The Human Stain

“Thrown out of a Norfolk whorehouse for being black, thrown out of Athena College for being white.”

Coleman mutters this line, and it is the first mention of Coleman’s race. It offers the suggestion that he was considered anything other than a white man at times in his life. It also suggests the fluctuating nature of identity.

“A tiny symbol, if one were needed, of all the million circumstances of the other fellow’s life, of that blizzard of details that constitute the confusion of a human biography—a tiny symbol to remind me why our understanding of people must always be at best slightly wrong.”

Nathan thinks these lines after seeing Coleman’s US Navy tattoo. Appearing so early on in the novel, it can be taken as a hint that Nathan is an unreliable narrator and that his understanding of Coleman will inevitably be wrong.

“Everyone knows you’re sexually exploiting an abused, illiterate woman half your age.”

This is the note that Delphine writes to Coleman, although she mails it anonymously. It is intended to shame Coleman, but it just ignites his righteous indignation at once again being accused of a crime he does not believe he is committing.

“Coleman Silk danced me right back into life.”

Nathan thinks this line while reflecting on how his friendship with Coleman has helped Nathan reconnect with other people and come out of his isolated lifestyle. It is a whimsical play on words, since they literally dance the fox trot on Coleman’s porch one Saturday night.

“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.’”

Coleman expresses his outrage at Nelson Primus, who has attempted to lecture Coleman on the dangers of continuing his affair with Faunia Farley. His choice of the phrase “lily-white” confuses Nelson. At the end of the chapter, Walt, Coleman’s brother, uses the same phrase, in a flashback scene, to disown Coleman, after Coleman decides to live as a white man.

“‘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.’”

This is a portion of Coleman’s conversation with Doc Chizner, just before Coleman passes as a white youth in a boxing match. It shows the encouragement a mentor in Coleman’s life gave him to pass.

“The power and pleasure were to be found in the opposite, in being counter confessional 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.”

Coleman feels power and pleasure after passing as white during the boxing match. He feels that he can avoid the injustices experienced by Black people by pretending to be white.

“It occurred first to his heart, which began banging away like the heart of someone on the brink of committing his first great crime.”

These lines occur just before Coleman declares his race as white on his US Navy enrollment forms. They help explain the excitement Coleman feels at getting away with something.

“‘Lost himself to all his people’ was another way they put it.”

These lines refer to other people in Coleman’s family who vanished from the family for various reasons. Coleman was not the first. These lines also suggest the many people who passed as white throughout American history to avoid prejudice and racist oppression.

“‘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!’”

Walt, Coleman’s brother, says these words to Coleman after Coleman breaks his mother’s heart. Coleman has just told his mother he is planning to marry Iris and never reveal his identity as a Black man, effectively disowning his mother and family.

“The sincere performance is everything.”

These words are part of a conversation between two unnamed male faculty members at Athena College. They are discussing the scandal involving President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, and the performance they refer to is Lewinsky’s. The argument is that she seems sincere and polite, but she is really empty and shallow, and it’s all a performance. The significance of performance comes up for many of the characters who pretend to be someone they are not.

“Where neither Nelson Primus nor his beloved Lisa nor even the cryptic denunciation anonymously dispatched by Delphine Roux had convinced him of anything, this scene of no great moment on the lawn […] exposed to him at last the underside of his own disgrace.”

Coleman sees Faunia lounging on the grass with some of her janitorial coworkers. He feels a deep sense of the social and intellectual gulf between them.

“Well, what he did with the kid who couldn’t read was to make her his mistress.”

Coleman compares the children his daughter, Lisa, teaches to Faunia. He imagines her as a helpless child because she is illiterate, and he feels that he has exploited her, just as Delphine accuses him of doing.

“I am a crow. I know it. I know it!”

Faunia thinks this as she lounges on the grass and stares at the crows. Coleman assumes she is thinking of her own suffering and abuse, yet Faunia is thinking about how she is a crow, and crows are easily able to fly away.

“Let him not underestimate her resolve: Nothing was more important to her than exposing Coleman Silk for what he was.”

Delphine is determined to expose Coleman for what she perceives him to be—a racist, sexist, abusive man. The certainty of her thoughts underscores the extent of her obsession with Coleman.

“There is now no way they will stop themselves in time. It’s done. I am not alone in listening to the music from the road.”

Nathan thinks these lines as he drives by Coleman’s house to check on him. The fatalistic tone comes from the fact that Nathan wrote these words after their deaths and knew how their stories, and lives, would end at the time of his writing.

“Nobody knows, Professor Roux…What we know is that, in an unclichéd ways, nobody knows anything. You can’t know anything. The things you know you don’t know. Intention? Motive? Consequence? Meaning? All that we don’t know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing.”

Nathan thinks these lines, and they provide a rich summary of the novel’s theme of knowing. All of the action of the plot drives toward this central idea that nobody truly knows anything, or at least everything, about anyone.

“For better or worse, I can only do what everyone does who thinks that they know. I imagine. I am forced to imagine. It happens to be what I do for a living. It is my job. It’s now all I do.”

Nathan, as a writer and as the unreliable narrator of the novel, admits that he does not know—he imagines. This admission throws everything in the novel into question, as it’s possible to see interpretations of events as a product of Nathan’s imagination.

“‘That’s what comes of being hand-raised,’ said Faunia. ‘That’s what comes of hanging around all his life with people like us. The human stain,’ she said, and without revulsion or contempt or condemnation. Not even with sadness.”

Faunia speaks these lines about Prince, the crow who cannot live in the wild with other crows. These lines express Faunia’s pessimism and her impassivity. She accepts that the negative impact of the human stain is inevitable.

“Be unclassifiable here, be something they cannot reconcile, and they torment you for it. That being unclassifiable is a part of her bildungsroman, that she has always thrived on being unclassifiable, nobody at Athena understands.”

Delphine thinks these lines, and they reveal how similar she is to Coleman. Coleman also thrived on being unclassifiable and undiscoverable to the people around him.

“Simply to make the accusation is to prove it. To hear the allegation is to believe it. No motive for the perpetrator is necessary, no logic or rationale is required. Only a label is required. The label is the motive. The label is the evidence. The label is the logic.”

Nathan thinks these lines as an indictment against the people who will inevitably believe the emailed obituary of Faunia. The constant theme throughout the novel is people’s need and willingness to believe anything, as long as it aligns with predetermined labels and identities.

“Most people inflate themselves and lie about accomplishments they have only dreamed of achieving; Faunia had lied about failing to reach proficiency at a skill so fundamental that, in a matter of a year or two, it is acquired at least crudely by nearly every schoolchild in the world.”

Nathan imagines why Faunia lied about being illiterate. He determines she lied to spice things up and do the opposite of what people expect.

“Once you set the thing in motion, your art was being a white man. Being, in your brother’s words, ‘more white than the whites.’ That was your singular act of invention: every day you woke up to be what you had made yourself.”

Nathan realizes that Coleman’s adult life has been a work of art. Coleman created his identity as a white man, and every day he made choices to keep that identity intact.