was entirely his secret? He did love secrets. The secret of nobody's knowing what was going on in your head, thinking whatever you wanted to think with no way of anybody's knowing. All the other kids were always blabbing about themselves. But that wasn't where the power was or the pleasure either. The power and pleasure were to be found in the opposite, in being counterconfessional in the same way you were a counterpuncher, and he knew that with nobody having to tell him and without his having to think about it. That's why he liked shadowboxing and hitting the heavy bag: for the secrecy in it. That's why he liked track, too, but this was even better. Some guys just banged away at the heavy bag. Not Coleman. Coleman thought, and the same way that he thought in school or in a race: rule everything else out, let nothing else in, and immerse yourself in the thing, the subject, the competition, the exam — whatever's to be mastered, become that thing. He could do that in biology and he could do it in the dash and he could do it in boxing. And not only did nothing external make any difference, neither did anything internal. If there were people in the fight crowd shouting at him, he could pay no attention to that, and if the guy he was fighting was his best friend, he could pay no attention to that. After the fight there was plenty of time for them to be friends again. He managed to force himself to ignore his feelings, whether of fear, uncertainty, even friendship — to have the feelings but have them separately from himself. When he was shadowboxing, for instance, he wasn't just loosening up. He was also imagining another guy, in his head fighting through a secret fight with another guy. And in the ring, where the other guy was real — stinky, snotty, wet, throwing punches as real as could be — the guy still could have no idea what you were thinking. There wasn't a teacher to ask for the answer to the question. All the answers that you came up with in the ring, you kept to yourself, and when you let the secret out, you let it out through everything but your mouth.

So at magic, mythical West Point, where it looked to him that day as though there were more of America in every square inch of the flag flapping on the West Point flagpole than in any flag he'd ever seen, and where the iron faces of the cadets had for him the most powerful heroic significance, even here, at the patriotic center, the marrow of his country's unbreakable spine, where his sixteen-year-old's fantasy of the place matched perfectly the official fantasy, where everything he saw made him feel a frenzy of love not only for himself but for all that was visible, as if everything in nature were a manifestation of his own life — the sun, the sky, the mountains, the river, the trees, just Coleman Brutus “Silky” Silk carried to the millionth degree — even here nobody knew his secret, and so he went out there in the first round and, unlike Mac Machrone's undefeated counterpuncher, started hitting this guy with everything he had. When the guy and he were of the same caliber, he would have to use his brains, but when the guy was easy and when Coleman saw that early, he could always be a more aggressive fighter and begin to pound away. And that's what happened at West Point. Before you turned around, he had cut the guy's eyes, the guy's nose was bleeding, and he was knocking him all over the place. And then something happened that had never happened before. He threw a hook, one that seemed to go three-quarters of the way into the guy's body. It went so deep he was astonished, though not half as astonished as the Pitt guy. Coleman weighed a hundred and twenty-eight pounds, hardly a young boxer who knocked people out. He never really planted his feet to throw that one good shot, that was not his style; and still this punch to the body went so deep that the guy just folded forward, a college boxer already twenty years old, and Coleman caught him in what Doc Chizner called “the labonz.” Right in the labonz, and the guy folded forward, and for a moment Coleman thought the guy was even going to throw up, and so before he threw up and before he went down, Coleman set himself to whack him with the right one more time — all he saw as this white guy was going down was somebody he wanted to beat the living shit out of — but suddenly the Pitt coach, who was the referee, called, “Don't, Silky!” and as Coleman started to throw that last right, the coach grabbed him and stopped the fight.

“And that kid,” said Doc on the drive home, “that kid was a goddamn good fighter, too. But when they dragged him back to his corner, they had to tell him the fight was over. This kid is already back in his corner, and still he didn't know what hit him.”

Deep in the victory, in the magic, in the ecstasy of that last punch and of the sweet flood of fury that had broken out and into the open and overtaken him no less than its victim, Coleman said — almost as though he were speaking in his sleep rather than aloud in the car as he replayed the fight in his head—“I guess I was too quick for him, Doc.”

“Sure, quick. Of course quick. I know you're quick. But also strong. That is the best hook you ever threw, Silky. My boy, you were too strong for him.”

Was he? Truly strong?

He went to Howard anyway. Had he not, his father would — with words alone, with just the English language — have killed him. Mr. Silk had it all figured out: Coleman was going to Howard to become a doctor, to meet a light-skinned girl there from a good Negro family, to marry and settle down and have children who would in turn go to Howard. At all-Negro Howard, Coleman's tremendous advantages of intellect and of appearance would launch him into the topmost ranks of Negro society, make of him someone people would forever look up to. And yet within his first week at Howard, when he eagerly went off on Saturday with his roommate, a lawyer's son from New Brunswick, to see the Washington Monument, and they stopped in Woolworth's to get a hot dog, he was called a nigger. His first time. And they wouldn't give him the hot dog. Refused a hot dog at Woolworth's in downtown Washington, on the way out called a nigger, and, as a result, unable to divorce himself from his feelings as easily as he did in the ring. At East Orange High the class valedictorian, in the segregated South just another nigger. In the segregated South there were no separate identities, not even for him and his roommate. No such subtleties allowed, and the impact was devastating. Nigger — and it meant him.

Of course, even in East Orange he had not escaped the minimally less malevolent forms of exclusion that socially separated his family and the small colored community from the rest of East Orange — everything that flowed from what his father called the country's “Negrophobia.” And he knew, too, that working for the Pennsylvania Railroad, his father had to put up with insults in the dining car and, union or no union, prejudicial treatment from the company that were far more humbling than anything Coleman would have known as an East Orange kid who was not only as light-skinned as a Negro could get but a bubbling, enthusiastic, quickwitted boy who happened also to be a star athlete and a straight-A student. He would watch his father do everything he could so as not to explode when he came home from work after something had happened on the job about which, if he wanted to keep the job, he could do nothing but meekly say, “Yes, suh.” That Negroes who were lighter were treated better didn't always hold true. “Any time a white deals with you,” his father would tell the family, “no matter how well intentioned he may be, there is the presumption of intellectual inferiority. Somehow or other, if not directly by his words then by his facial expression, by his tone of voice, by his impatience, even by the opposite — by his forbearance, by his wonderful display of humaneness—he will always talk to you as though you are dumb, and then, if you're not, he will be astonished.” “What happened, Dad?” Coleman would ask. But, as much out of pride as disgust, rarely would his father elucidate. To make the pedagogical point was enough. “What happened,” Coleman's mother would explain, “is beneath your father even to repeat.”

At East Orange High, there were teachers from whom Coleman sensed an unevenness of acceptance, an unevenness of endorsement compared to what they lavished on the smart white kids, but never to the degree that the unevenness was able to block his aims. No matter what the slight or the obstacle, he took it the way he took the low hurdles. If only to feign impregnability, he shrugged things off that Walter, say, could not and would not. Walt played varsity football, got good grades, as a Negro was no less anomalous in his skin color than Coleman, and yet he was always a little angrier about everything. When, for instance, he didn't get invited into a white kid's house but was made to wait outside, when he wasn't asked to the birthday party of a white teammate whom he'd been foolish enough to consider a buddy, Coleman, who shared a bedroom with him, would hear about it for months. When Walt didn't get his A in trigonometry, he went right to the teacher and stood there and, to the man's white face, said, “I think you made a mistake.” When the teacher went over his grade book and looked again at Walt's test scores, he came back to Walt and, even while allowing his mistake, had the nerve to say, “I couldn't believe your grades were as high as they were,” and only after a remark like that made the change from a B to an A. Coleman wouldn't have dreamed of asking a teacher to change a grade, but then he'd never had to. Maybe because he didn't have Walt's brand of bristling defiance, or maybe because he was lucky, or maybe because he was smarter and excelling academically wasn't the same effort for him that it was for Walt, he got the A in the first place. And when, in the seventh grade, he didn't get invited to some white friend's birthday party (and this was somebody who lived just down the block in the corner apartment house, the little white son of the building's super who'd been walking back and forth to school with Coleman since they'd started kindergarten), Coleman didn't take it as rejection by white people — after his initial mystification, he took it as rejection by Dicky Watkin's stupid mother and father. When he taught Doc Chizner's class, he knew there were kids who were repelled by him, who didn't like to be touched by him or to come in contact with his sweat, there was occasionally a kid who dropped out — again, probably because of parents who didn't want him taking boxing instruction, or any instruction, from a colored boy — and yet, unlike Walt, on whom no slight failed to register, Coleman, in the end, could forget it, dismiss it, or decide to appear to. There was the time one of the white runners on the track team was injured seriously in a car crash and guys from the team rushed to offer blood to the family for the transfusions, and Coleman was one of them, yet his was the blood the family didn't take. They thanked him and told him that they had enough, but he knew what the real reason was. No, it wasn't that he didn't know what was going on. He was too smart not to know. He competed against plenty of white Newark guys at track meets, Italians from Barringer, Poles from East Side, Irish from Central, Jews from Weequahic. He saw, he heard — he overheard. Coleman knew what was going on. But he also knew what wasn't going on, at the center of his life anyway. The protection of his parents, the protection provided by Walt as his older, six-foot-two-and-a-half-inch brother, his own innate confidence, his bright charm, his running prowess (“the fastest kid in the Oranges”), even his color, which made of him someone that people sometimes couldn't quite figure out — all this combined to mute for Coleman the insults that Walter found intolerable. Then there was the difference of personality: Walt was Walt, vigorously Walt, and Coleman was vigorously not. There was probably no better explanation than that for their different responses.

