PIP: A STORY IN THREE PARTS

To Jonathan Baer

1. One Pip

Where does it all begin? With water? Everything! Always with water. From the womb to the well or running stream, always. Womb? His mother’s, yes, begins.

Her people, so, therefore, his people, had made the Passage a hundred years before, lived in South Carolina all the generations since. She knew how to read and write—the doctor who made the rounds of the plantation took her under his wing and taught her, and a few others, these arts. She in turn had tried to teach her mother, but her mother remained too tired, as young as she was, after a day’s work with the rice. All so complicated. They kept a small compact black idol, a seated man with wiry arms and a long neck, stowed in the back of their cabin even as they went to church every Sunday—it made a difference to them, keeping the old ways while all around them most other souls who lived in the cabins jumped up and down and sang their hearts out while the preacher shouted out the name of Jesus. Sunday nights, they would set the black stone god on their table and stare at him, giving themselves over to the deepest thoughts they could muster while thinking his unsayable name.

“———”

The idol had come on the Passage from the old country long long ago, with the great-great grandparents, and she believed the little man had saved them from the sickness and the storms that blasted them and battered the ship, killing so many, so many, as they sailed west.

Jesus! A god nowhere near as old as theirs! He kept them rounded up, crowded into a make-shift church every Sunday.

That’s where she saw him for the first time as more than the boy he was when they first noticed each other—clapping his hands above his head, dodging this way, dodging that way.

He sparked something in her, down below, the way lightning might strike a tree on fire in a violent spring storm. Jesus! She shouted out. Jesus! Just her way of announcing to herself that she felt the desire in her.

Imagine his mother on her back, legs raised, ankles hooked behind the neck of the rowdy young fellow who had worshiped her from afar, this young stalk of a man, muscley arms, thick neck, callused hands, walking hang-dog all the days until one late afternoon, after the overseer called in the hands from the fields—it was raining, unaccountably, warm drizzle seeming almost to emerge from the air itself at every level from the clouds to the distant tree-tops to the succulent air they waded through as if through a shoulder-high creek—and this young lad seeing her—and she seeing him—worked up the courage to speak.

The loving, the only freedom they had!

Raising that raggedy hem up to her chin, feeling that good heat between her legs, oh, it made her raise herself up in spirit high as those rain clouds—the warm rain seeping, seeping everywhere—

Her blood stopped, the baby grew in her belly. The family gathered around the little black god, saying, praying. She imagined the infant, a tiny man, floating in her belly water, the ocean inside her.

In the middle of the hot season, which everyone said was the home season, as hot as home, though only the oldest among the folks in the cabin had even the slightest memory of the place, she felt the stirrings, twinges at first, and then twistings, and soon she lay on her side and then on her back, her apron up to her chin, while the wiggedy woman worked over her, helping to pull that child from its hiding place of water and blood and various other body liquors, the kind that stinked up the cabin even while the infant cried its heart out into the stale, unmoving air.

“I am here!” he seemed to announce. “Make my way in the world!”

To what?

A life of indentured labor in the rice fields loomed ahead of him in the not so distant future when he would put aside his wooden toys and wade in water up to his knees as he followed along behind his mother who stooped to shake the kernels from the mature and blooming plants.

That was the system that bound them, that was the system that, ironically, led to his freedom.

Herewith, told as compactly as possible, was how it happened: the scion of the plantation owner caught her in the barn and amid nervous, snorting, sometimes stamping horses raped her. His young wife, nervous herself, and shouting—it was not the first time he had gone to the barn—called him out about it at the family dinner table the next evening. His father put the girl up at auction in town the next week and a passing dealer from Virginia bought her, along with a few other souls, and sold her to a farmer in Alabama. (The child went along with her, for a few dollars extra, a bargain to anyone who looked beyond the next five years, oh, the labor he would produce!)

Slavery—that near-cosmic interlocking web of individual souls, the slaves and the free—made anything possible. Here and there we observe notes of great heroism on the part of the free on behalf of the slaves, and here and there we see the basest, most evil acts imaginable in the human sphere of things, and so much worse than anything we observe in the natural world—rape, oh, yes, even torture and cannibalism—put on the slaves by the free. So while difficult to consider in the abstract, the chain of simple, ordinary events, in this case mostly positive, that sent this young man from Alabama to Connecticut rings true, even if, to the unlearned observer, sounding somewhat like a fairy tale.

