Think of the havoc he could create in their lives if their children were born recognizably Negro. So far he has been lucky, and that goes for the two grandchildren out in California. But think of his daughter, who isn't married yet. Suppose one day she has a white husband, as more than likely she will, and she gives birth to a Negroid child, as she can—as she may. How does she explain this? And what will her husband assume? He will assume that another man fathered her child. A black man at that. Mr. Zuckerman, it was frighteningly cruel for Coleman not to tell his children. That is not Walter's judgment—that is mine. If Coleman was intent on keeping his race his secret, then the price he should have paid was not to have children. And he knew that. He had to know that. Instead, he has planted an unexploded bomb. And that bomb seemed to me always in the background when he talked about them. Especially when he talked about, not the twin girl, but the twin boy, Mark, the boy he had all the trouble with. He said to me that Markie probably hated him for his own reasons, yet it was as though he had figured out the truth. 'I got there what I produced,' he said, 'even if for the wrong reason. Markie doesn't even have the luxury of hating his fa-ther for the real thing. I robbed him,' Coleman said, 'of that part of his birthright, too.' And I said, 'But he might not have hated you at all for that, Coleman.' And he said, 'You don't follow me. Not that he would have hated me for being black. That's not what I mean by the real thing. I mean that he would have hated me for never telling him and because he had a right to know.' And then, because there was so much there to be misunderstood, we just let the subject drop. But it was clear that he could never forget that there was a lie at the foundation of his relationship to his children, a terrible lie, and that Markie had intuited it, somehow understood that the children, who carried their father's identity in their genes and who would pass that identity on to their children, at least genetically, and perhaps even physically, tangibly, never had the complete knowledge of who they are and who they were. This is somewhat in the nature of speculation, but I sometimes think that Coleman saw Markie as the punishment for what he had done to his own mother. Though that," Ernestine added, scrupulously, "is not something he ever said. As for Walter, what I was getting at about Walter is that all he was trying to do was to fill our father's shoes by making sure that Mother's heart would not be broken time and again."
"And was it?" I asked.
"Mr. Zuckerman, there was no repairing it—ever. When she died in the hospital, when she was delirious, do you know what she was saying? She kept calling for the nurse the way the sick patients used to call for her. 'Oh, nurse,' she said, 'oh, nurse—get me to the train. I got a sick baby at home.' Over and over, 'I got a sick baby at home.' Sitting there beside her bed, holding her hand and watching her die, I knew who that sick baby was. So did Walter know. It was Coleman. Whether she would have been better off had Walt not interfered the way he did by banishing Coleman forever like that... well, I still hesitate to say. But Walter's special talent as a man is his decisiveness. That was Coleman's as well. Ours is a family of decisive men. Daddy had it, and so did his father, who was a Methodist minister down in Georgia. These men make up their minds, and that's it. Well, there was a price to pay for their decisiveness. One thing is clear, however. And I realized that today. And I wish my parents could know it. We are a family of educators. Beginning with my paternal grandmother. As a young slave girl, taught to read by her mistress, then, after Emancipation, went to what was then called Georgia State Normal and Industrial School for Colored.
That's how it began, and that's what we have turned out to be. And that is what I realized when I saw Coleman's children. All but one of them teachers. And all of us—Walt, Coleman, me, all of us teachers as well. My own son is another story. He did not finish college. We had some disagreements, and now he has a significant other, as the expression goes, and we have our disagreement about that. I should tell you that there were no colored teachers in the white Asbury Park school system when Walter arrived there in '47. You have to remember, he was the first. And subsequently their first Negro principal.
And subsequently their first Negro superintendent of schools.
That tells you something about Walt. There was already a well-established colored community, but it was not till Walter got there in
