Pym (4 page)

It was
not
colourless, nor was it of any one uniform colour—presenting to the eye, as it flowed, every possible shade of purple.… Upon collecting a basinful, and allowing it to settle thoroughly, we perceived that the whole mass of liquid was made up of a number of distinct veins, each of a distinct hue; that these veins did not commingle; and that their cohesion was perfect in regard to their own particles among themselves, and imperfect in regard to neighbouring veins.

The water is purple, a product of the mixes of the shades of white and black. The water’s veins hold up even when a knife cuts through it. So many shades yet they do not “commingle,” they exist separate but equal. Connected but completely disconnected. Metaphorically, it is synonymous with the racial fantasy that Booker T. Washington would put forth so many decades later in his “Atlanta Compromise,” that all Americans will be a fist of strength together, but in socializing we’ll be as racially segregated as the fingers of a hand.

The island of Tsalal offers horror, clearly, immediately. These black people—and it is a stretch to call these people “people,” with their animalistic primitivism and baby talk—are clearly horrors from the pit of the antebellum subconscious. And yet still for me, despite the filter, on my first reads through there was simply wonder at the thought of a lost tribe of Africans, even one distorted through the eye of the paranoid myopic vision of a white pro-slavery southerner. Tall, athletic—Yoruba, Igbo? Hair long and woolly—like dreadlocks? To me the Tsalalians were real but obscured and caricatured, hidden from our view in the erratic work of a drunken, pretentious madman. This is an American thing: to wish longingly for a romanticized ancestral home. This is a black American thing: to wish to be in the majority within a nation you could call your own, to wish for the complete power of that state behind you. It was the story of the maroons and black towns on the frontier, it was the dream of every Harlem Pan-Africanist.
Tsalal
—put it on your tongue and let it slither.

Immediately, the Tsalalians betray an aversion to all things white, manifested in their reaction to the skin of the
Jane Guy
’s passengers. Of course, the complexions of the mates of the
Jane Guy
(not including Dirk Peters of course) would probably be more of a pinkish beige. Yet the Tsalalians react to their
metaphorical
Whiteness. It’s as if, as cut off as they appear, the Tsalalians already seem to know of the larger colonial struggle, understand that they should fear the infection of the Europeans’ amoral commerce. Of Whiteness as an ideology. And of course, the
Jane Guy
brings that pathology with it, immediately setting about building a production plant to process Tsalal’s natural resource of
bêche-de-mer
, or sea cucumber, for trade on the world market. True to form, not only do the colonial Europeans instantly commodify paradise on arrival but after they have begun the rape of Tsalal’s natural resources, they get the Tsalalians themselves to contribute the hard manual labor.

The chief of the Tsalalians, Too-wit, goes along with this invasion, acquiescing, having his people offer not the slightest resistance. On the surface, it appears another case of Enlightenment man, armed with only the products of his rational brain, conquering the ignorant savages despite their superior numbers. Too-wit, however, lives up to his name and, after a month of shucking and jiving for the invaders, leads the men of the
Jane Guy
and their false sense of security into a narrow pass. Once the crew is vulnerable there, Too-wit has his warriors cause a landslide to kill the lot of them.
^‡

Amazingly, two people survive this unforeseen attack. Less amazingly, those people are Arthur Gordon Pym and Dirk Peters. Stunning no matter how many times you read it: after the attack has happened and the rest of the crew have been killed, after Pym realizes he is stuck on an island overrun with super niggers, he looks at the man he referred to as both a “half-breed” and a “demon” just a few pages before and says:

We were the only living white men upon the island.

Fascinating. Whiteness, of course, has always been more of a strategy than an ethnic nomenclature, but Dirk Peters’s caste shifting so quickly, so blatantly in reaction to the current dilemma is still something spectacular to behold.

When Pym and Peters return to the shore, they find the Tsalalians in a panic as these natives examine the corpse of that white polar bear thing, having pulled it from the now ransacked
Jane Guy
. And this, having taken the long route of entry, is where I first encountered the cry.

“Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!” they scream.

Clearly this references something, something white and petrifying because, after being taken prisoner, this Tsalalian shouts the same expletive in response to the white linen shirts Pym and Peters use to construct a sail for their getaway canoe. The Tsalalians, having blown up the
Jane Guy
because of their primitive incapability to negotiate technology (and in the process having killed a thousand of their own people), are soon far behind Poe’s heroes, as the two men and one petrified Tsalalian hostage sail southward.

Oddly enough, the greatest allure of
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
comes from these final pages, from this ending. And it comes not from what Edgar Allan Poe does with the finale but from what he won’t do.

After drifting uneventfully along in this canoe toward the Antarctic, the narrative breaks into dated, diary mode. As their black Tsalalian hostage fades further toward death the closer they get to the polar whiteness, we’re left with this final paragraph, a complete daily entry in a novel that has suddenly reverted to journal form:

The darkness had materially increased, relieved only by the glare of the water thrown back from the white curtain before us. Many gigantic and pallidly white birds flew continuously now from beyond the veil, and their scream was the eternal
Tekeli-li!
as they retreated from our vision. Hereupon Nu-Nu stirred in the bottom of the boat; but, upon touching him, we found his spirit departed. And now we rushed into the embraces of the cataract, where a chasm threw itself open to receive us. But there arose in our pathway a shrouded human figure, very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men. And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow.

And that’s it. That’s the ending. That’s it, that’s all, nothing more. That’s the end of the book. No explanation of who the white figure is is given. No word on what happens next. No pseudo-scientific or mystical explanation for the chasm. No explanation of the human figure, or of how they make it back to America. Just over.