Simply this: a secret Abolitionist kidnapped him when the boy was only six years old and conveyed him to near–New England where he arranged for a young family to take him in. Once a wave in a black sea that broke on a white shore, now he lived as one of the few black children in a sea of white.

How many slave children could have said this was their story?

A few, almost none, perhaps just this young fellow.

This extraordinary young fellow!

One Pip!

In Tolland County, Connecticut, he spent the rest of his growing up in a family who produced a son somewhat overweight, especially when standing next to slender Pippin, or Pip, as he became to be known, this fellow nick-named Dough-Boy. In outer aspect, Pip and Dough-Boy made a match—as Melville described it—like a black pony and a white one, of equal developments, though of dissimilar color, driven in one eccentric span. But while hapless Dough-Boy was by nature dull and torpid in his intellects, Pip, though overly tender-hearted, was at bottom very bright . . . Pip loved life . . . in his . . . County in Connecticut, he had once enlivened many a fiddler’s frolic on the green; and at melodious even-tide, with his gay ha-ha! had turned the round horizon into one star-belled tambourine. So, though in the clear air of day, suspended against a blue-veined neck, the pure-watered diamond drop will healthful glow; yet, when the cunning jeweller would show you the diamond in its most impressive lustre, he lays it against a gloomy ground, and then lights it up, not by the sun, but by some unnatural gases. Then come out those fiery effulgences, infernally superb; then the evil-blazing diamond, once the divinest symbol of the crystal skies, looks like some crown jewel stolen from the King of Hell. But let us to the story . . . of how two boys set out together on a lark to meet their fate. One late autumn afternoon, when clouds had gathered above the dying grass on their sweet Connecticut field, they heard their mother’s call from the house to come in for supper. As if he had been planning it all his young life, Pip put a finger to his lips, and Dough-Boy, as boys will, kept his silence. A cow moaned in the barn. A hawk circled overhead, looking for the last mouse of Indian summer. What if we dance along the road, Pip said, and run all the way to the sea-shore? A light came in to Dough-Boy’s eyes. What if? a boy asks. Why not? a boy says.

Off to the shore, following the weather. No dark of night fazed them. They had each other, the black boy, the white boy, walking all day, sleeping in each others’ arms most of the night. A few farmers gave them passage overland. After some days they arrived in New Bedford and saw the sea reflected in the sky, a marbled display of cloud that augured troubled seas. Yes, it rained, and they huddled under a thicket of trees not a hundred yards from the shore.

Darkness settled over them before they arrived at the harbor, which seemed a place into which all light had retreated and then been covered over with a lid. Such dreary streets! blocks of blackness, not houses, on either hand, and here and there a candle, like a candle moving about in a tomb. At this hour of the night, of the last day of the week, that quarter of the town proved all but deserted. But presently they came to a smoky light proceeding from a low, wide building, the door of which stood invitingly open. It had a careless look, as if it were meant for the uses of the public; so, entering, the first thing they did was to stumble over an ash-box on the porch. Ha! thought Pip who had listened to his sermons in his late childhood, ha, as the flying particles almost choked him, are these ashes from that destroyed city, Gomorrah? However, they picked themselves up and hearing a loud voice within, pushed on and opened a second, interior door.

It seemed the great Black Parliament sitting in Tophet. A hundred black faces turned round in their rows to peer; and beyond, a black Angel of Doom was beating a book in a pulpit. It was a negro church; and the preacher’s text was about the blackness of darkness, and the weeping and wailing and teeth-gnashing there. Pip, raised as the black oddity in a white family in a white town in a white county, had never seen anything like it. He listened, as if mesmerized by some master magician, hearing about his sins committed and his sins to come—the DARK part of you, the preacher intoned, the part that the DEVIL owns, the part that is DEAD to the rest of you but DRIVES you to commit the dastardly. Pip’s hands shook first, and then his knees, and soon he could hardly stand, leaning back against the wall that stood between him and the street. He reached for Dough-Boy’s hand, but his brother had already lighted out the door, fearing such darkness as welled up inside this church.

