Mat Johnson - Pym

“I have a shared associate with your husband. Arthur Pym?” Searching frantically for some way to authenticate Poe’s presence, Peters glanced into the room beyond and looking at the small table spied pages with his own distinctive binding and handwriting. Charging into the room, Dirk Peters quickly explained himself to a shocked Virginia, “See, I sent your husband a business proposal, for him to do the telling on my own tale.” To his surprise, grabbing the pile of papers and waving them at her did nothing to improve the situation.

“Edgar doesn’t like Negroes,” she blurted out. Dirk Peters was not put off by this, for aside from himself, he didn’t care much for Negroes either. But then Virginia told Peters what bar she thought her husband might be in. Peters left with a bounce in his step, perceiving a victory in having proven his character to the woman. Wrongly.

My feet were hurting, fierce, when I come to the public house that was suggested. I figure I will have a drink, regardless. At the bar I see him, him that was in daguerreotype at the house. At first I wondered, because he was wearing his coat inside out and showing the stitching, though he don’t seem to know this. But still I am very happy to see Mr. Poe. He sits at the table deep in his cups, a fellow about the same build as I. I approach him with my widest grin, hands at my sides, explain myself and my business. What he says back to me is “Who is your master?” To this I tell him again who I am and that I have no master. Mr. Poe, who is Mr. Poe because I asked him and he told me so, he says, “Off with you, boy.” I says again, I’m the friend of Mr. Pym, but he makes no motion, keeps drinking. Then I says it again, and removes from my pocket the pages I’d reacquired. Well then, he takes notice. His face, the color goes out of it, there being not much there to begin with. He starts to say something, but it not coming out, he grabs my papers and begins to balling them. Them being my property, I pulled them away and made haste away from him. b

If Dirk Peters perceived any possible racial implication to Mr. Poe’s reaction, he took no note of it. Peters was accustomed to being on ships, and he was accustomed to others accepting his own racial explanation. But Poe, of course, was a southerner of the planting class. If not by birth, then by upbringing and inclination. His preoccupation with the gentility of Europe simply further solidified this classification. And an astute southerner, particularly one as conscious of caste as Mr. Poe, could discern negritude in the palest of those mixed in race. Even if Poe did not make a conscious discovery of Dirk Peters’s race at the moment, and Peters’s treatment was simply the irrational act of an alcoholic stewed in his poisonous tastes, the evidence of Poe’s reaction to the man can be found in Poe’s Pym itself, where, again, Peters’s head is described as having an indentation “like that on the head of most negroes.” The reality of Poe’s insight seeps forth, held in check solely by the demands of the narrative.

On my desk, those three balled and flung pages of Peters’s narrative were still rumpled from Poe’s coarse handling, permanent planes giving depth to pages that were, nearly two centuries later, as brittle as the leaves of November. They showed the orbiting stains from whatever mug was once placed down repeatedly upon them, revealing the reality of Peters’s later description of the event during which he repossessed them. Most important, it is within the final paragraph of these pages that Dirk Peters, inadvertently, hints at the greatness of his discovery, which he described again in a second version:

Just Arthur Pym and I weren’t dead. The heathens blew up the Jane Guy the next day. So we got a canoe, got out of there. Took one of them niggers for rowing, but he ended up dead. Pym wanted to cook him up right then, but the tide had pulled us all the way down to the bottom of the world land by then and we come to the end of the ice. The current pulled us towards the ice shelf, but being as high as it was, there was nowhere to go to. Then a big piece just falls out, down into the water, and reveals a hole inside. Tekeleli I keep hearing, just like those island niggers used to yell when they saw white things. Then this really big pale guy in a white robe comes out. c

So ends the final crumpled page. This was to be all that Edgar Allan Poe would see of Peters’s narrative, all that his imagination would have to draw from.

But in Peters’s manuscript, there is more to the story. Sewn together with a thick purple ribbon reduced to pale lavender by time, there it is: the fourth page. An unrumpled, withered, yet clean sheet that clearly shows none of the harsh use of the other three. And on that fourth page, in Dirk Peters’s signature liberally inked chicken scratch, is written the following:

He points at us to land our boat and Pym got out first, and I went to follow and this big thing makes like I’m not welcome, pushes me back in the boat and gives it a kick. At this time, I don’t even mind, because this white thing gives me the shivers. He ain’t born right, I can see. I was far down there, about longitude 3.34 and latitude 34.3 by my calculations. And being as weak as I was, and as tired as I was, I assumed death was waiting at sea for me. But the same tide that pulled me down from the Tsalal Island in a few days pulled me back again. I came in at night, gathered up some of them dried sea turds fishes, and in a few days I sailed off again. Picked up by the crew of the Blue Fortune on what they said was November 17th. d

Longitude 3.34 and latitude 34.3. What we today know as Morter’s Point on the Ross Ice Shelf. Longitude 3.34 and latitude 34.3; on the map it was a rather big place. It was the size of a small city, actually. But in the right place, at the right time, aimed in the right direction, what Dirk Peters’s notes told me is that you could sail from there off this frozen continent to a hidden tropical utopia within a few days of floating. I knew this in my heart: that if I found the right place at those coordinates and launched a vessel from it at the right time of the month, that regardless of global warming or centuries, the path to the isle of Tsalal would still be viable. That just as it did for Dirk Peters, the current would pull me to the island, and to discovery.

I called my cousin Booker Jaynes at the number he left for me. Garth’s handwriting wasn’t much better than Dirk Peters’s, but I got through anyway.

“Booker Jaynes?”

“ Captain Booker Jaynes.” The voice was abrupt, graveled. I apologized and started in with family small talk but only got a few seconds before he interrupted me.

“Mr. Chris Jaynes, I have three questions to ask you before we say anything else,” he told me. I stuttered a bit, then went silent. After a few seconds of this, satisfied, he put them to me.

“One. You want to go to Antarctica, to the Ross Ice Shelf, take a group down there and do some research. Is that correct?”

It was. I’d told him in my original message. Clearly this was why he bothered to call me back. He sure didn’t want to talk about Great-Uncle Oley.

“Two. Do you have the kind of money it would take to get down there, rent equipment, hire a professional crew, and make it through any weather delays necessary to get the intel you need?”

It looked like I did. The first settlement offer from the college was a little more than I had invested in the books themselves. Not as much as I knew the books’ worth had probably appreciated to, but getting in the ballpark. Added with the year’s severance I’d received for not suing them for firing their only black professor, I could do this.