But “nigger” — directed at him? That infuriated him. And yet, unless he wanted to get in serious trouble, there was nothing he could do about it except to keep walking out of the store. This wasn't the amateur boxing card at the Knights of Pythias. This was Woolworth's in Washington, D.C. His fists were useless, his footwork was useless, so was his rage. Forget Walter. How could his father have taken this shit? In one form or another taken shit like this in that dining car every single day! Never before, for all his precocious cleverness, had Coleman realized how protected his life had been, nor had he gauged his father's fortitude or realized the powerful force that man was — powerful not merely by virtue of being his father. At last he saw all that his father had been condemned to accept. He saw all his father's defenselessness, too, where before he had been a naive enough youngster to imagine, from the lordly, austere, sometimes insufferable way Mr. Silk conducted himself, that there was nothing vulnerable there. But because somebody, belatedly, had got around to calling Coleman a nigger to his face, he finally recognized the enormous barrier against the great American menace that his father had been for him.

But that didn't make life better at Howard. Especially when he began to think that there was something of the nigger about him even to the kids in his dorm who had all sorts of new clothes and money in their pockets and in the summertime didn't hang around the hot streets at home but went to “camp”—and not Boy Scout camp out in the Jersey sticks but fancy places where they rode horses and played tennis and acted in plays. What the hell was a “cotillion”? Where was Highland Beach? What were these kids talking about? He was among the very lightest of the light-skinned in the freshman class, lighter even than his tea-colored roommate, but he could have been the blackest, most benighted field hand for all they knew that he didn't. He hated Howard from the day he arrived, within the week hated Washington, and so in early October, when his father dropped dead serving dinner on the Pennsylvania Railroad dining car that was pulling out of 30th Street Station in Philadelphia for Wilmington, and Coleman went home for the funeral, he told his mother he was finished with that college. She pleaded with him to give it a second chance, assured him that there had to be boys from something like his own modest background, scholarship boys like him, to mix with and befriend, but nothing his mother said, however true, could change his mind. Only two people were able to get Coleman to change his mind once he'd made it up, his father and Walt, and even they had to all but break his will to do it. But Walt was in Italy with the U.S. Army, and the father whom Coleman had to placate by doing as he was told was no longer around to sonorously dictate anything.

Of course he wept at the funeral and knew how colossal this thing was that, without warning, had been taken away. When the minister read, along with the biblical stuff, a selection from Julius Caesar out of his father's cherished volume of Shakespeare's plays — the oversized book with the floppy leather binding that, when Coleman was a small boy, always reminded him of a cocker spaniel — the son felt his father's majesty as never before: the grandeur of both his rise and his fall, the grandeur that, as a college freshman away for barely a month from the tiny enclosure of his East Orange home, Coleman had begun faintly to discern for what it was.

Cowards die many times before their deaths;

The valiant never taste of death but once.

Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,

It seems to me most strange that men should fear;

Seeing that death, a necessary end,

Will come when it will come.

The word “valiant,” as the preacher intoned it, stripped away Coleman's manly effort at sober, stoical self-control and laid bare a child's longing for that man closest to him that he'd never see again, the mammoth, secretly suffering father who talked so easily, so sweepingly, who with just his powers of speech had inadvertently taught Coleman to want to be stupendous. Coleman wept with the most fundamental and copious of all emotions, reduced helplessly to everything he could not bear. As an adolescent complaining about his father to his friends, he would characterize him with far more scorn than he felt or had the capacity to feel — pretending to an impersonal way of judging his own father was one more method he'd devised to invent and claim impregnability. But to be no longer circumscribed and defined by his father was like finding that all the clocks wherever he looked had stopped, and all the watches, and that there was no way of knowing what time it was. Down to the day he arrived in Washington and entered Howard, it was, like it or not, his father who had been making up Coleman's story for him; now he would have to make it up himself, and the prospect was terrifying. And then it wasn't. Three terrible, terrifying days passed, a terrible week, two terrible weeks, until, out of nowhere, it was exhilarating.

“What can be avoided / Whose end is purposed by the mighty gods?” Lines also from Julius Caesar, quoted to him by his father, and yet only with his father in the grave did Coleman at last bother to hear them — and when he did, instantaneously to aggrandize them. This had been purposed by the mighty gods! Silky's freedom. The raw I. All the subtlety of being Silky Silk.

At Howard he'd discovered that he wasn't just a nigger to Washington, D.C.—as if that shock weren't strong enough, he discovered at Howard that he was a Negro as well. A Howard Negro at that. Overnight the raw I was part of a we with all of the we's overbearing solidity, and he didn't want anything to do with it or with the next oppressive we that came along either. You finally leave home, the Ur of we, and you find another we? Another place that's just like that, the substitute for that? Growing up in East Orange, he was of course a Negro, very much of their small community of five thousand or so, but boxing, running, studying, at everything he did concentrating and succeeding, roaming around on his own all over the Oranges and, with or without Doc Chizner, down across the Newark line, he was, without thinking about it, everything else as well. He was Coleman, the greatest of the great pioneers of the I.

Then he went off to Washington and, in the first month, he was a nigger and nothing else and he was a Negro and nothing else. No. No. He saw the fate awaiting him, and he wasn't having it. Grasped it intuitively and recoiled spontaneously. You can't let the big they impose its bigotry on you any more than you can let the little they become a we and impose its ethics on you. Not the tyranny of the we and its we-talk and everything that the we wants to pile on your head. Never for him the tyranny of the we that is dying to suck you in, the coercive, inclusive, historical, inescapable moral we with its insidious E pluribus unum. Neither the they of Woolworth's nor the we of Howard. Instead the raw I with all its agility. Self-discovery—that was the punch to the labonz. Singularity. The passionate struggle for singularity. The singular animal. The sliding relationship with everything. Not static but sliding. Self-knowledge but concealed. What is as powerful as that?

“Beware the ides of March.” Bullshit — beware nothing. Free. With both bulwarks gone — the big brother overseas and the father dead — he is repowered and free to be whatever he wants, free to pursue the hugest aim, the confidence right in his bones to be his particular I. Free on a scale unimaginable to his father. As free as his father had been unfree. Free now not only of his father but of all that his father had ever had to endure. The impositions. The humiliations. The obstructions. The wound and the pain and the posturing and the shame — all the inward agonies of failure and defeat. Free instead on the big stage. Free to go ahead and be stupendous. Free to enact the boundless, self-defining drama of the pronouns we, they, and I.

The war was still on, and unless it ended overnight he was going to be drafted anyway. If Walt was in Italy fighting Hitler, why shouldn't he fight the bastard too? It was October of 1944, and he was still a month shy of being eighteen. But he could easily lie about his age — to move his birth date back by a month, from November 12 to October 12, was no problem at all. And dealing as he was with his mother's grief — and with her shock at his quitting college — it didn't immediately occur to him that, if he chose to, he could lie about his race as well. He could play his skin however he wanted, color himself just as he chose. No, that did not dawn on him until he was seated in the federal building in Newark and had all the navy enlistment forms spread out in front of him and, before filling them out, and carefully, with the same meticulous scrutiny that he'd studied for his high school exams — as though whatever he was doing, large or small, was, for however long he concentrated on it, the most important thing in the world — began to read them through. And even then it didn't occur to him. It occurred first to his heart, which began banging away like the heart of someone on the brink of committing his first great crime.

In '46, when Coleman came out of the service, Ernestine was already enrolled in the elementary education program at Montclair State Teachers College, Walt was at Montclair State finishing up, and both of them were living at home with their widowed mother. But Coleman, determined to live by himself, on his own, was across the river in New York, enrolled at NYU. He wanted to live in Greenwich Village far more than to go to NYU, wanted to be a poet or a playwright far more than to study for a degree, but the best way he could think to pursue his goals without having to get a job to support himself was by cashing in on the GI Bill. The problem was that as soon as he started taking classes, he wound up getting As, getting interested, and by the end of his first two years he was on the track for Phi Beta Kappa and a summa cum laude degree in classics. His quick mind and prodigious memory and classroom fluency made his performance at school as outstanding as it had always been, with the result that what he had come to New York wanting most was displaced by his success at what everybody else thought he should do and encouraged him to do and admired him for doing brilliantly. This was beginning to look like a pattern: he kept getting co-opted because of his academic prowess. Sure, he could take it all in and even enjoy it, the pleasure of being conventional unconventionally, but that wasn't really the idea. He had been a whiz at Latin and Greek in high school and gotten the Howard scholarship when what he wanted was to box in the Golden Gloves; now he was no less a whiz in college, while his poetry, when he showed it to his professors, didn't kindle any enthusiasm. At first he kept up his roadwork and his boxing for the fun of it, until one day at the gym he was approached to fight a four-rounder at St. Nick's Arena, offered thirty-five dollars to take the place of a fighter who'd pulled out, and mostly to make up for all he'd missed at the Golden Gloves, he accepted and, to his delight, secretly turned pro.

So there was school, poetry, professional boxing, and there were girls, girls who knew how to walk and how to wear a dress, how to move in a dress, girls who conformed to everything he'd been imagining when he'd set out from the separation center in San Francisco for New York — girls who put the streets of Greenwich Village and the crisscrossing walkways of Washington Square to their proper use. There were warm spring afternoons when nothing in triumphant postwar America, let alone in the world of antiquity, could be of more interest to Coleman than the legs of the girl walking in front of him. Nor was he the only one back from the war beset by this fixation. In those days in Greenwich Village there seemed to be no more engrossing off-hours entertainment for NYU's ex-GIs than appraising the legs of the women who passed by the coffeehouses and cafes where they congregated to read the papers and play chess. Who knows why sociologically, but whatever the reason, it was the great American era of aphrodisiacal legs, and once or twice a day at least, Coleman followed a pair of them for block after block so as not to lose sight of the way they moved and how they were shaped and what they looked like at rest while the corner light was changing from red to green. And when he gauged the moment was right — having followed behind long enough to become both verbally poised and insanely ravenous — and quickened his pace so as to catch up, when he spoke and ingratiated himself enough so as to be allowed to fall in step beside her and to ask her name and to make her laugh and to get her to accept a date, he was, whether she knew it or not, proposing the date to her legs.