Thus Pip had no one, nothing to hold on to, and he too wept, and he too gnashed his teeth, and felt himself falling forward even as he leaned further back against the wall, and a dark face loomed up in his thoughts, and he did not know the face but knew it was his father, or, rather, his Father, God Himself, whose face glowed as dark as the light-faced Jesus he was raised to believe in, and he held out his hand—while the preacher shouted out, COME TO ME—and he felt the fingers of a hand reaching back to him—and it tugged him forward, and he shouted FATHER!

All the heads in the congregation turned around, and row upon row of black and brown and tan and near-white, and darker than dark faces opened their eyes wide upon him, and he backed out the door into the dark street that seemed almost by comparison as light as that moment just before the night ends and the dawn begins—a sliver of light sandwiched between the dark and the light . . . He found Dough-Boy standing with his face to the east, tears running down his cheeks.

“What’s that?” Pip said.

“I want to go home,” Dough-Boy said through his tears.

“Now, now,” said Pip. “You have no home now, no home except with me, your brother.”

He took Dough-Boy by the hand and led him toward the water, which differed only from the dark sky by the sizzing sound made by the waves. They found a small boat chained to a metal pillar and climbed down into it.

Just then a figure passed them by, tall and unusual as it stretched out at the advent of first light, jarring Pip into recognition. A man, yes, but what a man! Such a face! It was of a dark purplish, yellow color, here and there stuck over with large, blackish looking squares, as if its owner had been in a midnight brawl, got dreadfully cut, and there he was, just returning from the surgeon. But in that moment that he passed he turned his face so toward the light, that Pip plainly saw they could not be sticking-plasters at all, those black squares on his cheeks. They were stains of some sort or other. At first he knew not what to make of this; but soon an inkling of the truth occurred to him. He remembered a story told by some white boy, the son of a whaleman, about a whaleman who, falling among the far South Sea cannibals, had been tattooed by them. Pip marveled at this artwork, even as its owner, after bestowing on him and Dough-Boy, a jagged wink of his eye, disappeared into the shadows. They next pulled the sails over them, Pip consoling Dough-Boy with intermittent pats on his shoulder, until they awaked early and pulled sails aside and watched that slant of earliest morning grow wider and wider, like an eye gazing down at them in a long horizontal ever-enlarging stare.

The next morning Dough-Boy seemed cured of his home-sickness, and good for that. He miraculously produced some silver coins from inside his sock.

“Have you been walking on those?” Pip inquired.

“Dancing on them,” Dough-Boy said.

The coins bought them a ferry-ride to Nantucket.

“So, my boys, you’re going to see the world?”

The ferry-man, who wore a thick dark beard and a gold earring that dangled from his left ear-lobe, took their money while squinting oddly into the light behind them, as if he could not see the boys at all.

“I suppose,” Pip said.

“I suppose, too,” Dough-Boy said.

“See life and death in various arctic and tropic poses,” the ferry-man said. “Well, I’ll help ye on your way.” And he gestured for them to board his little ferry.

Within the hour, Pip found himself looking back at the mainland receding into a flowering cloud bank. This was serious travel now, serious travel, the spat and hiss of the waves against the sides of the small boat, the lulling motion in his stomach. Dough-Boy moaned with the roll of the waves. The trip took much longer than they had ever imagined. Five days from Connecticut seemed like a lark compared to these hours on the heaving near-ocean. Slowly the light faded from the sky, the east blackened almost at once and to the west, whence they had come, a gradual thinning out and covering over. It could not have been more than early afternoon but it seemed almost the dark of night.

But darker still was the face of the man they first encountered just after disembarking from the ferry, a stranger as tall and straight as a young tree, with a long steel-tipped weapon in hand.

“You come from over dere?” he said, pointing with the weapon—only later would they recognize they had seen their first, though hardly their last, harpoon—in the direction of the mainland.

Dough-Boy shed yet another tear or two.

“Yes,” he said, “from our home.”

“Say goodbye,” the tall dark man said. He stared down at Pip from his considerable height. “You, my brother, say goodbye.”

“Goodbye?” Pip did not seem to understand.

