Pym: A Novel

by Mat Johnson

  “Please, listen to me,” I pleaded. “My work, it’s about finding the answer to why we have failed to truly become a postracial society. It’s about finding the cure! A thousand Baldwin and Ellison essays can’t do this, you have to go to the source, that’s why I started focusing on Poe. If we can identify how the pathology of Whiteness was constructed, then we can learn how to dismantle it. The work I am doing, it’s just books, sure, but it’s important, essential research. You’re going to fire me for refusing to sit on the campus Diversity Committee?”

  “You could have compensated for your lack of national presence by embracing our role locally, but alas,” he told me and looked away. “Everyone has a role to play.”

  I put my hand out to him, and before he could meet my palm with his own I reached higher and grabbed the tie on his neck. It was a clip-on and came off easily, barely shook him when I yanked it off in my fist. I was right about it being his power source. He was totally quiet after it was taken from him. I didn’t hear a peep behind me as I ran from the confrontation.

  When I got to the car, I told Garth that my academic career was probably over, but since I’d been saying the same thing for a couple days he just tuned me out as he tuned in the radio.

  “Take me to this place, before we go. It was done at a park about two miles from your house. I already Googled it,” he said, reaching across me to get into the glove compartment. Garth pulled out this print of a painting, all scrolled up, and dropped it in my lap. I unraveled it and saw a syrupy sweet landscape of the Catskills, the kind of vista painted on how-to shows in a half hour. The kind of painting Garth adored, done by that artist he idolized.

  “It’s called Stock of the Woods,” he said. “It’s a Thomas Karvel Hudson Valley School Edition. A tribute to the painters they used to have here. I have an original signed print. That’s part of my nest egg, and you’re there laughing at it. Look at it. Really look at it, you need to. Don’t it make you all peaceful just looking into that world?”

  “Looks like the view up a Care Bear’s ass.”

  “I got stress!” Garth turned and started yelling at me, his tree air fresheners dancing over the dashboard from the wind. “I got no type of job. I got no savings. The whole world’s hell. The world is pollution and terrorism and warming and whatever, I don’t know, whatever gets dropped next. I drive a bus! Or I used to. I’m a thirty-eight-year-old man who drives a bus and I ain’t even got that now. I got stress!” Garth pushed past me to get another Little Debbie snack cake from the box beneath my legs, and calmed down eating it.

  “My man, you’re like a home experiment in type 2 diabetes. Your picture, it’s real nice, okay? And I’ll take you wherever. But you need to calm the hell down,” I told him, and he did. So we took to the road the last few miles to my home.

  He was stressed. I understood. I understood even before we got to my house and saw all my books sitting there, on the front porch. Not in boxes, just stacked there. Hundreds of them. My books, my treasure. Sitting in the rain, bloated with a week’s worth of water and dirt and mold. Pages bursting open like they were screaming. Some lug nut from the physical plant had just left them there and driven off again. Tens of thousands of dollars, years of collecting. Destroyed. Irreplaceable. Gifts, inscriptions, ruined. I picked one up, threw it down, started screaming. Jumping. When I finished, Garth held out one of his Little Debbie cakes to me, cellophane already pulled back for convenience. Poking closer and closer to my face till I took it from him.

  “Come on, take a bite of the white girl. It will make you feel good.”

  “I’m going back to campus. I’m going back to campus and I’m going to get that bastard.”

  “Damn dog. You already got his bow tie.”

  I went to the bar. Garth was tired from driving and so stayed back. On the way I made a call to my lawyer, and one hopefully to my antiquarian as well. The latter told me he had something special, something signed, first edition, and I caught myself almost smiling in response. Life would move on, I tried to remind myself. Presumably, it would take me with it.

  There was one bar in town and there was a black guy sitting in it, and this I took as a divine miracle, maybe even another sign of my impending turn of fortune. It was a town of only 1,163, just eight miles north of the campus. Aside from a handful of students during term, there were no black people in the area. In the summer tourism months, on occasion you could spot a black woman with her white partner passing through, but often these visitors were particularly disinclined to coethnic bonding. This brother wasn’t, though. When I walked in he looked up and smiled at me like he knew me and I gave him the nigga-nod and he hit me right back so I knew we were cool. I sat down next to him.

  “Mosaic Johnson. Hip-Hop Theorist.” Of course he was an academic. Of course I was. There was no other reason for two obviously educated black men to be there. And it was obvious, even of him, dressed as he was in his carefully selected baggy jeans, hat to the side, and other matching oversize pop culture juvenilia. But he was a professor of music, so allowances could be made for the styling.

  “Chris Jaynes. Americanist.” And our fists bumped in blackademic bliss. Mr. Johnson was a younger man than I, in both years and manner. Dressed like he was straight out of Compton, but clearly straight out of a postdoc instead. Just arrived in town to start teaching the following term, coming in the summer because his lease in Chicago was up and this was his future. Eager. Earnest. Through drunken eyes, I looked at Mosaic Johnson and I saw myself there. I saw myself showing up in this town, seeing it as foreign territory I was hopeful to invade. Twenty-one years of academic training culminating in permanent entrenchment on the business side of the classroom. Theory finally turned into practice, a practice of yapping about theory. Just like me. I wept for this bastard.

