Read Online Pym by Mat Johnson - Free Book Online Page A

Apache.
    When I turned back to Mahalia Mathis, she seemed to have aged nearly ten years in as many seconds. Her mouth was agape, her top denture clacked loosely down for lack of support. Mrs. Mathis thought the thirty-two percent Native was her , I realized. That was the only thing that had let her keep her composure before now. Putting a trembling hand to the folder before her, Mrs. Mathis looked inside, and I peered discreetly over her shoulder. Two percent Native. Twenty-three percent European. Seventy-five percent African. This last bit I saw when I picked the findings off the linoleum after Mahalia Mathis collapsed, unconscious.
    Discovering to my great relief that the older woman was neither dead nor in a coma, I carried Mrs. Mathis off the floor and out of the room, placing her barely conscious body in the backseat of my rental car. There she moaned and coughed as I returned her to her residence, invisible in my rearview mirror, her occasional sobs the only proof I had that she had recovered from her faint. At her curb, my steadying arm was all that managed to get her to her door. Not a word was said, not even “Good night.” I was so freaked out by the entire incident, so in a rush to distance myself from the entire event, that I left her front stoop before I realized that I didn’t get what I had come for: Poe’s letter. It took all of my social strength to return right then to Mahalia Mathis’s door and knock on it. “The letter,” I bellowed to the wood, attempting to be both loud and empathetic, repeating this refrain until my throat was as sore as my rapping knuckles. It took me a while to accept that, even if the older woman heard me, she was beyond my reach now.

    By the time I got back to the Hudson Valley, I could laugh at some of it as I told Garth what had happened. Garth had his copy of Chesapeake Cabin rolled out on the coffee table, along with printed out driving directions to possible site locations. It wasn’t till I’d finished my story and he looked up at me that I realized he was pissed.
    “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