“To home,” the dark harpooner said.

Dough-Boy shed more tears. Pip pinched him at the elbow and shook his head. “You hush, now,” he said. “We are on our way.”

“To where, oh, where?” Dough-Boy tried to keep his tear voice steady but did not do a good job of it.

“Dere,” said the tall dark harpooner, turning the point of his weapon toward the harbor.

Three ships stood out among the many smaller vessels, the Devil-Dam, the Tit-bit, and the Pequod. The dark harpooner herded them toward this last, using his weapon like a shepherd’s crook. The Pequod was a rare old craft, a ship of the old school, rather small if anything; with an old-fashioned claw-footed look about her. Long seasoned and weather-stained in the typhoons and calms of all four oceans, her old hull’s complexion was darkened like a French grenadier’s who has alike fought in Egypt and Siberia. Her venerable bows looked bearded. Her masts—cut somewhere on the coast of Japan, where her original ones were lost overboard in a gale—her masts stood stiffly up like the spines of the three old kings of Cologne. Her ancient decks were worn and wrinkled, like the pilgrim-worshipped flag-stone in Canterbury Cathedral where Beckett bled. But to all these her old antiquities, were added new and marvelous features, pertaining to the wild business that for more than half a century she had followed. Old Captain Peleg, many years her chief-mate, before he commanded another vessel of his own, and now a retired seaman, and one of the principal owners of the Pequod—this old Peleg, during the term of his chief-mateship, had built upon her original grotesqueness, and inlaid it, all over, with a quaintness both of material and device, unmatched by anything except it be Thorkill-Hake’s carved buckler or bedstead. She was apparelled like any barbaric Ethiopian emperor, his neck heavy with pendants of polished ivory. She was a thing of trophies. A cannibal of a craft, tricking herself forth in the chased bones of her enemies. All round, her unpanelled, open bulwarks were garnished like one continuous jaw, with the long sharp teeth of the Sperm Whale, inserted there for pins, to fasten her old hempen thews and tendons to. Those thews ran not through base blocks of land wood, but deftly travelled over sheaves of sea-ivory. Scorning a turnstile wheel at her reverend helm, she sported there a tiller; and that tiller was in one mass, curiously carved from the long narrow lower jaw of her hereditary foe. The helmsman who steered by that tiller in a tempest, felt like the Tartar, when he holds back his fiery steed by clutching its jaw. A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that.

Now when the boys followed the harpooner aboard they looked about the quarter-deck, for some one having authority, in order to propose themselves as candidates for the voyage, at first they saw nobody; but they could not well overlook a strange sort of tent, or rather wigwam, pitched a little behind the main-mast. It seemed only a temporary erection used in port. It was of a conical shape, some ten feet high; consisting of the long, huge slabs of limber black bone taken from the middle and highest part of the jaws of the right-whale. Planted with their broad ends on the deck, a circle of these slabs laced together, mutually sloped towards each other, and at the apex united in a tufted point, where the loose hairy fibers waved to and fro like a top-knot on some old Pottawatomie Sachem’s head. A triangular opening faced towards the bows of the ship, so that the insider commanded a complete view forward.

And half concealed in this queer tenement, they at length found one who by his aspect seemed to have authority; and who, with, as it appeared, the ship’s work suspended, was now enjoying respite from the burden of command. He was seated on an old-fashioned oaken chair, wriggling all over with curious carving; and the bottom of which was formed of a stout interlacing of the same elastic stuff of which the wigwam was constructed.

There was nothing so very particular, perhaps, about the appearance of the elderly man they saw; he was brown and brawny, like most old seamen, and heavily rolled up in blue pilot-cloth, cut in the Quaker style; only there was a fine and almost microscopic net-work of the minutest wrinkles interlacing round his eyes, which must have arisen from his continual sailings in many hard gales, and always looking to windward;—for this causes the muscles about the eyes to become pursed together. Such eye-wrinkles are very effectual in a scowl.

The dark-hued harpooner apparently having disappeared, Pip, employing his best Connecticut manners and advancing to the door of the tent (while towing Dough-Boy along behind), said, “Sir, Sir, are you the Captain of the ship?”

“Supposing it be the Captain of the Pequod, what dost thou want of him?” the man demanded.