And the girls, in turn, liked Coleman's legs. Steena Palsson, the eighteen-year-old exile from Minnesota, even wrote a poem about Coleman that mentioned his legs. It was handwritten on a sheet of lined notebook paper, signed “S,” then folded in quarters and stuck into his mail slot in the tiled hallway above his basement room. It had been two weeks since they'd first flirted at the subway station, and this was the Monday after the Sunday of their first twenty-four-hour marathon. Coleman had rushed off to his morning class while Steena was still making up in the bathroom; a few minutes later, she herself set out for work, but not before leaving him the poem that, in spite of all the stamina they'd so conscientiously demonstrated over the previous day, she'd been too shy to hand him directly. Since Coleman's schedule took him from his classes to the library to his late evening workout in the ring of a rundown Chinatown gym, he didn't find the poem jutting from the mail slot until he got back to Sullivan Street at eleven-thirty that night.

He has a body.

He has a beautiful body—

the muscles on the backs of his legs and the back of his neck.

Also he is bright and brash.

He's four years older,

but sometimes I feel he is younger.

He is sweet, still, and romantic,

though he says he is not romantic.

I am almost dangerous for this man.

How much can I tell

of what I see in him?

I wonder what he does

after he swallows me whole.

Rapidly reading Steena's handwriting by the dim hall light, he at first mistook “neck” for “negro”—and the back of his negro... His negro what? Till then he'd been surprised by how easy it was. What was supposed to be hard and somehow shaming or destructive was not only easy but without consequences, no price paid at all. But now the sweat was pouring off him. He kept reading, faster even than before, but the words formed themselves into no combination that made sense. His negro WHAT? They had been naked together a whole day and night, for most of that time never more than inches apart. Not since he was an infant had anyone other than himself had so much time to study how he was made. Since there was nothing about her long pale body that he had not observed and nothing that she had concealed and nothing now that he could not picture with a painterlike awareness, a lover's excited, meticulous connoisseurship, and since he had spent all day stimulated no less by her presence in his nostrils than by her legs spread-eagled in his mind's eye, it had to follow that there was nothing about his body that she had not microscopically absorbed, nothing about that extensive surface imprinted with his self-cherishing evolutionary uniqueness, nothing about his singular configuration as a man, his skin, his pores, his whiskers, his teeth, his hands, his nose, his ears, his lips, his tongue, his feet, his balls, his veins, his prick, his armpits, his ass, his tangle of pubic hair, the hair on his head, the fuzz on his frame, nothing about the way he laughed, slept, breathed, moved, smelled, nothing about the way he shuddered convulsively when he came that she had not registered. And remembered. And pondered.

Was it the act itself that did it, the absolute intimacy of it, when you are not just inside the body of the other person but she is tightly enveloping you? Or was it the physical nakedness? You take off your clothes and you're in bed with somebody, and that is indeed where whatever you've concealed, your particularity, whatever it may be, however encrypted, is going to be found out, and that's what the shyness is all about and what everybody fears. In that anarchic crazy place, how much of me is being seen, how much of me is being discovered? Now I know who you are. I see clear through to the back of your negro.

But how, by seeing what? What could it have been? Was it seeable to her, whatever it was, because she was a blond Icelandic Dane from a long line of blond Icelanders and Danes, Scandinavian-raised, at home, in school, at church, in the company all her life of nothing but ... and then Coleman recognized the word in the poem as a four- and not a five-letter word. What she'd written wasn't “negro.” It was “neck.” Oh, my neck! It's only my neck! ... the muscles on the backs of his legs and the back of his neck.

But what then did this mean: “How much can I tell / of what I see in him?” What was so ambiguous about what she saw in him? If she'd written “tell from” instead of “tell of,” would that have made her meaning clearer? Or would that have made it less clear? The more he reread that simple stanza, the more opaque the meaning became — and the more opaque the meaning, the more certain he was that she distinctly sensed the problem that Coleman brought to her life. Unless she meant by “what I see in him” no more than what is colloquially meant by skeptical people when they ask someone in love, “What can you possibly see in him?”

And what about “tell”? How much can she tell to whom? By tell does she mean make—“how much can I make,” et cetera — or does she mean reveal, expose? And what about “I am almost dangerous for this man.” Is “dangerous for” different from “dangerous to”? Either way, what's the danger?

Each time he tried to penetrate her meaning, it slipped away. After two frantic minutes on his feet in the hallway, all he could be sure of was his fear. And this astonished him — and, as always with Coleman, his susceptibility, by catching him unprepared, shamed him as well, triggering an SOS, a ringing signal to self-vigilance to take up the slack.

Bright and game and beautiful as Steena was, she was only eighteen years old and fresh to New York from Fergus Falls, Minnesota, and yet he was now more intimidated by her — and her almost preposterous, unequivocal goldenness — than by anybody he had ever faced in the ring. Even on that night in the Norfolk whorehouse, when the woman who was watching from the bed as he began to peel off his uniform — a big-titted, fleshy, mistrustful whore not entirely ugly but certainly no looker (and maybe herself two thirty-fifths something other than white)—smiled sourly and said, “You're a black nigger, ain't you, boy?” and the two goons were summoned to throw him out, only then had he been as undone as he was by Steena's poem.

I wonder what he does

after he swallows me whole.

Even that he could not understand. At the desk in his room, he battled into the morning with the paradoxical implications of this final stanza, ferreting out and then renouncing one complicated formulation after another until, at daybreak, all he knew for sure was that for Steena, ravishing Steena, not everything he had eradicated from himself had vanished into thin air.

Dead wrong. Her poem didn't mean anything. It wasn't even a poem. Under the pressure of her own confusion, fragments of ideas, raw bits of thought, had all chaotically come tumbling into her head while she was under the shower, and so she'd torn a page from one of his notebooks, scribbled out at his desk whatever words jelled, then jammed the page into the mail slot before rushing off for work. Those lines were just something she'd done — that she'd had to do — with the exquisite newness of her bewilderment. A poet? Hardly, she laughed: just somebody leaping through a ring of fire.

They were together in the bed in his room every weekend for over a year, feeding on each other like prisoners in solitary madly downing their daily ration of bread and water. She astonished him — astonished herself—with the dance she did one Saturday night, standing at the foot of his foldout sofa bed in her half slip and nothing else. She was getting undressed, and the radio was on — Symphony Sid — and first, to get her moving and in the mood, there was Count Basie and a bunch of jazz musicians jamming on “Lady Be Good,” a wild live recording, and following that, more Gershwin, the Artie Shaw rendition of “The Man I Love” that featured Roy Eldridge steaming everything up. Coleman was lying semi-upright on the bed, doing what he most loved to do on a Saturday night after they'd returned from their five bucks' worth of Chianti and spaghetti and cannoli in their favorite Fourteenth Street basement restaurant: watch her take her clothes off. All at once, with no prompting from him — seemingly prompted only by Eldridge's trumpet — she began what Coleman liked to describe as the single most slithery dance ever performed by a Fergus Falls girl after little more than a year in New York City. She could have raised Gershwin himself from the grave with that dance, and with the way she sang the song. Prompted by a colored trumpet player playing it like a black torch song, there to see, plain as day, was all the power of her whiteness. That big white thing. “Some day he'll come along ... the man I love ... and he'll be big and strong ... the man I love.” The language was ordinary enough to have been lifted from the most innocent first-grade primer, but when the record was over, Steena put her hands up to hide her face, half meaning, half pretending to cover her shame. But the gesture protected her against nothing, least of all from his enravishment. The gesture merely transported him further. “Where did I find you, Voluptas?” he asked. “ How did I find you? Who are you?”

It was during this, the headiest of times that Coleman gave up his evening workout at the Chinatown gym and cut back his early morning five-mile run and, in the end, relinquished in any way taking seriously his having turned pro. He had fought and won a total of four professional bouts, three four-rounders and then, his finale, a six-rounder, all of them Monday night fights at the old St. Nicholas Arena. He never told Steena about the fights, never told anyone at NYU, and certainly never let on to his family. For those first few years of college, that was one more secret, even though at the arena he boxed under the name of Silky Silk and the results from St. Nick's were printed in small type in a box on the sports page of the tabloids the next day. From the first second of the first round of the first thirty-five-dollar four-round fight, he went into the ring as a pro with an attitude different from that of his amateur days. Not that he had ever wanted to lose as an amateur. But as a pro he put out twice as hard, if only to prove to himself that he could stay there if he wanted to. None of the fights went the distance, and in the last fight, the six-rounder — with Beau Jack at the top of the card — and for which he got one hundred dollars, he stopped the guy in two minutes and some-odd seconds and was not even tired when it was over. Walking down the aisle for the six-rounder, Coleman had had to pass the ringside seat of Solly Tabak, the promoter, who was already dangling a contract in front of Coleman to sign away a third of his earnings for the next ten years. Solly slapped him on the behind and, in his meaty whisper, told him, “Feel the nigger out in the first round, see what he's got, Silky, and give the people their money's worth.” Coleman nodded at Tabak and smiled but, while climbing into the ring, thought, Fuck you. I'm getting a hundred dollars, and I'm going to let some guy hit me to give the people their money's worth? I'm supposed to give a shit about some jerk-off sitting in the fifteenth row? I'm a hundred and thirty-nine pounds and five foot eight and a half, he's a hundred and forty-five and five foot ten, and I'm supposed to let the guy hit me in the head four, five, ten extra times in order to put on a show? Fuck the show.

After the fight Solly was not happy with Coleman's behavior. It struck him as juvenile. “You could have stopped the nigger in the fourth round instead of the first and gave the people their money's worth. But you didn't. I ask you nicely, and you don't do what I ask you. Why's that, wise guy?”

