Mat Johnson - Pym

Structurally, The True and Interesting Narrative of Dirk Peters does not actually conform much to the novelistic prose form either. Like Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym , Peters’s narrative is episodic, disjointed. The book begins with twelve pages on Dirk Peters’s isolated upbringing in rural Michigan. Similar to the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass , Peters’s tale focuses on his earliest memories of the woman who gave birth to him, the rumors about who his father probably was, as well as the agricultural, cultural, and socioeconomic breakdown of the area, and the narrator’s first recorded encounters with a racist society. From the unnamed mother we get the sole yet pivotal advice, “You got straight hair, you got light skin: if they don’t know you ain’t colored, don’t tell them!”

The next twenty-seven pages consist of Dirk Peters’s maiden voyage at sea. A fairly uneventful tale that spends the majority of its efforts describing in minute detail the duties of each member of the crew, and then more details of how each man failed to fully fulfill his responsibilities. §It is revealed that, because of his small stature, he was assigned to understudy the main lookout. Apparently, up on his crow’s nest perch, Dirk Peters spent more time looking down than out at the sea around them, which seems plausible since the body of water was not an actual sea but Lake Michigan. In the following twenty-six-page section, Dirk Peters serves as a mate on a completely different boat, the Precipice , and he is somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico. How he managed to go from an inland freshwater ship in the North American Midwest to a merchant ship in Central America is completely unremarked upon.

Let me say here that it became evident to me that there were logical reasons why this text, The True and Interesting Narrative of Dirk Peters , while momentous in its historical significance, avoided publication and therefore its righteous place in history. I’ll begin with the obvious: the handwriting is downright fecal. Given the time period, when blotting quills and poor paper stock commonly obscured the scripted word, the hand of Dirk Peters still managed to be spectacularly illegible. It took me six eighteen-hour days to push through a first reading of the text. And I was trying really, really hard. This atrocious penmanship was allied with an equally poor grasp of grammar. When deciphering a blurred word, it helps to know what it should be. But Dirk himself doesn’t usually know what it should be. If it wasn’t for the revelation in the clearly printed title, I would have given up after the first page. ‖On the seventh day, I took a train into the city to check a ship’s log for the Precipice held at the New-York Historical Society. Taking the subway from Penn Station, unable to get a seat, I stood up with the firmly packed crowd and attempted awkwardly to record a thought on Peters’s saga as the local train swayed violently to and fro. The lights went out, and I kept writing. When the lights came back on a few seconds later, what I saw on the page stunned me. There I was eerily greeted with an exact duplication of Dirk Peters’s own hand. He was writing the manuscript at sea , I realized. Beneath the rocking deck, in little if any candlelight.

Another probable factor in the Peters manuscript’s obscurity was its timing. After a little old white lady published her lengthy melodrama about the evils of slavery in the American South in 1838, Uncle Tom’s Cabin changed the dialogue of African American literature dramatically. Overnight, African American autobiographical storytelling became antiquated, and fiction, with its ability to directly manipulate the emotions of the white masses, proved a far more effective political tool. While the majority of Dirk Peters’s manuscript was written before 1837, for a variety of reasons it was not quite ready for publication then, and truly never was.

While I have said that the narrative of Dirk Peters, much like Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym , is episodic, let me further state that in the majority of other ways their structures are dissimilar. Poe’s Pym is serialized, the product of a magazinist whose imagination constructed narratives in fifteen-page, stand-alone segments. Dirk Peters’s chapters are crude and roughly structured. To be specific, Peters barely even has prose, just handwritten notes, brown and crisp from time, hand-sewn together haphazardly by thick thread (some of which appears to be fishing line). Each bound section is an individual tirade or description of events complete without reference to any larger context of the man’s life. One minute he’s on one ship. The next he’s on another boat yammering about a completely new set of mundane events. The next he’s at shore complaining about the price of the produce and prostitutes. If it wasn’t for the later entries, where Peters actively describes trying to sell his work, it would be logical to conclude that the collection was not intended for publication. What truly distinguishes The True and Interesting Narrative of Dirk Peters from the rest of the pantheon is that Dirk Peters was never a writer. This was a work constructed by a man without talent for structure. Or for character. Or poetry.

That first week of studying the manuscript, I felt drunk. When I wasn’t researching, I actually got drunk, so I could sustain the sensation. Garth didn’t fully understand what was going on, but he knew I was instantly overflowing with joy, and he was cool with that. We put off leaving for Detroit longer, and that meant he got to hike back to his painting site every sunset and pretend to climb into a better world, so we both were happy.

It took ten days to get verification on the age of the manuscript based on a sample of its ink and paper I sent to a grad school connection now working at the Smithsonian, and in that regard it was either an unlikely masterpiece of forgery or an actual product of the nineteenth century. This was all good, but what I really wanted to verify was whether or not it was true. Did this Dirk Peters really live and work among us? In the months ahead, I planned to continue my thorough and academic inquiry. In my more ambitious waves, I imagined an expedition to Antarctica. I had a cousin who might offer insight, someone I knew only from family rumors and newspaper clippings, who’d done oceanic salvage in the area, and for a romantic afternoon I hunted him down and left messages, trying to get him to contact me. The next day, Garth promised to drive me down to the National Archives in Washington, D.C., as long as we detoured on a Karvel spotting mission to find the site of a monstrosity titled Cabana de la Chesapeake .

It was going on two in the morning. I was spent physically and mentally. The limits of my official online database searching had for the day been exhausted, there was no historical library catalog left that I could think of to unravel the mystery of Dirk Peters. So I Googled him.

There are a multitude of Dirk Peterses in the world, it turned out, and most of them had nothing to do with books. When I tried adding the keyword “Pym” to the search, I was drowning in information on Poe’s fictional account. Largely out of curiosity, I tried an image search for the name instead. The result: “Dirk Peters” was fairly common in the planet’s paler regions, as many a white Dirk Peters smiled for the camera in various snapshots. I was pushing absently through pages of these images in the hope of seeing perhaps a lithograph of Peters’s fictionalized portrait when a wholly inconsistent image struck me. Below that same Anglophonic name was the head shot of a woman, a black woman, probably in her sixties. It was a glamour shot, taken through the forced dreaminess of a Vaselined lens. Her chin rested on her hands, and one of those hands held a large red rose, like it was a singles ad. The entire photo was no bigger than my thumbnail, and even from that I could tell that flower was plastic. Clicking the link below took me to the obviously amateurish website of the woman in the picture, a self-proclaimed “Singer, Actor, Poet, Novelist, Dancer, Actress and Noted Psychic Person,” who went by the name Mahalia Mathis. By this point I was just browsing for laughs. I stopped laughing when I came to a page titled “Genealogy.” And there, at the top of a long and haggard willow of a family tree, was a patriarch who held the same name as the one I had been searching for, next to a tag that read “Crow Indian, Michigan.”