Pym_ A Novel - Mat Johnson [28]
* Dirk Peters, The True and Interesting Narrative of Dirk Peters, p. 277.
† Dirk Peters used the phrase “remembering thing,” actually.
‡ Peters’s repeated phrase for this was “Help me make good on the thing.”
§ Peters, Narrative, p. 184.
‖ Ibid., p. 185.
a That is to say, it advocated lifelong human bondage for those of African descent, as well as their children and grandchildren, great-grandchildren, et cetera, for eternity.
b Peters, Narrative, p. 278.
c Peters, Narrative, p. 185.
d Peters, Narrative, p. 186.
MOST of the people on the Jaynes side of the family fell into two categories, brilliant or lunatic. My mother, who raised me alone, gave me both her surname and its problematic lineage. The Jaynes family was stricken with overactive intellectualism, which is why so many were clinically or functionally insane. But my other cousins insisted that Booker Jaynes was in the brilliant category. Mostly.
From calling around, the story I got was this: Booker Jaynes hadn’t started out paranoid, he’d just worked his way there through life experience and due diligence. Booker Jaynes was probably the world’s only civil rights activist turned deep-sea diver. The successes of the struggle in the South left him feeling distraught and betrayed—he was just getting started when those Negroes down there decided to call it quits—and he went as far away from it as he could. While his other disaffected radical brothers went underground, he went undersea, diving commercially mostly and wreck-diving when he could. The man had made his career before technology increased the range and duration of dives, back when you made it on oxygen and a prayer. It was a world where you owned no treasure unless you dragged it onto the boat yourself, where the rights to a fortune were often protected only by the sea that hid it, where claim jumping was called “fair game.” Booker Jaynes was as much a product of this world as of the northern Bronx he grew up in. For Booker, going from diving to polar exploration was as natural as making the transition from H2O in its liquid to its solid form. When he was a kid growing up with my great-uncle Frazel, Booker had his interest in polar exploration sparked by an article about the explorer Matthew Henson in the Brooklyn Sun. After saving Green Stamps from the local Shop N’ Go for a year, Booker used the coupons to buy ice shoes and ski poles. By the time he could actually afford the things, it was June, so his pop arranged for Booker to have time climbing the discarded shavings from an ice-skating rink in Rosendale. The most important thing my calls to cousins and aunties told me, though, was that Booker was a man who made things happen. Or at least tried to.
Booker looked like a Jaynes, forehead like a block of caramel toffee, neck stolen from a giraffe, unfortunate attributes he’d tried to cover with a snake orgy of gray dreadlocks. As we’d planned the night before, we met at a bar in lower Manhattan, past City Hall by the docks. I didn’t like going near Wall Street. More specifically, I didn’t like going near high-risk bombing targets, it just wasn’t my thing. He sat in the back of the room staring intently at the front door, Malcolm X style, which considering we were in an organic juice bar was a little heavy for the scene.
“I used to come here before. Used to serve you underage, if you worked the docks,” he told me. “Wasn’t all bright with these damn lights in here. It was called Hughson’s. It was a place you could get stabbed with a knife. It changed on me,” my cousin told me, in a way that sounded like he was adding it to a long list of things in this world that had betrayed him.
He asked about my motive for the expedition and I launched into the story of Pym. As his eyes drooped, I suddenly appreciated Garth for his ability to feign the slightest interest in literary history. Next, he asked me about the family. It was clear he wasn’t interested.