“Because I don't carry no nigger.” That's what he said, the classics major from NYU and valedictorian son of the late optician, dining car waiter, amateur linguist, grammarian, disciplinarian, and student of Shakespeare Clarence Silk. That's how obstinate he was, that's how secretive he was — no matter what he undertook, that's how much he meant business, this colored kid from East Orange High.

He stopped fighting because of Steena. However mistaken he was about the ominous meaning hidden in her poem, he remained convinced that the mysterious forces that made their sexual ardor inexhaustible — that transformed them into lovers so unbridled that Steena, in a neophyte's distillation of self-marveling self-mockery, midwesternly labeled them “two mental cases”—would one day work to dissolve his story of himself right before her eyes. How this would happen he did not know, and how he could forestall it he did not know. But the boxing wasn't going to help. Once she found out about Silky Silk, questions would be raised that would inevitably lead her to stumble on the truth. She knew that he had a mother in East Orange who was a registered nurse and a regular churchgoer, that he had an older brother who'd begun teaching seventh and eighth grades in Asbury Park and a sister finishing up for her teaching certificate from Montclair State, and that once each month the Sunday in his Sullivan Street bed had to be cut short because Coleman was expected in East Orange for dinner. She knew that his father had been an optician — just that, an optician — and even that he'd come originally from Georgia. Coleman was scrupulous in seeing that she had no reason to doubt the truth of whatever she was told by him, and once he'd given up the boxing for good, he didn't even have to lie about that. He didn't lie to Steena about anything. All he did was to follow the instructions that Doc Chizner had given him the day they were driving up to West Point (and that already had gotten him through the navy): if nothing comes up, you don't bring it up.

His decision to invite her to East Orange for Sunday dinner, like all his other decisions now — even the decision at St. Nick's to silently say fuck you to Solly Tabak by taking out the other guy in the first round — was based on nobody's thinking but his own. It was close to two years since they'd met, Steena was twenty and he was twenty-four, and he could no longer envision himself walking down Eighth Street, let alone proceeding through life, without her. Her undriven, conventional daily demeanor in combination with the intensity of her weekend abandon — all of it subsumed by a physical incandescence, a girlish American flashbulb radiance that was practically voodooish in its power — had achieved a startling supremacy over a will as ruthlessly independent as Coleman's: she had not only severed him from boxing and the combative filial defiance encapsulated in being Silky Silk the undefeated welterweight pro, but had freed him from the desire for anyone else.

Yet he couldn't tell her he was colored. The words he heard himself having to speak were going to make everything sound worse than it was — make him sound worse than he was. And if he then left it to her to imagine his family, she was going to picture people wholly unlike what they were. Because she knew no Negroes, she would imagine the kind of Negroes she saw in the movies or knew from the radio or heard about in jokes. He realized by now that she was not prejudiced and that if only she were to meet Ernestine and Walt and his mother, she would recognize right off how conventional they were and how much they happened to have in common with the tiresome respectability she had herself been all too glad to leave behind in Fergus Falls. “Don't get me wrong — it's a lovely city,” she hastened to tell him, “it's a beautiful city. It's unusual, Fergus Falls, because it has the Otter Tail Lake just to the east, and not far from our house it has the Otter Tail River. And it's, I suppose, a little more sophisticated than other towns out there that size, because it's just south and to the east of Fargo-Moorhead, which is the college town in that section of the country.” Her father owned a hardware supply store and a small lumberyard. “An irrepressible, gigantic, amazing person, my father. Huge. Like a slab of ham. He drinks in one night an entire container of whatever alcohol you have around. I could never believe it. I still can't. He just keeps going. He gets a big gash in his calf muscle wrestling with a piece of machinery — he just leaves it there, he doesn't wash it. They tend to be like this, the Icelanders. Bulldozer types. What's interesting is his personality. Most astonishing person. My father in a conversation takes over the whole room. And he's not the only one. My Palsson grandparents, too. His father is that way. His mother is that way.” “Icelanders. I didn't even know you call them Icelanders. I didn't even know they were here. I don't know anything about Icelanders at all. When,” Coleman asked, “did they come to Minnesota?” She shrugged and laughed. “Good question. I'm going to say after the dinosaurs. That's what it seems like.” “And it's him you're escaping?” “I guess. Hard to be the daughter of that sort of feistiness. He kind of submerges you.” “And your mother? He submerges her?” “That's the Danish side of the family. That's the Rasmussens. No, she's unsubmergeable. My mother's too practical to be submerged. The characteristics of her family — and I don't think it's peculiar to that family, I think Danes are this way, and they're not too different from Norwegians in this way either — they're interested in objects. Objects. Tablecloths. Dishes. Vases. They talk endlessly about how much each object costs. My mother's father is like this too, my grandfather Rasmussen. Her whole family. They don't have any dreams in them. They don't have any unreality. Everything is made up of objects and what they cost and how much you can get them for. She goes into people's houses and examines all the objects and knows where they got half of them and tells them where they could have got them for less. And clothing. Each object of clothing. Same thing. Practicality. A bare-boned practicality about the whole bunch of them. Thrifty. Extremely thrifty. Clean. Extremely clean. She'll notice, when I come home from school, if I have one bit of ink under one fingernail from filling a fountain pen. When she's having guests on a Saturday evening, she sets the table Friday night at about five o'clock. It's there, every glass, every piece of silver. And then she throws a light gossamer thing over it so it won't get dust specks on it. Everything organized perfectly. And a fantastically good cook if you don't like any spices or salt or pepper. Or taste of any kind. So that's my parents. I can't get to the bottom with her particularly. On anything. It's all surface. She's organizing everything and my father's disorganizing everything, and so I got to be eighteen and graduated high school and came here. Since if I'd gone up to Moorhead or North Dakota State, I'd still have to be living at home, I said the heck with college and came to New York. And so here I am. Steena.”

That's how she explained who she was and where she came from and why she'd left. For him it was not going to be so simple. Afterward, he told himself. Afterward — that's when he could make his explanations and ask her to understand how he could not allow his prospects to be unjustly limited by so arbitrary a designation as race. If she was calm enough to hear him out, he was sure he could make her see why he had chosen to take the future into his own hands rather than to leave it to an unenlightened society to determine his fate — a society in which, more than eighty years after the Emancipation Proclamation, bigots happened to play too large a role to suit him. He would get her to see that far from there being anything wrong with his decision to identify himself as white, it was the most natural thing for someone with his outlook and temperament and skin color to have done. All he'd ever wanted, from earliest childhood on, was to be free: not black, not even white — just on his own and free. He meant to insult no one by his choice, nor was he trying to imitate anyone whom he took to be his superior, nor was he staging some sort of protest against his race or hers. He recognized that to conventional people for whom everything was ready-made and rigidly unalterable what he was doing would never look correct. But to dare to be nothing more than correct had never been his aim. The objective was for his fate to be determined not by the ignorant, hate-filled intentions of a hostile world but, to whatever degree humanly possible, by his own resolve. Why accept a life on any other terms?

This is what he would tell her. And wouldn't it all strike her as nonsense, like one big sales pitch of a pretentious lie? Unless she had first met his family — confronted head-on the fact that he was as much a Negro as they were, and that they were as unlike what she might imagine Negroes to be as he was — these words or any others would seem to her only another form of concealment. Until she sat down to dinner with Ernestine, Walt, and his mother, and they all took a turn over the course of a day at swapping reassuring banalities, whatever explanation he presented to her would sound like so much preening, self-glorifying, self-justifying baloney, high-flown, highfalutin talk whose falseness would shame him in her eyes no less than in his own. No, he couldn't speak this shit either. It was beneath him. If he wanted this girl for good, then it was boldness that was required now and not an elocutionary snow job, a la Clarence Silk.

In the week before the visit, though he didn't prepare anyone else, he readied himself in the same concentrated way he used to prepare mentally for a fight, and when they stepped off the train at the Brick Church Station that Sunday, he even summoned up the phrases that he always chanted semi-mystically in the seconds before the bell sounded: “The task, nothing but the task. At one with the task. Nothing else allowed in.” Only then, at the bell, breaking from his corner — or here, starting up the porch stairs to the front door — did he add the ordinary Joe's call to arms: “Go to work.”

The Silks had been in their one-family house since 1925, the year before Coleman was born. When they got there, the rest of the street was white, and the small frame house was sold to them by a couple who were mad at the people next door and so were determined to sell it to colored to spite them. But no one in the private houses ran because they'd moved in, and even if the Silks never socialized with their neighbors, everyone was agreeable on that stretch of street leading up toward the Episcopal rectory and church. Agreeable even though the rector, when he arrived some years earlier, had looked around, seen a fair number of Bajians and Barbadians, who were Church of England — many of them domestics working for East Orange's white rich, many of them island people who knew their place and sat at the back and thought they were accepted — leaned on his pulpit, and, before beginning the sermon on his first Sunday, said, “I see we have some colored families here. We'll have to do something about that.” After consulting with the seminary in New York, he had seen to it that various services and Sunday schools for the colored were conducted, outside basic church law, in the colored families' houses. Later, the swimming pool at the high school was shut down by the school superintendent so that the white kids wouldn't have to swim with the colored kids. A big swimming pool, used for swimming classes and a swimming team, a part of the physical education program for years, but since there were objections from some of the white kids' parents who were employers of the black kids' parents — the ones working as maids and housemen and chauffeurs and gardeners and yardmen — the pool was drained and covered over.

