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By Root 369 0

was never a slave. Peters was instead the progeny of a free woman of European, African, and Native American heritage, and an Acadian trader.† The fact that Peters omits the African ingredient from his personal recipe, emphasizing the Native element instead, is altogether common and consistent with American Creoles of the period. Wishing not to be branded with the stigma and considerable social and legal limitations that accompanied a “black” classification, people of mixed heritage contended with the “one drop” rule of blackness by denying that one drop’s existence completely. While Native Americans were also a lower caste, the existence of diluted Native blood in most portions of the growing nation carried significantly fewer societal implications. Often, Native heritage was falsely claimed by African/European mulattoes attempting to “pass,” using indigenous ancestry as an excuse to explain away clearly non-European physical features. Similar claims have also been used by contemporary African Americans attempting to lessen the stigma of their personal “blackness.”‡

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