Mat Johnson - Pym

“Three. Are you willing, are you willing to swear on your God, swear on your heart, swear on the very Jaynes bloodline, that you will not tell a soul about our meeting, or reveal any information therein — not one goddamn word — without my approval? Can you handle that?”

I could, did. I wrote the address of the bar he wanted to meet at the following night. Then I hung up and started calling some cousins on his side of the family to see if Booker Jaynes was actually as crazy as he sounded.

* Dirk Peters, The True and Interesting Narrative of Dirk Peters , p. 277.

† Dirk Peters used the phrase “remembering thing,” actually.

‡ Peters’s repeated phrase for this was “Help me make good on the thing.”

§ Peters, Narrative , p. 184.

‖ Ibid., p. 185.

a That is to say, it advocated lifelong human bondage for those of African descent, as well as their children and grandchildren, great-grandchildren, et cetera, for eternity.

b Peters, Narrative , p. 278.

c Peters, Narrative , p. 185.

d Peters, Narrative , p. 186.

MOST of the people on the Jaynes side of the family fell into two categories, brilliant or lunatic. My mother, who raised me alone, gave me both her surname and its problematic lineage. The Jaynes family was stricken with overactive intellectualism, which is why so many were clinically or functionally insane. But my other cousins insisted that Booker Jaynes was in the brilliant category. Mostly.

From calling around, the story I got was this: Booker Jaynes hadn’t started out paranoid, he’d just worked his way there through life experience and due diligence. Booker Jaynes was probably the world’s only civil rights activist turned deep-sea diver. The successes of the struggle in the South left him feeling distraught and betrayed — he was just getting started when those Negroes down there decided to call it quits — and he went as far away from it as he could. While his other disaffected radical brothers went underground, he went undersea, diving commercially mostly and wreck-diving when he could. The man had made his career before technology increased the range and duration of dives, back when you made it on oxygen and a prayer. It was a world where you owned no treasure unless you dragged it onto the boat yourself, where the rights to a fortune were often protected only by the sea that hid it, where claim jumping was called “fair game.” Booker Jaynes was as much a product of this world as of the northern Bronx he grew up in. For Booker, going from diving to polar exploration was as natural as making the transition from H 2O in its liquid to its solid form. When he was a kid growing up with my great-uncle Frazel, Booker had his interest in polar exploration sparked by an article about the explorer Matthew Henson in the Brooklyn Sun . After saving Green Stamps from the local Shop N’ Go for a year, Booker used the coupons to buy ice shoes and ski poles. By the time he could actually afford the things, it was June, so his pop arranged for Booker to have time climbing the discarded shavings from an ice-skating rink in Rosendale. The most important thing my calls to cousins and aunties told me, though, was that Booker was a man who made things happen. Or at least tried to.

Booker looked like a Jaynes, forehead like a block of caramel toffee, neck stolen from a giraffe, unfortunate attributes he’d tried to cover with a snake orgy of gray dreadlocks. As we’d planned the night before, we met at a bar in lower Manhattan, past City Hall by the docks. I didn’t like going near Wall Street. More specifically, I didn’t like going near high-risk bombing targets, it just wasn’t my thing. He sat in the back of the room staring intently at the front door, Malcolm X style, which considering we were in an organic juice bar was a little heavy for the scene.

“I used to come here before. Used to serve you underage, if you worked the docks,” he told me. “Wasn’t all bright with these damn lights in here. It was called Hughson’s. It was a place you could get stabbed with a knife. It changed on me,” my cousin told me, in a way that sounded like he was adding it to a long list of things in this world that had betrayed him.

He asked about my motive for the expedition and I launched into the story of Pym . As his eyes drooped, I suddenly appreciated Garth for his ability to feign the slightest interest in literary history. Next, he asked me about the family. It was clear he wasn’t interested. He was just checking to see if I was really me. Once that was confirmed, Booker Jaynes cut short my family update.

“This bar holds a lot of memories for me. I was here, taking a break from working a dock in Brooklyn, the morning the truck bomb went off in the shipping entrance of the Twin Towers. I heard the bomb go off, went outside. Smelled the smoke and saw the soot-covered people, and it all kicked in. I knew exactly what I had to do. It was time to march, ” he told me, hit the last word slow and hard so that I could feel the impact, then took a swig of his carrot juice. Immediately locating a Kinko’s, my cousin had a flyer typed, printed out, and copied by the hundred before the smoke had even cleared. Setting the rally for four hours in the future, Booker Jaynes barked the news and handed out the flyers as he took his long walk north, from City Hall to Fourteenth Street. Hours later, flyers dispensed and throat parched from calling others to the cause, Booker Jaynes arrived at his rally point at Union Square, the historic site of American civil disobedience, and received the shock of his life.

“Not one goddamn person came to the Twin Towers Bombing Rally. Not one, not even the Negroes bothered. Not even one news crew either, and I called them all. What type of shit is that? Not a one; people just walking by. What the hell has this country come to, that people won’t rally against injustice? What the hell is wrong with a society that won’t even bother marching anymore?”

“But, you were going to march about what?” I asked my cousin, somewhat confused.

“What? What was I going to march about?” Captain Jaynes spun in my direction, shoulders, chest, and all. When Booker Jaynes looked at you, he really looked at you with his whole body: an errant billy club in Little Rock in ’64 had resulted in a loss of rotation in his neck. “Negro, we were going to march! Don’t ask me about marching; what kind of ignorant ass question is that? Let me tell you, I marched at Selma, I marched in Mississippi, I marched in Montgomery. I know how to march.” The last sentence was delivered in a loud staccato, each word nearly a sentence in itself.

“I’m sorry, Captain, I’m a bit lost,” I continued carefully, truly unsure as to whether I had missed some form of information. “March against whom? Why? I don’t understand, how would that help anything to do with the bombing?” Maybe I did lack some insight, but my cousin didn’t bother sharing his with me. Instead, he just stared me down, the gray snakes around his neck now still as if steadying themselves for a lunging attack. He paused to take me in. For a second, I thought he was going to stand up and walk out, leave me there sipping my wheatgrass. I could see he wanted to. But he didn’t. Instead he leaned forward, and in little more than a whisper, he let me in.

“There are people out there, people who have made fortunes just following me around, finding out where I’m taking my boat next, so they can come right behind me and steal something. White folks who wake up every morning and say, ‘Hmm, I’m getting kind of low, I wonder what Captain Jaynes is finding that I can take from him.’ So this doesn’t go beyond this table, do you understand me?” he demanded. I didn’t really, but assured him I did. After making me swear a few more oaths, he continued.