Pym_ A Novel - Mat Johnson [26]
“I have a shared associate with your husband. Arthur Pym?” Searching frantically for some way to authenticate Poe’s presence, Peters glanced into the room beyond and looking at the small table spied pages with his own distinctive binding and handwriting. Charging into the room, Dirk Peters quickly explained himself to a shocked Virginia, “See, I sent your husband a business proposal, for him to do the telling on my own tale.” To his surprise, grabbing the pile of papers and waving them at her did nothing to improve the situation.
“Edgar doesn’t like Negroes,” she blurted out. Dirk Peters was not put off by this, for aside from himself, he didn’t care much for Negroes either. But then Virginia told Peters what bar she thought her husband might be in. Peters left with a bounce in his step, perceiving a victory in having proven his character to the woman. Wrongly.
My feet were hurting, fierce, when I come to the public house that was suggested. I figure I will have a drink, regardless. At the bar I see him, him that was in daguerreotype at the house. At first I wondered, because he was wearing his coat inside out and showing the stitching, though he don’t seem to know this. But still I am very happy to see Mr. Poe. He sits at the table deep in his cups, a fellow about the same build as I. I approach him with my widest grin, hands at my sides, explain myself and my business. What he says back to me is “Who is your master?” To this I tell him again who I am and that I have no master. Mr. Poe, who is Mr. Poe because I asked him and he told me so, he says, “Off with you, boy.” I says again, I’m the friend of Mr. Pym, but he makes no motion, keeps drinking. Then I says it again, and removes from my pocket the pages I’d reacquired. Well then, he takes notice. His face, the color goes out of it, there being not much there to begin with. He starts to say something, but it not coming out, he grabs my papers and begins to balling them. Them being my property, I pulled them away and made haste away from him.b
If Dirk Peters perceived any possible racial implication to Mr. Poe’s reaction, he took no note of it. Peters was accustomed to being on ships, and he was accustomed to others accepting his own racial explanation. But Poe, of course, was a southerner of the planting class. If not by birth, then by upbringing and inclination. His preoccupation with the gentility of Europe simply further solidified this classification. And an astute southerner, particularly one as conscious of caste as Mr. Poe, could discern negritude in the palest of those mixed in race. Even if Poe did not make a conscious discovery of Dirk Peters’s race at the moment, and Peters’s treatment was simply the irrational act of an alcoholic stewed in his poisonous tastes, the evidence of Poe’s reaction to the man can be found in Poe’s Pym itself, where, again, Peters’s head is described as having an indentation “like that on the head of most negroes.” The reality of Poe’s insight seeps forth, held in check solely by the demands of the narrative.
On my desk, those three balled and flung pages of Peters’s narrative were still rumpled from Poe’s coarse handling, permanent planes giving depth to pages that were, nearly two centuries later, as brittle as the leaves of November. They showed the orbiting stains from whatever mug was once placed down repeatedly upon them, revealing the reality of Peters’s later description of the event during which he repossessed them. Most important, it is within the final paragraph of these pages that Dirk Peters, inadvertently, hints at the greatness of his discovery, which he described again in a second version:
Just Arthur Pym and I weren’t dead. The heathens blew up the Jane Guy the next day. So we got a canoe, got out of there. Took one of them niggers for rowing, but he ended up dead. Pym wanted to cook him up right then, but the tide had pulled us all the way down to the bottom of the world land by then and we come to