  “Don’t join the Diversity Committee,” I told him when the third round hit. We’d been talking well, for a minute, mostly me bemoaning the history of Dutch slavery in the area, but he hung with me. A squat dude whose only thinness was his mustache, Mosaic seemed to roll a bit away from me when I said this, but I leaned closer because he needed to hear it.

  “These historically white institutions, they get that one black professor, they put him or her on something they call the ‘Diversity Committee.’ Don’t let them put you there. It’s a slave hold. They’ll fight you: they’ll really want you on the Diversity Committee because if there aren’t any minorities on the committee, the committee isn’t diverse.”

  “Man, in my work, I deal with the ghetto. The real shit, you know what I’m saying? Reality,” he told me, motioning around the room with a silver-ringed hand as if our present setting was mere computer simulation. “I’m not trying to run from the folks. I want to be on that committee. I’m a fighter. I want to be on that committee, to bring the fight here.” The hand in the air formed into a fist. I looked around the room, at the twenty or so white liberals taking him in on the sly. They loved it. They loved that fist. If I was still here tomorrow, they would come up to me and ask why I never raised the black power fist like the new guy. Undaunted, I continued.

  “No, you don’t, and I’ll tell you why. The Diversity Committee has one primary purpose: so that the school can say it has a diversity committee. They need that for when students get upset about race issues or general ethnic stuff. It allows the faculty and administration to point to it and go, ‘Everything’s going to be okay, we have formed a committee.’ People find that very relaxing. It’s sort of like, if you had a fire, and instead of putting it out, you formed a fire committee. But none of the ideas that come out of all that committeeing will ever be implemented, see? Nothing the committee has suggested in thirty years has ever been funded. It’s a gerbil wheel, meant to ‘Keep this nigger boy running.’ ”

  “Ellison.” He smiled. I knew a black author reference would get to him. “Now that cat was straight hip-hop,” he continued. I would have corrected the hip to be, but what’s a difference of black American musical traditions
among kin?

  “Chris Jaynes. You know, I’ve read some of your early work, your Ellison theory. That had the beat. Why don’t you bring it like that no more?” he asked me, and I glowed at this. Old musicians asked to play their classic songs, they must get this feeling. You’re tired of it, sure, but at least somebody cares. I thanked him, told him how I’ve developed, how I’ve been drawn toward nineteenth-century fiction, Edgar Allan Poe.

  As I’m getting up to hit the john, right as I’m turned away, Mosaic Johnson says, “Man, nobody cares about the Poe thing.” And I laughed back at him and told him thanks for getting my pain and in moments I was off to pissing.

  In the can, standing in front of the urinal, I was still for the moment. It felt like it was the first time I was truly still since this whole disaster had started. Even when I was pulled into a ball on the floor, I was rocking and reeling internally. But this bathroom, this empty bathroom, it was like a temple. Utterly serene. And within that silence, clarity came to me. I started thinking about my past, and my new friend. And I started to think about everything he had said, and all of his responses. And I was surprised to find a previously undetected negative tone there. Not in his words, but in the little performances in his demeanor. His last statement being the irrefutable proof of this.

  “You’re not in the music department are you?” I said to him on my return. I didn’t even sit down. I was standing. I was shaking. My voice was cracking a little bit too, which was beyond my control.

  “No, I am not. My instrument is the QWERTY keyboard,” he admitted. Took the last swig from his Hennessy, and then swiveled to face me.

  “You’re here to replace me, aren’t you? You’re here to take my job. To take my office. That’s why you’re in this bar tonight, isn’t it?”

  “Man, just relax. Ain’t nothing personal. Yes, I’m the new hire. Yes, it was your tenure line. I never said I was a music prof. I said I was a hip-hop theorist, okay? That’s my school of literary criticism, right? I’m here to bring the beat to the text, that’s it. It’s all good. And hell yes I will represent myself as the strong black man I am on this campus.”

  “Right. You’re here to be the Diversity Committee.”

  “Look, cuz, unlike you, clearly, I believe in trying to change things. Fighting against racism where I see it. I don’t back down, and I don’t apologize for that either. Hell yeah, I’m down for the damn committee. I’m down for the fight, know what I’m saying?” A Ph.D. can’t manage a lot of menace, but we are good at reading between the lines. I knew exactly what he meant, no footnotes needed. Still, I stepped in closer.

  “You know what I think? I think that when you fight the same battles, with the same tactics, you don’t get any further. That unless you address the roots of the problem, it will continue to grow.”

  This was fairly eloquent for me. Given that it was off the cuff. No peer review or rewrites. And I was proud that I had thought it there and not later via l’esprit de l’escalier. It was the arrogance brought on by this success that made me pause two steps into my exit, turn, and continue.

  “And the white folks here know that. And they like it that way. You’re hired to be the angry black guy, get it? You’re not fighting Whiteness, you’re feeding its perversion. You’re here so you can assuage their guilt without making them actually change a damn thing. They want you to be the Diversity Committee. Because every village needs a fool.” Still, I felt I was sticking to my thesis closely, not diverting off into too much bullshit. If Mosaic Johnson had kept his mushy buttocks on the stool instead of getting in my face then, it would have made a decent closer.

