Pym_ A Novel - Mat Johnson [15]
At the least, this was the greatest discovery in the brief history of American letters. That I was sure of. My boldest ambitions had instantly been met, and in the next instant surpassed beyond equal measure. Because if Dirk Peters existed, if this was a historic person who had walked this country just like me, what else did that mean in relation to Poe’s Narrative?
It meant, I discovered at my desk that night as I turned the work’s fragile pages, that there truly had been something living down in Antarctica. Something large and humanoid in nature. Maybe it was a lost strain of Neanderthal, or simply a variant of Homo sapiens that through location had managed to avoid modernity.§ And more important to me, it meant that Tsalal, the great undiscovered African Diasporan homeland, might still be out there, uncorrupted by Whiteness. That there was a group of our people who did achieve victory over slavery in all its forms, escaping completely from the progression of Westernization and colonization to form a society outside of time and history. And that I might find them.
* Reference: Buck Nigger archetype. Meaning: Any large, physically imposing Negro whose very presence demands that others get the “buck” out of his way.
† After noting that immigrant ethnic groups in the United States have traditionally used the word nigger to define themselves as white, the comedian Paul Mooney once said that he didn’t brush his teeth. He simply woke up every morning and said “nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger” until his smile was like so many pearls sparkling. Perhaps the Tsalalians’ black teeth were the first sign that the island was effectively removed from the Diasporan dialogue, the word clearly never having been uttered among them.
‡ This was really the way to deal with first contact with the Europeans of this era. The Hawaiians, they wish they’d thought of this. So do the Arawak of Jamaica, and the Mayans too. And the Ashanti. And the Iroquois also. Smile in their faces, be the harmless darky they think you are. And then, when they are fat and confident with their gunpowder and their omnipotence, kill every last one of them. Kill them before they go back to their overcrowded countries and tell the rest of their people where to find your home and what to steal there.
§ While Poe’s narrative makes note of a figure “very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men,” I have often wondered what Pym, presumably as short in stature as the majority of men of his period, would have made of an average National Basketball Association center.
THE dialogue that is African American literature really gets going with the slave narrative, the first book-length manuscript of which was published by Olaudah Equiano in 1789. Equiano’s slave narrative, with its swashbuckling seafaring adventure scenes, moves the reader with the story of the narrator’s own kidnapping, subjugation, and eventual escape from the slave system. Every word in Equiano’s narrative, every sentence, every page, is dedicated to one thing: convincing its reader of the moral necessity of abolitionism. And that’s the beginning of the primary conversation in African American literature, right there: the African descendant explaining to the European descendant about how white people’s actions are affecting the lives of black people.*
In the two centuries to follow, thousands more personal stories would be recorded, but in the next sixty years in particular, the slave narrative became a genre in itself. It is into this context that we must place The True and Interesting Narrative of Dirk Peters. That said, in those first days of plowing through the text, the differences between The True and Interesting Narrative of Dirk Peters and the major slave narratives of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries became fairly stark. For one, Dirk Peters