“We wish to go to sea,” Pip said, surprising himself with his resolution.

“Thou wast, wast thou? I see thou are no Nantucketer—ever been in a stove boat?”

“No, Sir, I never have.”

“Dost know nothing at all about whaling, I dare say—eh?”

“Nothing, Sir; but I have no doubt we shall soon learn.”

“But what takes thee a-whaling? I want to know that before I think of shipping ye.”

“Well, sir, we want to see what whaling is. I want to see the world.”

“Want to see what whaling is, eh? Have ye clapped eye on Captain Ahab?”

“Who is Captain Ahab, sir?”

“Aye, aye, I thought so. Captain Ahab is the Captain of this ship.”

“You are not the Captain?”

Pip felt the boastfulness that had been powering him give him the last burst of propulsion, like the last breeze to fill an ill-fated kite.

“Thou art speaking just now to Captain Peleg—that’s who ye are speaking to, young man. It belongs to me and Captain Bildad to see the Pequod fitted out for the voyage, and supplied with all her needs, including crew. We are part owners and agents. But as I was going to say, if thou wantest to know what a voyage is, as thou tellest ye do, I can put ye in a way of finding it out before ye bind yourself to it, past backing out. Clap eye on Captain Ahab, young man, and thou wilt find that he has only one leg.”

“What do you mean, Sir? Was the other one lost by a shark?”

“Lost by a shark? Young man, come nearer to me: it was devoured, chewed up, crunched by the monstrousest parmacetty that ever chipped a boat!—ah, ah! In other words, taken from him by a whale!”

Pip grew alarmed by his energy, perhaps also a little touched at the hearty grief in his concluding exclamation, but said as calmly as he could, “A whale might do that?” He heard an odd noise at his shoulder and glanced around to find Dough-Boy whimpering like a child.

“Oh, now, my young boys,” the Captain said. “I have frightened you without reason. While there is always the possibility of some creature stoving us in, you’ll have your hands full enough serving the Captain. He’s a queer man, Captain Ahab—so some think—but a good one. Oh, thou’lt like him well enough; no fear, no fear. He’s a grand, ungodly, god-like man, Captain Ahab; doesn’t speak much; but, when he does speak, then you may well listen. Mark ye, be forewarned; Ahab’s above the common; Ahab’s been in colleges, as well as ‘mong the cannibals; been used to deeper wonders than the waves; fixed his fiery lance in mightier stranger foes than whales. His lance! Aye, the keenest and the surest that out of all our isle! Oh! he ain’t Captain Bildad; no, and he ain’t Captain Peleg; he’s Ahab, boy; and Ahab of old, thou knowest, was a crowned king!”

Next he led them out of the tent and into the damp and bracing air.

“Now then,” he said, “ye never been to sea. Take a long look and see what you see, just step forward there, and take a peep over the weather-bow, and then back to me and tell me what ye see there.”

For a moment Pip stood a little puzzled by this curious request, not knowing exactly how to take it, whether humorously or in earnest. But concentrating all his crow’s feet into one scowl, Captain Peleg started him on the errand.

Going forward and glancing over the weather bow, Pip perceived that the ship swinging to her anchor with the flood-tide was now obliquely pointing toward the open ocean. The prospect was unlimited, but exceedingly monotonous and forbidding; not the slightest variety that he could see.

“Well, what’s the report?” said Peleg when Pip came back; “what did ye see?”

“Not much,” Pip replied—“nothing but water; considerable horizon though, and there’s a squall coming up, I think.”

“Well, what dost thou think then of seeing the world? Do ye wish to go round Cape Horn to see any more of it, eh? Can’t ye see the world where you stand?”

Pip looked to Dough-Boy, Dough-Boy looked to Pip, and the pair bowed their heads toward the water, toward the Captain. Within a few moments he led them below-decks to the quarters of Captain Ahab, the master of the Pequod, of whom they had never seen the likes before.