Within the four square miles of this residential flyspeck of a Jersey town of not quite seventy thousand people, as throughout the country during Coleman's youth, there existed these rigid distinctions between classes and races sanctified by the church and legitimized by the schools. Yet on the Silks' own modest tree-lined side street ordinary people needed not to be quite so responsible to God and the state as those whose vocation it was to maintain a human community, swimming pool and all, untainted by the impurities, and so the neighbors were on the whole friendly with the ultra-respectable, light-skinned Silks — Negroes, to be sure, but, in the words of one tolerant mother of a kindergarten playmate of Coleman's, “people of a very pleasing shade, rather like eggnog”—even to the point of borrowing a tool or a ladder or helping to figure out what was wrong with the car when it wouldn't start. The big apartment house at the corner remained all white until after the war. Then, in late 1945, when colored people began coming in at the Orange end of the street — the families of professional men mainly, of teachers, doctors, and dentists — there was a moving van outside the apartment building every day, and half the white tenants disappeared within months. But things soon settled down, and, though the landlord of the apartment building began renting to colored just in order to keep the place going, the whites who remained in the immediate neighborhood stayed around until they had a reason other than Negrophobia to leave.

Go to work. And he rang the doorbell and pushed open the front door and called, “We're here.”

Walt had been unable to make it up that day from Asbury Park but there, coming out of the kitchen and into the hallway, were his mother and Ernestine. And here, in their house, was his girl. She may or may not have been what they were expecting. Coleman's mother hadn't asked. Since he'd unilaterally made his decision to join the navy as a white man, she hardly dared ask him anything, for fear of what she might hear. She was prone now, outside the hospital — where she had at last become the first colored head floor nurse of a Newark hospital, and without help from Dr. Fensterman — to let Walt take charge of her life and of the family altogether. No, she hadn't asked anything about the girl, politely declined to know, and encouraged Ernestine not to inquire. Coleman, in turn, hadn't told anyone anything, and so, fair-complexioned as fair could be, and — with her matching blue handbag and pumps, in her cotton floral shirtwaist dress and her little white gloves and pillbox hat — as immaculately trim and correct as any girl alive and young in 1950, here was Steena Palsson, Iceland and Denmark's American progeny, of the bloodline going back to King Canute and beyond.

He had done it, got it his own way, and no one so much as flinched. Talk about the ability of the species to adapt. Nobody groped for words, nobody went silent, nor did anyone begin jabbering a mile a minute. Commonplaces, yes, cornballisms, you bet — generalities, truisms, clichés aplenty. Steena hadn't been raised along the banks of the Otter Tail River for nothing: if it was hackneyed, she knew how to say it. Chances were that if Coleman had gotten to blindfold the three women before introducing them and to keep them blindfolded throughout the day, their conversation would have had no weightier a meaning than it had while they smilingly looked one another right in the eye. Nor would it have embodied an intention other than the standard one: namely, I won't say anything you can possibly take offense with if you won't say anything I can take offense with. Respectability at any cost — that's where the Palssons and the Silks were one.

The point at which all three got addled was, strangely enough, while discussing Steena's height. True, she was five eleven, nearly three full inches taller than Coleman and six inches taller than either his sister or his mother. But Coleman's father had been six one and Walt was an inch and a half taller than that, so tallness in and of itself was nothing new to the family, even if, with Steena and Coleman, it was the woman who happened to be taller than the man. Yet those three inches of Steena's — the distance, say, from her hairline to her eyebrows — caused a careening conversation about physical anomalies to veer precipitously close to disaster for some fifteen minutes before Coleman smelled something acrid and the women — the three of them — rushed for the kitchen to save the biscuits from going up in flames.

After that, throughout dinner and until it was time for the young couple to return to New York, it was all unflagging rectitude, externally a Sunday like every nice family's dream of total Sunday happiness and, consequently, strikingly in contrast with life, which, as experience had already taught even the youngest of these four, could not for half a minute running be purged of its inherent instability, let alone be beaten down into a predictable essence.

Not until the train carrying Coleman and Steena back to New York pulled into Pennsylvania Station early that evening did Steena break down in tears.

As far as he knew, until then she had been fast asleep with her head on his shoulder all the way from Jersey — virtually from the moment they had boarded at Brick Church Station sleeping off the exhaustion of the afternoon's effort at which she had so excelled.

“Steena — what is wrong?”

“I can't do it!” she cried, and, without another word of explanation, gasping, violently weeping, clutching her bag to her chest — and forgetting her hat, which was in his lap, where he'd been holding it while she slept — she raced alone from the train as though from an attacker and did not phone him or try ever to see him again.

It was four years later, in 1954, that they nearly collided outside Grand Central Station and stopped to take each other's hand and to talk just long enough to stir up the original wonder they'd awakened in each other at twenty-two and eighteen and then to walk on, crushed by the certainty that nothing as statistically spectacular as this chance meeting could possibly happen again. He was married by then, an expectant father, in the city for the day from his job as a classics instructor at Adelphi, and she was working in an ad agency down the street on Lexington Avenue, still single, still pretty, but womanly now, very much a smartly dressed New Yorker and clearly someone with whom the trip to East Orange might have ended on a different note if only it had taken place further down the line.

The way it might have ended — the conclusion against which reality had decisively voted — was all he could think about. Stunned by how little he'd gotten over her and she'd gotten over him, he walked away understanding, as outside his reading in classical Greek drama he'd never had to understand before, how easily life can be one thing rather than another and how accidentally a destiny is made ... on the other hand, how accidental fate may seem when things can never turn out other than they do. That is, he walked away understanding nothing, knowing he could understand nothing, though with the illusion that he would have metaphysically understood something of enormous importance about this stubborn determination of his to become his own man if ... if only such things were understandable.

The charming two-page letter she sent the next week, care of the college, about how incredibly good he'd been at “swooping” their first time together in his Sullivan Street room—“swooping, almost like birds do when they fly over land or sea and spy something moving, something bursting with life, and dive down ... and seize upon it”—began, “Dear Coleman, I was very happy to see you in New York. Brief as our meeting was, after I saw you I felt an autumnal sadness, perhaps because the six years since we first met make it wrenchingly obvious how many days of my life are ‘over.’ You look very good, and I'm glad you're happy...” and ended in a languid, floating finale of seven little sentences and a wistful closing that, after numerous rereadings, he took as the measure of her regret for her loss, a veiled admission of remorse as well, poignantly signaling to him a subaudible apology: “Well, that's it. That's enough. I shouldn't even bother you. I promise I won't ever again. Take care. Take care. Take care. Very fondly, Steena.”

He never threw the letter away, and when he happened upon it in his files and, in the midst of whatever else he was doing, paused to look it over — having otherwise forgotten it for some five or six years — he thought what he thought out on the street that day after lightly kissing her cheek and saying goodbye to Steena forever: that had she married him — as he'd wanted her to — she would have known everything — as he had wanted her to — and what followed with his family, with hers, with their own children, would have been different from what it was with Iris. What happened with his mother and Walt could as easily never have occurred. Had Steena said fine, he would have lived another life.

I can't do it. There was wisdom in that, an awful lot of wisdom for a young girl, not the kind one ordinarily has at only twenty. But that's why he'd fallen for her — because she had the wisdom that is solid, thinking-for-yourself common sense. If she hadn't ... but if she hadn't, she wouldn't have been Steena, and he wouldn't have wanted her as a wife.

He thought the same useless thoughts — useless to a man of no great talent like himself, if not to Sophocles: how accidentally a fate is made ... or how accidental it all may seem when it is inescapable.

As she first portrayed herself and her origins to Coleman, Iris Gittelman had grown up willful, clever, furtively rebellious — secretly plotting, from the second grade on, how to escape her oppressive surroundings — in a Passaic household rumbling with hatred for every form of social oppression, particularly the authority of the rabbis and their impinging lies. Her Yiddish-speaking father, as she characterized him, was such a thoroughgoing heretical anarchist that he hadn't even had Iris's two older brothers circumcised, nor had her parents bothered to acquire a marriage license or to submit to a civil ceremony. They considered themselves husband and wife, claimed to be American, even called themselves Jews, these two uneducated immigrant atheists who spat on the ground when a rabbi walked by. But they called themselves what they called themselves freely, without asking permission or seeking approval from what her father contemptuously described as the hypocritical enemies of everything that was natural and good — namely, officialdom, those illegitimately holding the power. On the cracking, filth-caked wall over the soda fountain of the family candy store on Myrtle Avenue — a cluttered shop so small, she said, “you couldn't bury the five of us there side by side”—hung two framed pictures, one of Sacco, the other of Vanzetti, photographs torn from the rotogravure section of the newspaper. Every August 22 — the anniversary of the day in 1927 when Massachusetts executed the two anarchists for murders Iris and her brothers were taught to believe neither man had committed — business was suspended and the family retreated upstairs to the tiny, dim apartment whose lunatic disorder exceeded even the store's, so as to observe a day of fasting. This was a ritual Iris's father had, like a cult leader, dreamed up all on his own, modeling it wackily on the Jewish Day of Atonement. Her father had no real ideas about what he thought of as ideas — all that ran deep was desperate ignorance and the bitter hopelessness of dispossession, the impotent revolutionary hatred. Everything was said with a clenched fist, and everything was a harangue. He knew the names Kropotkin and Bakunin, but nothing of their writings, and the anarchist Yiddish weekly Freie Arbeiter Stimme, which he was always carrying around their apartment, he rarely read more than a few words of each night before dropping off to sleep. Her parents, she explained to Coleman — and all this dramatically, scandalously dramatically, in a Bleecker Street cafe minutes after he had picked her up in Washington Square — her parents were simple people in the grips of a pipe dream that they could not begin to articulate or rationally defend but for which they were zealously willing to sacrifice friends, relatives, business, the good will of neighbors, even their own sanity, even their children's sanity. They knew only what they had nothing in common with, which to Iris, the older she got, appeared to be everything. Society as it was constituted — its forces all in constant motion, the intricate underwebbing of interests stretched to its limit, the battle for advantage that is ongoing, the subjugation that is ongoing, the factional collisions and collusions, the shrewd jargon of morality, the benign despot that is convention, the unstable illusion of stability — society as it was made, always has been and must be made, was as foreign to them as was King Arthur's court to the Connecticut Yankee. And yet, this wasn't because they'd been bound by the strongest ties to some other time and place and then forcefully set down in a wholly alien world: they were more like people who'd stepped directly into adulthood from the cradle, having had no intervening education in how human beastliness is run and ruled. Iris could not decide, from the time she was a tot, whether she was being raised by crackpots or visionaries, or whether the passionate loathing she was meant to share was a revelation of the awful truth or utterly ridiculous and possibly insane.

