Pym_ A Novel - Mat Johnson [17]
Another probable factor in the Peters manuscript’s obscurity was its timing. After a little old white lady published her lengthy melodrama about the evils of slavery in the American South in 1838, Uncle Tom’s Cabin changed the dialogue of African American literature dramatically. Overnight, African American autobiographical storytelling became antiquated, and fiction, with its ability to directly manipulate the emotions of the white masses, proved a far more effective political tool. While the majority of Dirk Peters’s manuscript was written before 1837, for a variety of reasons it was not quite ready for publication then, and truly never was.
While I have said that the narrative of Dirk Peters, much like Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, is episodic, let me further state that in the majority of other ways their structures are dissimilar. Poe’s Pym is serialized, the product of a magazinist whose imagination constructed narratives in fifteen-page, stand-alone segments. Dirk Peters’s chapters are crude and roughly structured. To be specific, Peters barely even has prose, just handwritten notes, brown and crisp from time, hand-sewn together haphazardly by thick thread (some of which appears to be fishing line). Each bound section is an individual tirade or description of events complete without reference to any larger context of the man’s life. One minute he’s on one ship. The next he’s on another boat yammering about a completely new set of mundane events. The next he’s at shore complaining about the price of the produce and prostitutes. If it wasn’t for the later entries, where Peters actively describes trying to sell his work, it would be logical to conclude that the collection was not intended for publication. What truly distinguishes The True and Interesting Narrative of Dirk Peters from the rest of the pantheon is that Dirk Peters was never a writer. This was a work constructed by a man without talent for structure. Or for character. Or poetry.
That first week of studying the manuscript, I felt drunk. When I wasn’t researching, I actually got drunk, so I could sustain the sensation. Garth didn’t fully understand what was going on, but he knew I was instantly overflowing with joy, and he was cool with that. We put off leaving for Detroit longer, and that meant he got to hike back to his painting site every sunset and pretend to climb into a better world, so we both were happy.
It took ten days to get verification on the age of the manuscript based on a sample of its ink and paper I sent to a grad school connection now working at the Smithsonian, and in that regard it was either an unlikely masterpiece of forgery or an actual product of the nineteenth century. This was all good, but what I really wanted to verify was whether or not it was true. Did this Dirk Peters really live and work among us? In the months ahead, I planned to continue my thorough and academic inquiry. In my more ambitious waves, I imagined an expedition to Antarctica. I had a cousin who might offer insight, someone I knew only from family rumors and newspaper clippings, who’d done oceanic salvage in the area, and for a romantic afternoon I hunted him down and left messages, trying to get him to contact me. The next day, Garth promised to drive me down to the National Archives in Washington, D.C., as long as we detoured on a Karvel spotting mission to find the site of a monstrosity titled Cabana de la Chesapeake.
It was going on two in the morning. I was spent physically and mentally. The limits of my official online database searching had for the day been exhausted, there was no historical library catalog left that I could think of to unravel the mystery of Dirk Peters. So I Googled him.
There are a multitude of Dirk Peterses in the world, it turned out, and most of them had nothing