He frightened them, desperately. Behold: . . . He looked like a man cut away from the stake, when the fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them, or taking away one particle from their compacted aged robustness. His whole high, broad form, seemed made of solid bronze, and shaped in an unalterable mould, like Cellini’s cast Perseus. Threading its way out from among his gray hairs, and continuing right down one side of his tawny scorched face and neck, till it disappeared in his clothing, you saw a slender rod-like mark, lividly whitish. It resembled that perpendicular seam sometimes made in the straight, lofty trunk of a great tree, when the upper lightning tearingly darts down it, and without wrenching a single twig, peels and grooves out the bark from top to bottom, ere running off into the soil, leaving the tree still greenly alive, but branded. Whether that mark was born with him, or whether it was the scar left by some desperate wound, no one could certainly say. So powerfully did the whole grim aspect of Ahab affect Pip, and the livid brand which streaked it, that for the first few moments he hardly noted that not a little of this overbearing grimness was owing to the barbaric white leg upon which he partly stood. The black boy was struck with the singular posture the Captain maintained. Upon each side of the Captain’s desk, there was an auger hole, bored about half an inch or so, into the plank. When he rose to speak, his bone leg steadied in that hole . . .

“You will serve me?” he said to the boys.

They nodded wordlessly, and in a moment, dismissed by their new—and as it would turn out final—master, they trailed behind Captain Peleg up to the tent on the deck where another brawny leathery-browed Nantucket Captain signed them both for a thousandth lay each of the profits from this whaling voyage.

Pip understood that he would become the marked Captain’s shadow. But until the voyage began he slept some depth below the decks curled up in the arms of his brother Dough-Boy. It felt so cold down here that his shivers began to shiver. He arose early and crept back up topside even before the rising sun gave him a shadow. Turning his back to the town he stared out over the quietly rippling water, where the harbor met the ocean and stood there a long while, as the sun inched quietly across the pure cream of the southern sky. If he had known the word, he would have called what he was doing meditation. (Water and meditation are wedded forever.) His mother’s face came to mind, and he breathed and breathed as he studied it, her dark, springy hair, her broad uncreased forehead, the brown depths of her eyes, the beautiful flanges of her nose, her full lips, the way her tongue peeked out when she was thinking. Hello, Mama. Goodbye, Mama. Hello, Mama. Goodbye, Mama. Hello, Mama, Goodbye, Mama. He breathed in and out, in and out, in and out. Breath comes in threes. As the tide laps waves against the hull. Slapping and quiet, slapping and quiet, slapping and quiet. Cool wind. He breathed in and out. Recognized his breathing. A sea-bird caught his eye as it swerved over the mast, skidded in air, and lighted down upon the bow. Oh, Mama, where are you? In warm weather, water, bath of life, the essence of wind and wave come slapping, lapping, stillness.

Third among the harpooners on this voyage was Daggoo, a gigantic, coal-black man, with a lion-like tread—a king to behold. Suspended from his ears were two golden hoops, so large that the sailors called them ring-bolts, and would talk of securing the top-sail halyards to them. In his youth Daggoo had voluntarily shipped on board of a whaler, lying in a lonely bay on his native coast. And never having been anywhere in the world but in Africa, Nantucket, and the pagan harbors most frequented by whalemen; and having now led for many years the bold life of the fishery in the ships of owners uncommonly heedful of what manner of men they shipped; Daggoo retained all his barbaric virtues, and erect as a giraffe, moved about the decks in all the pomp of six feet five in his socks. There was a corporeal humility in looking up at him; and a white man standing before him seemed a white flag come to beg truce of a fortress. When Pip turned at a sound and saw him approaching, the same man who had led them to the ship, he wanted to bow down and at the same time hug his giant leg and at the same time look up at him and declare him “Papa!”

“You! Squib!” the harpooner said to him, “you sign for the voyage?”

Pip nodded, finding it difficult to speak.

“Brave little black spot,” the harpooner said.

“I—”

The harpooner stared him down, laying a finger across his lips.

“Never say a word on dis ship,” he said. “You obey, not talk. Sing, maybe, but not talk. Dance, maybe, but not talk.”

He seemed about to say more when he turned quickly, as if about to strike at an interloper, and Pip saw an odd pair of new arrivals clambering aboard the deck: a young man about average height with brown hair and wide eyes, dressed in a tight wool coat to keep himself warm, and that same bald-headed tattooed native whom the boys had encountered on the street, his face a patch-quilt of lights and darks.