There is an afterword “Note” section to the novel, but it offers basically nothing, just more confusion than solution. For one, it tells us that Pym died, and died suddenly, having not completed the final three chapters of the book—but he somehow managed that earlier preface, supposedly written after the journey. What was this mortal accident? Doesn’t say. In addition, the supposed ghostwriter, Edgar Allan Poe, who knows the final story, refuses to tell it as it is entirely unbelievable. And then we’re told that Dirk Peters, who now resides in Illinois, is unavailable for comment on the matter.

Stunning. An ending that confounds more than it concludes. Within this we can see genius as well, as amazingly the reaction of the reader is not to throw the book across the room, as we are tempted to do with most literary disappointments, cop-outs, and blunders. Instead, our reaction is to grip it closer. To make our own connections and conclusions where there is no material provided. Our impetus is to find the satisfactory ending that has eluded us, to walk away with an answer.

You want to understand Whiteness, as a pathology and a mindset, you have to look to the source of its assumptions. You want to understand our contemporary conception of the environment, commerce, our taxonomy of humanity, you have to understand the base assumptions that underlie the foundation of the modern imagination. To truly understand evolution, Darwin couldn’t just stare at dead finches. No, he studied mammals in their embryonic form. How else would he have known that the inner ear owes its structure to what appears in larva stage as amphibious gills? That’s why Poe’s work mattered. It offered passage on a vessel bound for the primal American subconscious, the foundation on which all our visible systems and structures were built. That’s why Poe mattered. And that’s why my work mattered too, even if nobody wanted me to do it. That’s what people like Mosaic Johnson couldn’t understand. It wasn’t that I was an apolitical coward, running away from the battle. I was running so hard toward it, I was around the world and coming back in the other direction.

Garth failed to see the beauty in this rationale. The poetry in it. He was unamused when I showed up bloodied to wake him on the couch to retell my saga, and he didn’t seem to give a damn more for it as I gave him more detail while we trudged out to the site in the park at sunset like he’d demanded. We’d spent the morning and afternoon taking visitors—my lawyer, the college’s lawyer, my insurance claims agent, the college’s team of them—to the mountain of mold on my front porch. The closest I would get to an apology came in the chagrin of the campus attorney reflected against the joy in my own lawyer’s face as the word
settlement
was first said.

“We’re late. We going to miss the golden hour. You talk about me being fat, you so damn out of shape, we’re not going to make it till dawn,” Garth huffed. Once he got going he could still move fast. Like a dump truck on the highway.

“It’s right there, that’s your painting, isn’t it?” I managed, relieved that he shot on up the path in front of me and I could lean on my thighs and wheeze a bit in dignity. When I caught up to him, Garth was pacing the open field on top of the hill that overlooked the Hudson and the Catskill Mountains that began on the other side of the water. This was a good place to live. We were far enough north from the Point Pleasant nuclear reactor that if it was hit, we’d survive the radiation. Even a dirty bomb in Manhattan would be okay; the wind blew south from here. People moved here for that, and for the natural beauty. And that spot had a stunning view, locals hiked out all the time to see it. Garth was barely looking at it. Mostly he was looking at the ground, walking around a bit, pulling up his print of the painting to compare nature’s majesty with Thomas Karvel’s manufactured mess, then walking to another spot and trying it again.

“Well is this the right place or not?” My phone was ringing, but I was already impatient.

“Yeah. But I’m trying to find the really right place. Karvel spotting is a discipline.” Like a dog looking for a place to piss, he kept circling. Small and smaller loops, and then he was still. I thought he was going to look for artifacts at his feet, try to find a paintbrush or something, but he just looked back up and finally took in the vista. Garth held out the painting before him one more time, and then sighed. It was windy, and he was not close anymore, but I could hear him.

“
Stock of the Woods!
He must have been standing right here. Right here, in this very spot. The Master of Light!” Garth yelled back to me, and more such ramblings. I nodded and forced a smile, and when he was done, I checked my voice mail, and was soon as high as Garth was pacified.

“There was an item listed today in a certain Hertfordshire house’s catalog as a ‘Negro Servant’s Memoir, dated 1837,’ I yelled after I heard the news. Garth was too chilled to even get my meaning. He didn’t understand, but I knew. Just that winter a well-known Africanist intellectual had found a place for himself on several of the major news outlets merely because of his purchase of a previously unknown slave narrative.

“This is the stuff academic names are built on, man. Careers. Careers are made on this kind of thing.” As we walked back to Garth’s car, images of a rogue intellectual career flashed before me, and I pictured a new life for myself, one of glamour and packed lecture halls. All the recent damage repaired.

“I like seeing the original site of the art. It’s like being able to climb in one,” Garth told me. I felt the same way, but it took me a moment to realize he was talking about the print he’d tucked in his coat like it was a sacred scroll.

When we arrived back at my rented house, the Ichabod Crane frame of Oliver Benjamin, book pimp, was on the porch, poking through the rotted mound of my literary history.

“How could you do this?” he said by way of hello. He had a moldy reproduction of the only issue of
Fire!
in his hand, holding the soggy thing as gently as if it were an original. I gave him a synopsis of the calamity and his response was “But still. You don’t know how to treat your things.”

He kept going. Pacing the travesty, listing off titles and cursing. He wouldn’t shut up. So he knew how to hurt me. I was so depressed at the end of his rant that I let him smoke in my living room, and even still Oliver spent the first minutes inside repeating a catalog of all that I had lost, specifically the volumes he’d found for me. Garth gave him coffee, and finally he relented. Oliver slurped and his Adam’s apple bobbed, and then he pulled his leather portfolio onto his lap and said, “This is going to cost you.” It wasn’t clear if he meant a lot of money or that he might not sell it to me at all, seeing that I was such a disastrous guardian of literary antiquities.