All that afternoon she told Coleman folklorishly enchanting stories that made having survived growing up above the Passaic candy store as the daughter of such vividly benighted individualists as Morris and Ethel Gittelman appear to have been a grim adventure not so much out of Russian literature as out of the Russian funny papers, as though the Gittelmans had been the deranged next-door neighbors in a Sunday comic strip called “The Karamazov Kids.” It was a strong, brilliant performance for a girl barely nineteen years old who had fled from Jersey across the Hudson — as who among his Village acquaintances wasn't fleeing, and from places as far away as Amarillo?—without any idea of being anything other than free, a new impoverished exotic on the Eighth Street stage, a theatrically big-featured, vivacious dark girl, emotionally a dynamic force and, in the parlance of the moment, “stacked,” a student uptown at the Art Students League who partly earned her scholarship there modeling for the life drawing classes, someone whose style was to hide nothing and who appeared to have no more fear of creating a stir in a public place than a belly dancer. Her head of hair was something, a labyrinthine, billowing wreath of spirals and ringlets, fuzzy as twine and large enough for use as Christmas ornamentation. All the disquiet of her childhood seemed to have passed into the convolutions of her sinuous thicket of hair. Her irreversible hair. You could polish pots with it and no more alter its construction than if it were harvested from the inky depths of the sea, some kind of wiry reef-building organism, a dense living onyx hybrid of coral and shrub, perhaps possessing medicinal properties.

For three hours she held Coleman entranced by her comedy, her outrage, her hair, and by her flair for manufacturing excitement, by a frenzied, untrained adolescent intellect and an actressy ability to enkindle herself and believe her every exaggeration that made Coleman — a cunning self-concoction if ever there was one, a product on which no one but he held a patent — feel by comparison like somebody with no conception of himself at all.

But when he got her back to Sullivan Street that evening, everything changed. It turned out that she had no idea in the world who she was. Once you'd made your way past the hair, all she was was molten. The antithesis of the arrow aimed at life who was twenty-five-year-old Coleman Silk — a self-freedom fighter too, but the agitated version, the anarchist version, of someone wanting to find her way.

It wouldn't have fazed her for five minutes to learn that he had been born and raised in a colored family and identified himself as a Negro nearly all his life, nor would she have been burdened in the slightest by keeping that secret for him if it was what he'd asked her to do. A tolerance for the unusual was not one of Iris Gittelman's deficiencies — unusual to her was what most conformed to the standards of legitimacy. To be two men instead of one? To be two colors instead of one? To walk the streets incognito or in disguise, to be neither this nor that but something in between? To be possessed of a double or a triple or a quadruple personality? To her there was nothing frightening about such seeming deformities. Iris's open-mindedness wasn't even a moral quality of the sort liberals and libertarians pride themselves on; it was more on the order of a mania, the cracked antithesis of bigotry. The expectations indispensable to most people, the assumption of meaning, the confidence in authority, the sanctification of coherence and order, struck her as nothing else in life did — as nonsensical, as totally nuts. Why would things happen as they do and history read as it does if inherent to existence was something called normalcy?

And yet, what he told Iris was that he was Jewish, Silk being an Ellis Island attenuation of Silberzweig, imposed on his father by a charitable customs official. He even bore the biblical mark of circumcision, as not many of his East Orange Negro friends did in that era. His mother, working as a nurse at a hospital staffed predominantly by Jewish doctors, was convinced by burgeoning medical opinion of the significant hygienic benefits of circumcision, and so the Silks had arranged for the rite that was traditional among Jews — and that was beginning, back then, to be elected as a postnatal surgical procedure by an increasing number of Gentile parents — to be performed by a doctor on each of their infant boys in the second week of life.

Coleman had been allowing that he was Jewish for several years now — or letting people think so if they chose to — since coming to realize that at NYU as in his cafe hangouts, many people he knew seemed to have been assuming he was a Jew all along. What he'd learned in the navy is that all you have to do is give a pretty good and consistent line about yourself and nobody ever inquires, because no one's that interested. His NYU and Village acquaintances could as easily have surmised — as buddies of his had in the service — that he was of Middle Eastern descent, but as this was a moment when Jewish self-infatuation was at a postwar pinnacle among the Washington Square intellectual avant-garde, when the aggrandizing appetite driving their Jewish mental audacity was beginning to look to be uncontrollable and an aura of cultural significance emanated as much from their jokes and their family anecdotes, from their laughter and their clowning and their wisecracks and their arguments — even from their insults — as from Commentary, Midstream, and the Partisan Review, who was he not to go along for the ride, especially as his high school years assisting Doc Chizner as a boxing instructor of Essex County Jewish kids made claiming a New Jersey Jewish boyhood not so laden with pitfalls as pretending to being a U.S. sailor with Syrian or Lebanese roots. Taking on the ersatz prestige of an aggressively thinking, self-analytic, irreverent American Jew reveling in the ironies of the marginal Manhattan existence turned out to be nothing like so reckless as it might have seemed had he spent years dreaming up and elaborating the disguise on his own, and yet, pleasurably enough, it felt spectacularly reckless — and when he remembered Dr. Fensterman, who'd offered his family three thousand dollars for Coleman to take a dive on his final exams so as to make brilliant Bert the class valedictorian, it struck him as spectacularly comical too, a colossal sui generis score-settling joke. What a great all-encompassing idea the world had had to turn him into this — what sublimely earthly mischief! If ever there was a perfect one-of-a-kind creation — and hadn't singularity been his inmost ego-driven ambition all along?—it was this magical convergence into his father's Fensterman son.

No longer was he playing at something. With Iris — the churned-up, untamed, wholly un-Steena-like, non-Jewish Jewish Iris — as the medium through which to make himself anew, he'd finally got it right. He was no longer trying on and casting off, endlessly practicing and preparing to be. This was it, the solution, the secret to his secret, flavored with just a drop of the ridiculous — the redeeming, reassuring ridiculous, life's little contribution to every human decision.

As a heretofore unknown amalgam of the most unalike of America's historic undesirables, he now made sense.

There was an interlude, however. After Steena and before Iris there was a five-month interlude named Ellie Magee, a petite, shapely colored girl, tawny-skinned, lightly freckled across the nose and cheeks, in appearance not quite over the dividing line between adolescence and womanhood, who worked at the Village Door Shop on Sixth Avenue, excitedly selling shelving units for books and selling doors — doors on legs for desks and doors on legs for beds. The tired old Jewish guy who owned the place said that hiring Ellie had increased his business by fifty percent. “I had nothing going here,” he told Coleman. “Eking out a living. But now every guy in the Village wants a door for a desk. People come in, they don't ask for me — they ask for Ellie. They call on the phone, they want to talk to Ellie. This little gal has changed everything.” It was true, nobody could resist her, including Coleman, who was struck, first, by her legs up on high heels and then with all her naturalness. Goes out with white NYU guys who are drawn to her, goes out with colored NYU guys who are drawn to her — a sparkling twenty-three-year-old kid, as yet wounded by nothing, who has moved to the Village from Yonkers, where she grew up, and is living the unconventional life with a small u, the Village life as advertised. She is a find, and so Coleman goes in to buy a desk he doesn't need and that night takes her for a drink. After Steena and the shock of losing someone he'd so much wanted, he is having a good time again, he's alive again, and all this from the moment they start flirting in the store. Does she think he's a white guy in the store? He doesn't know. Interesting. Then that evening she laughs and, comically squinting at him, says, “What are you anyway?” Right out she spots something and goes ahead and says it. But now the sweat is not pouring off him as it did when he misread Steena's poem. “What am I? Play it any way you like,” Coleman says. “Is that the way you play it?” she asks. “Of course that's the way I play it,” he says. “So white girls think you're white?” “Whatever they think,” he says, “I let them think.” “And whatever I think?” Ellie asks. “Same deal,” Coleman says. That's the little game they play, and that becomes the excitement for them, playing the ambiguity of it. He's not that close to anybody particularly, but the guys he knows from school think he's taking out a colored girl, and her friends all think she's going around with a white guy. There's some real fun in having other people find them important, and most everywhere they go, people do. It's 1951. Guys ask Coleman, “What's she like?” “Hot,” he says, drawing the word out while floppily wiggling one hand the way the Italians did back in East Orange. There's a day-to-day, second-to-second kick in all this, a little movie-star magnitude to his life now: he's always in a scene when he's out with Ellie. Nobody on Eighth Street knows what the hell is going on, and he enjoys that. She's got the legs. She laughs all the time. She's a woman in a natural way — full of ease and a lively innocence that's enchanting to him. Something like Steena, except she's not white, with the result that they don't go rushing off to visit his family and they don't go visiting hers. Why should they? They live in the Village. Taking her to East Orange doesn't even occur to him. Maybe it's because he doesn't want to hear the sigh of relief, to be told, even wordlessly, that he's doing the right thing. He thinks about his motivation for bringing Steena home. To be honest with everyone? And what did that achieve? No, no families — not for now anyway.