  “Oh I get it. I get it now, why you love Poe. You two share one big thing in common. Neither one of you is a damn bit relevant anymore.”

  “This college can really use you,” I returned, preparing myself to hoof it. “Every good zoo needs a caged gorilla.”

  It was an inflammatory statement. I lit that shit on fire too, just to watch him burn. Even I was offended, to tell the truth, and that’s why I chose that level of toxic phraseology to hit him. He hit me back, though. First in the gut and then, when I went down to the floor, in several other places.

  Mosiac Johnson could definitely bring the beat. To me personally, he brought the beat down.†

  “Poe. Doesn’t. Matter,” he said as he pummeled. I respected him for that, though. He guessed correctly his weak suburban mini-mall kung fu punches might not be enough to hurt me.

  “Tekeli-li!” I laughed, as the crowd pulled Mosaic Johnson from my body.

  “Tekeli-li!”

  * Matthew Henson excluded.

  † Not to be confused with the “downbeat.”

  TEKELI-LI. Tekeli-li, Tekeli-li. I got that from Pym. I got that from Poe. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe, specifically. Pym that is maddening, Pym that is brilliance, Pym whose failures entice instead of repel. Pym that flows and ignites and Pym that becomes so entrenched it stagnates for hundreds of words at a time. A book that at points makes no sense, gets wrong both history and science, and yet stumbles into an emotional truth greater than both.

  The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym was Edgar Allan Poe’s only novel. It shows. A self-proclaimed “magazinist” who plied his trade mostly with Virginia’s Southern Literary Messenger, Poe attempted the long form only because that’s what the editors at Harper & Brothers were looking for. Poe was broke, his relationship with the Messenger soured, his intended entrée into New York literary society failed in drunken spectacle. Spiraling into the wreck he became known for, Edgar Allan Poe was barely writing anything new and couldn’t find buyers for a collection of his short stories. The novel was a novelty, a lucrative one, so he cashed in. As for the idea of a book in “which a single connected story occupies the whole volume,” Poe went along grudgingly, belligerent.

  We start the story as Pym and his best friend, the ace sailor Augustus, joyride on a small boat at their home port in Nantucket, only to have Augustus pass out drunk not long after they set sail into the night. The two get rescued and, having escaped near dismemberment and drowning, decide the sea is the life for them. The novice Pym can’t get passage on one of whalers headed out of town, so Augustus stows his boy away in a large crate in the hold, placing a mattress, a bit of water, and a few snacks inside with him. The plan is that Pym will spring out after a few days at sea and reveal himself to the crew when it’s too late to turn back and dump him. Problem is, Augustus never comes back for him. We don’t know why, and neither does our impish hero. As a result, Pym starts starving to death, dehydrating in the dark hull, where the oddly jumbled cargo threatens with each wave to fall over and crush him.

  Then Pym is attacked by a lion (an African lion, in the darkness: begin trend here). Except it’s not a lion, it is Tiger, Arthur Pym’s exceptionally beloved canine companion, who just happens to be in the hold with him. “For the presence of Tiger I tried in vain to account,” Pym tells us, and we agree, because for the thirty-odd pages that led up to this point, not one goddamn line was mentioned about any dog, a narrative error Poe tries to compensate for by telling us how much he really really really loved this pet. Eventually, after an extended period of time and pages during which even the reader becomes claustrophobic, we get word from Augustus about what has happened: the Negroes have uprisen.

  Really, the mutineers are just the lower classes of the ship’s staff, led by a massive black cook.* Among this group is a man described as a half-breed Indian (the other half is given no race, so European ancestry—nonracial norm that it is—is the implied assumption). His name is Dirk Peters. Odd, however, is the description of this Peters:

  He was short in stature—not more than four feet eight inches high—but his limbs were of the most Herculean mould. His hands, especially, were so enormously thick and broad as hardly to retain a human shape. His arms, as well as legs, were bowed in the most singular manner, and appeared to possess no flexibility whatever. His head was equally deformed, be
ing of immense size, with an indentation on the crown (like that on the head of most negroes).… The mouth extended nearly from ear to ear; the lips were thin, and seemed, like some other portions of his frame, to be devoid of natural pliancy, so that the ruling expression never varied under the influence of any emotion whatever.

  Negro what? Brothers and sisters, pause to check the backs of your skulls. Notice the primitive dwarfish size, bowed legs, and mouth ever conspicuous. Then compare Peters’s description to some of the other darkies haunting Poe’s collected works:

  He was three feet in height.… He had bow-legs and was corpulent. His mouth should not be called small, nor his ears short. His teeth, however, were like pearl, and his large full eyes were deliciously white.

  —Describing Pompey, in “A Predicament”

  They had never before seen or heard of a blackamoor, and it must therefore be confessed that their astonishment was not altogether causeless. Toby, moreover, was as ugly an old gentleman as ever spoke—having all the peculiar features of his race; the swollen lips, large white protruding eyes, flat nose, long ears, double head, pot-belly, and bow legs.

  —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.