Pym_ A Novel - Mat Johnson [23]
“So that’s it, everybody has to play their roles, right? Black people can’t be Indians, don’t matter what’s in their blood or how they was raised or what the freedman did for red folk. You just got to be on Team Negro if you got any black in you. Even your octoroon ass.” Garth took a bite of a Little Debbie fudge roll so big it seemed to end the conversation right there, as a matter of physics.
“Look, I didn’t mean to offend, okay? I’m just saying it like it happened.” Garth claimed a line of Seminole on his mother’s side, I forgot about that. “I’m sorry. I’m not trying to judge.”
“Oh, you judging. Don’t back down now. You let me judge back first. You so scared someone’s going to kick you off Team Negro that you think everybody’s got to stick to some crazy one-drop rule. That’s me judging now.”
I wanted to ask him about his paintings then. I wanted to ask him if there were ever any black people in them, or did they look to him like a window to a Eurocentric fantasy world where black people couldn’t even exist, like they did to me. If that was the attraction. But I took my lumps because he was my boy and I wanted to walk away from this.
“A guy called for you. Booker Jaynes.” Garth’s tone eased, which in its way was its own apology. “Left a New York number, said he’s in the city next couple of days, recruiting a job for the place you called about. Said he wants to meet you. Yo, he ain’t looking for drivers, is he?”
I smiled at my unbelievable luck. Finally.
“Oh, this is big. This is very big. We’re going to Antarctica,” I told Garth. Our conflict was forgotten, smothered by the decades of friendship.
“You on your own there, dog. Ain’t nothing for black folks down there in the cold.”
“White people don’t own ice, Garth. I’m pretty sure they didn’t even invent it.”
* To my surprise the Miller Beach Senior Center was not actually in Miller Beach but in an adjacent community that merely aspired to appropriate the airs of its more reputable neighbor.
† No relation.
‡ By “somehow,” I mean that I don’t know if Mahalia Mathis had emailed the other members or called them, or rather I have no proof of this. But as to the source of this information I, personally, have no doubt.
§ As a child growing up in the Germantown section of Philadelphia, I remember one such gentleman who regularly strutted through my predominantly black neighborhood clad in a brown suede pantsuit and a matching strap tied around his forehead. You could hear him coming because he would sing “powwow” songs to the beat of the many beads that hung from him. We used to tauntingly say, “Howdy, Tonto,” to him when he passed, to which he invariably smiled, raised his open palm, and replied, “How.” For years I wondered just that: how? How the hell did that brother end up like that?
DIRK Peters was not a stupid man. He knew. He knew he was bad. Peters didn’t come to this conclusion on his own—he lacked even the talent for literary judgment—but from the written reactions of the few publishers he failed to entice with the manuscript, he could tell. Faced with this reality, Peters thought it of “considerable good fortune” that he knew of a man purported to be an exceptionally good writer, a friend of his former shipmate Arthur Pym. During their long and eventful tenure together on the wreck of the Grampus and those days on the Jane Guy, Pym had often reminisced about the fellow, a prankster he had come to know during a prospective visit along the Hudson to West Point. The two found an immediate intellectual kinship. They even looked the same. When they were walking the campus together, many assumed them to be reunited twins. To Peters, a resident of the sea and therefore a believer in fate, his own path was clear:
Way I figure, I figure he writes good. So I’m going to use him. I make a stop on the Green Goose in Baltimore City. Stop into a general store, what’s known to sell reading things and what. Got subscriptions and such. And I ask for this Poe gentleman, ask they got something by him. Man tells me, they knows this man real well, then pulls out