by Mat Johnson
—Describing Toby, in “The Journal of Julius Rodman”
These big-mouth animalistic pygmies with pairs of legs shaped like fallen over Cs, they are of the same nightmarish breed. Dirk Peters, we’re told, is not a Negro but a half-breed Indian probably of the “Upsaroka,” which we can assume is Poe’s reference to the Absaroka people. Or as we commonly call them, the Crow (darkness!). Narratively, Dirk Peters needs to be half Indian despite his Negroid traits because there is no such thing as a half Negro, according to the American “one drop” social reality. Either you are a Negro, containing some African ancestry, or you are not; half whiteness is not allowed. Peters must be at least half white because it is his shred of white decency that leads him to abandon the mutineers and assist Augustus in taking back control of the ship. To save the day, Pym imitates a ghost by covering himself entirely in white powder, then jumping out and startling the black-hearted mutineers. True to metaphor, the superstitious Negro mind is no match for the Enlightenment European intellect, and the three heroes regain control of the ship.
Shortly after this, as luck would have it, the Grampus is destroyed by inclement weather. These things happen. For another near third of the book, the sole survivors—Pym, Augustus, Dirk, and a guy named Richard Parker—cling to the driftwood that the capsized ship has become, steadily starving and dying of dehydration. The first imagined hope for rescue comes in the form of blackness, with a black ship moving toward them across the horizon, a man with “very dark skin” on deck nodding and “smiling constantly so as to display a set of the most brilliantly white teeth.” On arrival, it turns out to be just a decayed, blackened corpse, his smile the result of his lack of lips and his nodding the result of the fact that there is a seagull actively gorging on chunks of the dead man’s head, the bird’s “white plumage spattered all over with blood.”
Before long, the boys are forced to soil their own whiteness with gore as well. To fight starvation they must partake of the ultimate act of savagery: cannibalism. Not surprisingly, Parker, the least fleshed out character and a former participant in the mutiny, is the one who recommends this culinary choice, only to go on to literally draw the short straw. The line, the definitive line that separates civilized man from the primitive, is crossed. This is the sin that kills off Augustus, who poetically dies on the first of August despite his feast of man-meat. With little fanfare, this once central character melts away from the novel as if he never existed.
Why not eat the dog first? you might ask. Well, the dog is missing, having gone AWOL immediately after the mutiny. We know this not because we’re told but because we are not: no fate is given, Tiger’s simply gone, vanished from Poe’s mind without a mention despite his before stated importance. Not that this is simply an act of animal cruelty, because from the moment Augustus dies (a death we are at least informed of), Augustus too receives no mention for the rest of the book, which is only half completed by this point. Serial publication minded, Poe seems to have had little concern for the past or for continuity in this text. The work veers inconsistently from straight prose chapters to a dated journal finale. The only thing that appears to matter to him is the chapter at hand.
Before the doomed Parker can even be properly digested, rescue arrives in the form of the merchant ship the Jane Guy. By this time Pym and Peters, now the best of buddies it seems, discover that they have sunk far into the Southern Hemisphere. And they will be going farther, continuing down as the Jane Guy sails off to the South Seas for trading.
This is where things start to get interesting (really, they haven’t been tremendously until now). Here’s where things start to get surreal, where Poe starts to go off. This is where the darkies really start to bubble to the surface, where the Africanist presence jumps out and does its jig on the page.
I used to complain that the only things the white literary world would accept of Africa’s literary descendants were reflections of the Europeans themselves: works that focused on the effects of white racism, or the ghettos white economic and social disfranchisement of blacks created. I still think that, I have just come to the understanding that I’m no better. I like Poe, I like Melville, I like Hemingway, but what I like the most about the great literature created by the Americans of European descent is the Africanist presence within it. I like looking for myself in the whitest of pages. I like finding evidence of myself there, after being told my footprints did not exist on that sand. I think the work of the great white writers is important, but I think it’s most important when it’s negotiating me and my people, because I am as arrogant and selfish a reader as any other.
The Jane Guy finds a polar bear living wild in these southern seas. That’s right, a polar bear. It’s not simply that this bear shouldn’t be in the earth’s Southern Hemisphere—Poe gets many of his science facts wrong, particularly egregious considering that he plagiarized contemporary firsthand travel reports. At least he could have copied the information down correctly. No, what’s remarkable is the description of the bear itself:
His wool was perfectly white, and very coarse, curling tightly. The eyes were of a blood red, and larger than those of the Arctic bear—the snout also more rounded …
Tight, curly hair and a round nose … on a polar bear? Right. Strange things to imagine, particularly together. Makes you (me) wonder, who else is known for tight curly hair and round noses, whose attributes might have inspired Poe, consciously or sub? This improbable bear is, of course, just a teaser in his symbolic offering. One of many, along with Pym’s growing descriptions of the massive black albatrosses which haunt the Jane Guy, or the black and white penguins whose rookeries seem to offer a chance of order between this visual dichotomy. The real treasure comes at the arrival at the island of Tsalal, which despite being floating distance to the Antarctic continent, is a tropical land, well populated and idyllic in a way that harkens back to Diderot’s Tahiti. Except this island is not populated by a previously unknown enclave of Polynesians, or an even less probable lost tribe of hot-weather Inuits. No, the inhabitants of Tsalal are Negroes.
They were about the ordinary stature of Europeans, but of a more muscular and brawny frame. Their complexion a jet black, with thick and long woolly hair. They were clothed in skins of an unknown black animal, shaggy and silky, and made to fit the body with some degree of skill, the hair being inside, except where turned out about the neck, wrists, and ankles. Their arms consisted principally of clubs, of a dark, and apparently very heavy wood.
Not just skin of black, which is the classic European mythic negative, but woolly hair to match. These brothers are black. These brothers are so black they wear only the skins of animals that are black. The only wood they carry is darker than ebony. These brothers are so black, we eventually find out, that even their teeth are black.† In fact, the entire island of Tsalal is hued in shades of blackness. Poe leaves no detail unturned in his assertion of Tsalal as a fantastic place; even the water is poured into this metaphorical construct:
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.