Not long into The Human Stain, the film released last year about Coleman Silk, a brilliant classics scholar at the end of a stellar career who is ostensibly brought down by a stubborn refusal to apologize for an unwitting but politically incorrect “racist” remark, we learn that Silk is himself a black man who has been passing for white for a half century. Adapted from Philip Roth’s book of the same name, The Human Stain’s extraordinary cast spins a complex and nuanced tale. Anthony Hopkins as Silk, the luminous Nicole Kidman as the unschooled and much-abused cleaning woman less than half his age with whom he finds not only passion but sustenance and comfort, Ed Harris as her damaged, jealous exhusband, Gary Sinise as his late-in-life friend and the teller of this story, and Anna Devere Smith as his mother, bring us a multifaceted drama of enormous emotional range, weaving together the threads of class conflict, the legacies of Vietnam, May-December sex and male friendship.

But it is the universal question of who we are, ferociously particularized in the story of a man who lied about his race to even his wife of more than 40 years, that raises a merely compelling story about the ordinary hubris of a self-righteous man to the level of tragedy. In the rapid disintegration of Silk’s life, our most cherished national myth – the idea that here in the “New World” we are freed from the constraints and circumstances of birth to invent and reinvent ourselves freely through what we accomplish— slams full force into the reality of race as it is lived in America. For what more defining, confining “circumstance of birth” than which side of the color line you happen to be born on is there in this country?

My father, James “Buster” Williams, was about a decade older than the fictional Coleman Silk. Like Silk a light-skinned black man, he too chose to pass. I believe that he saw it as a courageous choice –as not only the avoidance of pain, but also the affirmation of possibility – a choice to claim the American birthright. Of course many in addition to my father and Roth’s Coleman Silk knew that the American myth of self-invention did not include black Americans. Alain Locke, a Harvard graduate, the first black Rhodes Scholar, author of The New Negro which spearheaded the first Harlem Renaissance (as well as—in what to me is a lovely closing of a circle of possibility—a one-time visiting professor at The City College ofM New York), argued passionately throughout his long academic career for black pride and self-assertion. But replying to his former student’s letter informing him that he was going to “cross over,” Locke wrote my father:

“You certainly know that I would not ‘fall down’ on you…Do write and tell me the news – I hope you successfully crossed the line just the same. It makes you feel a little more distant – but I am still, as always, your sincere friend and wish you as ever all success
and happiness.”

“Buster” Williams was able to “cross the line” and pass for many years—but not for as long as Coleman Silk. He married a white woman and escaped the projects of Muncie, Indiana, to become a prosperous small business owner in Virginia, where he was thought to be Greek or
Italian. I spent the first decade of my life there, carefree in the security of middle-class white America. But my father wrestled with many demons, surely at least in part because of the wrenching split between his early life and his life of success, and he ultimately succumbed to the alcoholism that destroyed first his marriage and then his business.

In 1954, when I was ten years old, my world was turned completely upside down. Almost overnight I lost my mother and my home, every vestige of the good life, and my membership in white America. My father and younger brother and I moved back to the Indiana projects that he had earlier fled, and I crossed the color line.

We lived in poverty, at first accepted by neither the black nor the white community (though ultimately embraced by the black community). I am often asked—as are many who have overcome difficult circumstances— how I did it. In all cases, the answer to that question is a long and complicated one. But I am increasingly convinced that part of my answer lies in the fact that, until I was 10 years old, that great American mythology of unlimited possibility and self-invention belonged to me. Through his choice to live as white, my father gave me for those crucial early years what society surely would have withheld – a white boy’s birthright, the easy, unexamined assumption that with hard work I could do whatever I wanted with my life. When I “became colored,” I knew that it was not I who changed, but others’ expectations and definitions of who I was and who I could be. Although I had many days of doubt and discouragement,
I never fully accepted the limits imposed on me because of my race.

At a time when the American secretary of state and the CEO of American Express are black men, when identity politics delivers votes and wins elections, when powerful men and women of color take leadership positions in every imaginable profession and the great civil rights marches form part of our most admired history, it is tempting to think that Coleman Silk’s story— and my father’s—are relics of a time now past, and the reasons for the choice that made and then unmade them both no longer exist.

I do not believe that is so—although the relatively simplistic era of the “tragic mulatto” melodramas like Pinky (1948) and Imitation of Life
(1959) is indeed over. There is certainly less rigidity to America’s color line today; the choices open to men and women of color are less harsh and forbidding. But however much real progress has been made in the way race is lived in America, we only have to visit the projects and the barrios and the prisons to find men and women whose life possibilities were stunted before they even got started. The Human Stain gives the chance to wonder about why someone might choose to turn his back on everything that was dear to him in order to invent a new life. And that is a kind of a gift, too.