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, 'i. 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