Meanwhile, he so enjoys being with her that one night the truth just comes bubbling out. Even about his being a boxer, which he could never tell Steena. It's so easy to tell Ellie. That she's not disapproving gives her another boost up in his estimation. She's not conventional — and yet so sound. He is dealing with someone utterly unnarrow-minded. The splendid girl wants to hear it all. And so he talks, and without restraints he is an extraordinary talker, and Ellie is enthralled. He tells her about the navy. He tells her about his family, which turns out to be a family not much different from hers, except that her father, a pharmacist with a drugstore in Harlem, is living, and though he isn't happy about her having moved to the Village, fortunately for Ellie he can't stop himself from adoring her. Coleman tells her about Howard and how he couldn't stand the place. They talk a lot about Howard because that was where her parents had wanted her to go too. And always, whatever they're talking about, he finds he is effortlessly making her laugh. “I'd never seen so many colored people before, not even in south Jersey at the family reunion. Howard University looked to me like just too many Negroes in one place. Of all persuasions, of every stripe, but I just did not want to be around them like that. Did not at all see what it had to do with me. Everything there was just so concentrated that any sort of pride I ever had was diminished. Completely diminished by a concentrated, false environment.” “Like a soda that's too sweet,” Ellie said. “Well,” he told her, “it's not so much that too much has been put in, it's that everything else has been taken out.” Talking openly with Ellie, Coleman finds all his relief. True, he's not a hero anymore, but then he's not in any way a villain either. Yes, she's a contender, this one. Her transcendence into independence, her transformation into a Village girl, the way she handles her folks — she seems to have grown up the way you're supposed to be able to.

One evening she takes him around to a tiny Bleecker Street jewelry shop where the white guy who owns it makes beautiful things out of enamel. Just shopping the street, out looking, but when they leave she tells Coleman that the guy is black. “You're wrong,” Coleman tells her, “he can't be.” “Don't tell me that I'm wrong”—she laughs—“you're blind.” Another night, near midnight, she takes him to a bar on Hudson Street where painters congregate to drink. “See that one? The smoothie?” she says in a soft voice, inclining her head toward a good-looking white guy in his mid-twenties charming all the girls at the bar. “Him,” she says. “ No,” says Coleman, who's the one laughing now. “You're in Greenwich Village, Coleman Silk, the four freest square miles in America. There's one on every other block. You're so vain, you thought you'd dreamed it up yourself.” And if she knows of three — which she does, positively — there are ten, if not more. “From all over everywhere,” she says, “they make straight for Eighth Street. Just like you did from little East Orange.” “And,” he says, “I don't see it at all.” And that too makes them laugh, laugh and laugh and laugh because he is hopeless and cannot see it in others and because Ellie is his guide, pointing them out.

In the beginning, he luxuriates in the solution to his problem. Losing the secret, he feels like a boy again. The boy he'd been before he had the secret. A kind of imp again. He gets from all her naturalness the pleasure and ease of being natural himself. If you're going to be a knight and a hero, you're armored, and what he gets now is the pleasure of being unarmored. “You're a lucky man,” Elbe's boss tells him. “A lucky man,” he repeats, and means it. With Ellie the secret is no longer operative. It's not only that he can tell her everything and that he does, it's that if and when he wants to, he can now go home. He can deal with his brother, and the other way, he knows, he could never have. His mother and he can go on back and resume being as close and easygoing as they always were. And then he meets Iris, and that's it. It's been fun with Ellie, and it continues to be fun, but some dimension is missing. The whole thing lacks the ambition — it fails to feed that conception of himself that's been driving him all his life. Along comes Iris and he's back in the ring. His father had said to him, “Now you can retire undefeated. You're retired.” But here he comes roaring out of his corner — he has the secret again. And the gift to be secretive again, which is hard to come by. Maybe there are a dozen more guys like him hanging around the Village. But not just everybody has that gift. That is, they have it, but in petty ways: they simply lie all the time. They're not secretive in the grand and elaborate way that Coleman is. He's back on the trajectory outward. He's got the elixir of the secret, and it's like being fluent in another language — it's being somewhere that is constantly fresh to you. He's lived without it, it was fine, nothing horrible happened, it wasn't objectionable. It was fun. Innocent fun. But insufficiently everything else. Sure, he'd regained his innocence. Ellie gave him that all right. But what use is innocence? Iris gives more. She raises everything to another pitch. Iris gives him back his life on the scale he wants to live it.

Two years after they met, they decided to get married, and that was when, for this license he'd taken, this freedom he'd sounded, the choices he had dared to make — and could he really have been any more artful or clever in arriving at an actable self big enough to house his ambition and formidable enough to take on the world?—the first large payment was exacted.

Coleman went over to East Orange to see his mother. Mrs. Silk did not know of Iris Gittelman's existence, though she wasn't at all surprised when he told her that he was going to get married and that the girl was white. She wasn't even surprised when he told her that the girl didn't know he was colored. If anyone was surprised, it was Coleman, who, having openly declared his intention, all at once wondered if this entire decision, the most monumental of his life, wasn't based on the least serious thing imaginable: Iris's hair, that sinuous thicket of hair that was far more Negroid than Coleman's — more like Ernestine's hair than his. As a little girl, Ernestine was famous for asking, “Why don't I have blow hair like Mommy?”—meaning, why didn't her hair blow in the breeze, not only like her mother's but like the hair of all the women on the maternal side of the family.

In the face of his mother's anguish, there floated through Coleman the eerie, crazy fear that all that he had ever wanted from Iris Gittelman was the explanation her appearance could provide for the texture of their children's hair.

But how could a motive as bluntly, as dazzlingly utilitarian as that have escaped his attention till now? Because it wasn't in any way true? Seeing his mother suffering like this — inwardly shaken by his own behavior and yet resolved, as Coleman always was, to carry through to the finish — how could this startling idea seem to him anything other than true? Even as he remained seated across from his mother in what appeared to be a state of perfect self-control, he had the definite impression that he had just chosen a wife for the stupidest reason in the world and that he was the emptiest of men.

“And she believes your parents are dead, Coleman. That's what you told her.”

“That's right.”

“You have no brother, you have no sister. There is no Ernestine. There is no Walt.”

He nodded.

“And? What else did you tell her?”

“What else do you think I told her?”

“Whatever it suited you to tell her.” That was as harsh as she got all afternoon. Her capacity for anger never had been and never would be able to extend to him. The mere sight of him, from the moment of his birth, stimulated feelings against which she had no defenses and that had nothing to do with what he was worthy of. “I'm never going to know my grandchildren,” she said.

He had prepared himself. The important thing was to forget about Iris's hair and let her speak, let her find her fluency and, from the soft streaming of her own words, create for him his apologia.

“You're never going to let them see me,” she said. “You're never going to let them know who I am. ‘Mom,’ you'll tell me, 'Ma, you come to the railroad station in New York, and you sit on the bench in the waiting room, and at eleven twenty-five A.M., I'll walk by with my kids in their Sunday best.' That'll be my birthday present five years from now. 'Sit there, Mom, say nothing, and I'll just walk them slowly by' And you know very well that I will be there. The railroad station. The zoo. Central Park. Wherever you say, of course I'll do it. You tell me the only way I can ever touch my grandchildren is for you to hire me to come over as Mrs. Brown to baby-sit and put them to bed, I'll do it. Tell me to come over as Mrs. Brown to clean your house, I'll do that. Sure I'll do what you tell me. I have no choice.”

“Don't you?”

“A choice? Yes? What is my choice, Coleman?”

“To disown me.”

Almost mockingly, she pretended to give that idea some thought. “I suppose I could be that ruthless with you. Yes, that's possible, I suppose. But where do you think I'm going to find the strength to be that ruthless with myself?”

It was not a moment for him to be recalling his childhood. It was not a moment for him to be admiring her lucidity or her sarcasm or her courage. It was not a moment to allow himself to be subjugated by the all-but-pathological phenomenon of mother love. It was not a moment for him to be hearing all the words that she was not saying but that were sounded more tellingly even than what she did say. It was not a moment to think thoughts other than the thoughts he'd come armed with. It was certainly not a moment to resort to explanations, to start brilliantly toting up the advantages and the disadvantages and pretend that this was no more than a logical decision. There was no explanation that could begin to address the outrage of what he was doing to her. It was a moment to deepen his focus on what he was there to achieve. If disowning him was a choice foreclosed to her, then taking the blow was all she could do. Speak quietly, say little, forget Iris's hair, and, for however long is required, let her continue to employ her words to absorb into her being the brutality of the most brutal thing he had ever done.

He was murdering her. You don't have to murder your father. The world will do that for you. There are plenty of forces out to get your father. The world will take care of him, as it had indeed taken care of Mr. Silk. Who there is to murder is the mother, and that's what he saw he was doing to her, the boy who'd been loved as he'd been loved by this woman. Murdering her on behalf of his exhilarating notion of freedom! It would have been much easier without her. But only through this test can he be the man he has chosen to be, unalterably separated from what he was handed at birth, free to struggle at being free like any human being would wish to be free. To get that from life, the alternate destiny, on one's own terms, he must do what must be done. Don't most people want to walk out of the fucking lives they've been handed? But they don't, and that's what makes them them, and this was what was making him him. Throw the punch, do the damage, and forever lock the door. You can't do this to a wonderful mother who loves you unconditionally and has made you happy, you can't inflict this pain and then think you can go back on it. It's so awful that all you can do is live with it. Once you've done a thing like this, you have done so much violence it can never be undone — which is what Coleman wants. It's like that moment at West Point when the guy was going down. Only the referee could save him from what Coleman had it in him to do. Then as now, he was experiencing the power of it as a fighter. Because that is the test too, to give the brutality of the repudiation its real, unpardonable human meaning, to confront with all the realism and clarity possible the moment when your fate intersects with something enormous. This is his. This man and his mother. This woman and her beloved son. If, in the service of honing himself, he is out to do the hardest thing imaginable, this is it, short of stabbing her. This takes him right to the heart of the matter. This is the major act of his life, and vividly, consciously, he feels its immensity.

