Pym Read Online Free PDF Page A

footprints did not exist on that sand. I think the work of the great white writers is important, but I think it’s most important when it’s negotiating me and my people, because I am as arrogant and selfish a reader as any other.

    The Jane Guy finds a polar bear living wild in these southern seas. That’s right, a polar bear. It’s not simply that this bear shouldn’t be in the earth’s Southern Hemisphere—Poe gets many of his science facts wrong, particularly egregious considering that he plagiarized contemporary firsthand travel reports. At least he could have copied the information down correctly. No, what’s remarkable is the description of the bear itself:
His wool was perfectly white, and very coarse, curling tightly. The eyes were of a blood red, and larger than those of the Arctic bear—the snout also more rounded …
    Tight, curly hair and a round nose … on a polar bear? Right. Strange things to imagine, particularly together. Makes you (me) wonder, who else is known for tight curly hair and round noses, whose attributes might have inspired Poe, consciously or sub? This improbable bear is, of course, just a teaser in his symbolic offering. One of many, along with Pym’s growing descriptions of the massive black albatrosses which haunt the Jane Guy , or the black and white penguins whose rookeries seem to offer a chance of order between this visual dichotomy. The real treasure comes at the arrival at the island of Tsalal, which despite being floating distance to the Antarctic continent, is a tropical land, well populated and idyllic in a way that harkens back to Diderot’s Tahiti. Except this island is not populated by a previously unknown enclave of Polynesians, or an even less probable lost tribe of hot-weather Inuits. No, the inhabitants of Tsalal are Negroes.
They were about the ordinary stature of Europeans, but of a more muscular and brawny frame. Their complexion a jet black, with thick and long woolly hair. They were clothed in skins of an unknown black animal, shaggy and silky, and made to fit the body with some degree of skill, the hair being inside, except where turned out about the neck, wrists, and ankles. Their arms consisted principally of clubs, of a dark, and apparently very heavy wood.
    Not just skin of black, which is the classic European mythic negative, but woolly hair to match. These brothers are black. These brothers are so black they wear only the skins of animals that are black. The only wood they carry is darker than ebony. These brothers are so black, we eventually find out, that even their teeth are black. † In fact, the entire island of Tsalal is hued in shades of blackness. Poe leaves no detail unturned in his assertion of Tsalal as a fantastic place; even the water is poured into this metaphorical construct:
It was not colourless, nor was it of any one uniform colour—presenting to the eye, as it flowed, every possible shade of purple.… Upon collecting a basinful, and allowing it to settle thoroughly, we perceived that the whole mass of liquid was made up of a number of distinct veins, each of a distinct hue; that these veins did not commingle; and that their cohesion was perfect in regard to their own particles among themselves, and imperfect in regard to neighbouring veins.
    The water is purple, a product of the mixes of the shades of white and black. The water’s veins hold up even when a knife cuts through it. So many shades yet they do not “commingle,” they exist separate but equal. Connected but completely disconnected. Metaphorically, it is synonymous with the racial fantasy that Booker T. Washington would put forth so many decades later in his “Atlanta Compromise,” that all Americans will be a fist of strength together, but in socializing we’ll be as racially segregated as the fingers of a hand.
    The island of Tsalal offers horror, clearly, immediately. These black people—and it is a stretch to call these people “people,” with their