“I don't know why I'm not better prepared for this, Coleman. I should be,” she said. “You've been giving fair warning almost from the day you got here. You were seriously disinclined even to take the breast. Yes, you were. Now I see why. Even that might delay your escape. There was always something about our family, and I don't mean color — there was something about us that impeded you. You think like a prisoner. You do, Coleman Brutus. You're white as snow and you think like a slave.”

It was not a moment to give credence to her intelligence, to take even the most appealing turn of phrase as the embodiment of some special wisdom. It often happened that his mother could say something that made it sound as though she knew more than she did. The rational other side. That was what came of leaving the orating to his father and so seeming by comparison to say what counted.

“Now, I could tell you that there is no escape, that all your attempts to escape will only lead you back to where you began. That's what your father would tell you. And there'd be something in Julius Caesar to back him up. But for a young man like you, whom everybody falls for? A good-looking, charming, clever young fellow with your physique, your determination, your shrewdness, with all your wonderful gifts? You with your green eyes and your long dark lashes? Why, this should cause you no trouble at all. I expect coming to see me is about as hard as it's going to get, and look how calmly you're sitting here. And that is because you know what you're doing makes great sense. I know it makes sense, because you would not pursue a goal that didn't. Of course you will have disappointments. Of course little is going to turn out as you imagine it, sitting so calmly across from me. Your special destiny will be special all right — but how? Twenty-six years old — you can't begin to know. But wouldn't the same be true if you did nothing? I suppose any profound change in life involves saying 'I don't know you' to someone.”

She went on for nearly two hours, a long speech about his autonomy dating back to infancy, expertly taking in the pain by delineating all she was up against and couldn't hope to oppose and would have to endure, during which Coleman did all he could not to notice — in the simplest things, like the thinning of her hair (his mother's hair, not Iris's hair) and the jutting of her head, the swelling of her ankles, the bloating of her belly, the exaggerated splay of her large teeth — how much further along toward her death she'd been drawn since the Sunday three years back when she'd done everything gracious she could to put Steena at her ease. At some point midway through the afternoon, she seemed to Coleman to step up to the very edge of the big change: the point of turning, as the elderly do, into a tiny, misshapen being. The longer she talked, the more he believed he was seeing this happen. He tried not to think about the disease that would kill her, about the funeral they would give her, about the tributes that would be read and the prayers offered up at the side of her grave. But then he tried not to think about her going on living either, of his leaving and her being here and alive, the years passing and her thinking about him and his children and his wife, more years passing and the connection between the two of them only growing stronger for her because of its denial.

Neither his mother's longevity nor her mortality could be allowed to have any bearing on what he was doing, nor could the struggles her family had been through in Lawnside, where she'd been born in a dilapidated shack and lived with her parents and four brothers until her father died when she was seven. Her father's people had been in Lawnside, New Jersey, since 1855. They were runaway slaves, brought north on the Underground Railroad from Maryland and into southwest Jersey by the Quakers. The Negroes first called the place Free Haven. No whites lived there then, and only a handful did now, out on the fringes of a town of a couple of thousand where just about everybody was descended from runaway slaves whom the Haddonfield Quakers had protected — the mayor was descended from them, the fire chief, the police chief, the tax collector, the teachers in the grade school, the kids in the grade school. But the uniqueness of Lawnside as a Negro town had no bearing on anything either. Nor did the uniqueness of Gouldtown, farther south in Jersey, down by Cape May. That's where her mother's people were from, and that's where the family went to live after the death of her father. Another settlement of colored people, many nearly white, including her own grandmother, everyone somehow related to everyone else. “Way, way back,” as she used to explain to Coleman when he was a boy — simplifying and condensing as best she could all the lore she'd ever heard — a slave was owned by a Continental Army soldier who'd been killed in the French and Indian War. The slave looked after the soldier's widow. He did everything, from dawn to dark didn't stop doing what needed to be done. He chopped and hauled the wood, gathered the crops, excavated and built a cabbage house and stowed the cabbages there, stored the pumpkins, buried the apples, turnips, and potatoes in the ground for winter, stacked the rye and wheat in the barn, slaughtered the pig, salted the pork, slaughtered the cow and corned the beef, until one day the widow married him and they had three sons. And those sons married Gouldtown girls whose families reached back to the settlement's origins in the 1600s, families that by the Revolution were all intermarried and thickly intermingled. One or another or all of them, she said, were descendants of the Indian from the large Lenape settlement at Indian Fields who married a Swede — locally Swedes and Finns had superseded the original Dutch settlers — and who had five children with her; one or another or all were descendants of the two mulatto brothers brought from the West Indies on a trading ship that sailed up the river from Greenwich to Bridgeton, where they were indentured to the landowners who had paid their passage and who themselves later paid the passage of two Dutch sisters to come from Holland to become their wives; one or another or all were descendants of the granddaughter of John Fenwick, an English baronet's son, a cavalry officer in Cromwell's Commonwealth army and a member of the Society of Friends who died in New Jersey not that many years after New Cesarea (the province lying between the Hudson and the Delaware that was deeded by the brother of the king of England to two English proprietors) became New Jersey. Fenwick died in 1683 and was buried somewhere in the personal colony he purchased, founded, and governed, and which stretched north of Bridgeton to Salem and south and east to the Delaware.

Fenwick's nineteen-year-old granddaughter, Elizabeth Adams, married a colored man, Gould. “That black that hath been the ruin of her” was her grandfather's description of Gould in the will from which he excluded Elizabeth from any share of his estate until such time as “the Lord open her eyes to see her abominable transgression against Him.” As the story had it, only one son of the five sons of Gould and Elizabeth survived to maturity, and he was Benjamin Gould, who married a Finn, Ann. Benjamin died in 1777, the year after the signing of the Declaration of Independence across the Delaware in Philadelphia, leaving a daughter, Sarah, and four sons, Anthony, Samuel, Abijah, and Elisha, from whom Gouldtown took its name.

Through his mother, Coleman learned the maze of family history going back to the days of aristocratic John Fenwick, who was to that southwestern region of New Jersey what William Penn was to the part of Pennsylvania that encompassed Philadelphia — and from whom it sometimes seemed all of Gouldtown had descended — and then he heard it again, though never the same in all its details, from great-aunts and great-uncles, from great-grear-aunts and -uncles, some of them people close to a hundred, when, as children, he, Walt, and Ernestine went with their parents down to Gouldtown for the annual reunion — almost two hundred relatives from southwest Jersey, from Philadelphia, from Atlantic City, from as far off as Boston, eating fried bluefish, stewed chicken, fried chicken, homemade ice cream, sugared peaches, pies, and cakes — eating favorite family dishes and playing baseball and singing songs and reminiscing all day long, telling stories about the women way back spinning and knitting, boiling fat pork and baking huge breads for the men to take to the fields, making the clothes, drawing the water from the well, administering medicines obtained mainly from the woods, herb infusions to treat measles, the syrups of molasses and onions to counter whooping cough. Stories about family women who kept a dairy making fine cheeses, about women who went to the city of Philadelphia to become housekeepers, dressmakers, and schoolteachers, and about women at home of remarkable hospitality. Stories about the men in the woods, trapping and shooting the winter game for meat, about the farmers plowing the fields, cutting the cordwood and the rails for fences, buying, selling, slaughtering the cattle, and the prosperous ones, the dealers, selling tons of salt hay for packing to the Trenton pottery works, hay cut from the salt marsh they owned along the bay and river shores. Stories about the men who left the woods, the farm, the marsh, and the cedar swamp to serve — some as white soldiers, some as black — in the Civil War. Stories about men who went to sea to become blockade runners and who went to Philadelphia to become undertakers, printers, barbers, electricians, cigar makers, and ministers in the African Methodist Episcopal Church — one who went to Cuba to ride with Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders, and a few men who got in trouble, ran away, and never came back. Stories about family children like themselves, often dressed poorly, without shoes sometimes or coats, asleep on winter nights in the freezing rooms of simple houses, in the heat of summer pitching, loading, and hauling hay with the men, but taught manners by their parents, and catechized in the schoolhouse by the Presbyterians — where they also learned to spell and read — and always eating all they wanted, even in those days, of pork and potatoes and bread and molasses and game, and growing up strong and healthy and honest.

But one no more decides not to become a boxer because of the history of Lawnside's runaway slaves, the abundance of everything at the Gouldtown reunions, and the intricacy of the family's American genealogy — or not to become a teacher of classics because of the history of Lawnside's runaway slaves, the abundance of the Gouldtown reunions, and the intricacy of the family's American genealogy — than one decides not to become anything else for such reasons. Many things vanish out of a family's life. Lawnside is one, Gouldtown another, genealogy a third, and Coleman Silk was a fourth.

Over these last fifty years or more, he was not the first child, either, who'd heard about the harvesting of the salt hay for the Trenton pottery works or eaten fried bluefish and sugared peaches at the Gouldtown reunions and grown up to vanish like this — to vanish, as they used to say in the family, “till all trace of him was lost.” “Lost himself to all his people” was another way they put it.

Ancestor worship — that's how Coleman put it. Honoring the past was one thing — the idolatry that is ancestor worship was something else. The hell with that imprisonment.

That night after coming back to the Village from East Orange, Coleman got a call from his brother in Asbury Park that took things further faster than he had planned. “Don't you ever come around her,” Walt warned him, and his voice was resonant with something barely suppressed — all the more frightening for being suppressed — that Coleman hadn't heard since his father's time. There's another force in that family, pushing him now all the way over on the other side. The act was committed in 1953 by an audacious young man in Greenwich Village, by a specific person in a specific place at a specific time, but now he will be over on the other side forever. Yet that, as he discovers, is exactly the point: freedom is dangerous. Freedom is very dangerous. And nothing is on your own terms for long. “Don't you even try to see her. No contact. No calls. Nothing. Never. Hear me?” Walt said. “Never. Don't you dare ever show your lily-white face around that house again!”