“Shoo, shoo!” said the giant harpooner, with a wave of his instrument, “dese men don’t come here on board to be stared at!”

At which, Pip and Dough-Boy scrambled across the deck and took the steps down and down and down to their private domain. There they stayed, until a seaman roused them from their sleeping entanglements and bid Pip come up to the Captain’s quarters.

Much to the boy’s chagrin, they were already moving.

“Here ye be!” The Captain pointed at him with a pen-point in hand. “And here ye remain!” He inclined his head toward a corner of the large cabin where lay a blanket and a pillow. Pointing with the pen, he growled, “Down dog, and kennel!”

In his place, Pip noticed that the ship rolled, the ship pitched as they headed out into the cold Atlantic, and in these early days of the voyage he learned to serve as only a servant could, being lower than low but yet still essential to the well-being of his master, who could not stand so high except for that he kept his servant beneath him.

Though stand be just a metaphor when referring to this Captain Ahab, who had lost a leg to the vindictive whale and its whiteness of being. Pip, as he followed the man about, was struck with the singular posture his master maintained. Upon each side of the Pequod’s quarter deck, and pretty close to the mizen shrouds, there was an auger hole, bored about half an inch or so, into the plank. His bone leg steadied in that hole; one arm elevated, and holding by a shroud; Captain Ahab stood erect, looking straight out beyond the ship’s ever-pitching prow. There was an infinity of firmest fortitude, a determinate unsurrenderable wilfulness, in the fixed and fearless, forward dedication of that glance. Not a word he spoke; nor did his officers say aught to him; though by all their minutest gestures and expressions, they plainly showed the uneasy, if not painful, consciousness of being under a troubled master-eye. And not only that, but moody stricken Ahab stood before them with a crucifixion in his face; in all the nameless regal overbearing dignity of some mighty woe.

By day Pip, doing his duties, which included everything from carrying his master’s wine glass to polishing his extra leg, noticed the crew remained on alert every passing minute, because those who spoke to him, and more and more of the crew did speak to him the farther out to sea they sailed, said a whale-spout might materialize at any second, and this was their business, spying the spout, so that each man remained as ready to catch sight of it as the sailor whose duty it was that day or night to climb up the mast-head and keep a horizon-filled watch for the tell-tale plume in the distance. He craned his neck each time he found himself on deck, watching the watchers.

Some weeks out, while in an off-moment from duty during an evening he heard a young sailor, perhaps the same brown-haired man who had boarded with the tattooed giant some weeks before, reading from a note-book, aloud, to his tattooed friend.

“Whales are as scarce as hen’s teeth they tell me when I am up on the mast-head. Perhaps they were; or perhaps there might have been shoals of them in the far horizon; but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last I lose my identity; take the mystic ocean at my feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes me; every dimly discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to me the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, my spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like Cranmer’s sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over. There is no life in me, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God. But while this sleep, this dream is on me, move my foot or hand an inch; slip my hold at all; and my identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek I could drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists!”

Dreamy, meditative talk, yes?

But nothing like the nights on deck, when the weather turned warm and the seas for a dreamy few minutes rocked the ship like an infant in a cradle.

Second Nantucket Sailor: Avast the chorus! Eight bells there! d’ye hear, bell-boy? Strike the bell eight, thou Pip! Thou blackling! and let me call the watch. I’ve the sort of mouth for that—the hogshead mouth. So, so, (thrusts his head down the scuttle), Star—bo-l-e-e-n-s, a-h-o-y! Eight bells there below! Tumble up!

French Sailor: Merry-mad! Hold up thy hoop, Pip, till I jump through it! split jibs! tear yourselves!

Tashtego quietly smoking: That’s a white man; he calls that fun: humph! I save my sweat.

Pip shrinking under the windlass: Jollies? Lord help such jollies! Crish, crash! there goes the jib-stay! Blang-whang! God! Duck lower, Pip, here comes the royal yard! It’s worse than being in the whirled woods, the last day of the year; Who’d go climbing after chestnuts now? But there they go, all cursing, and here I don’t. Fine prospects to ‘em; they’re on the road to heaven. Hold on hard! Jimmini, what a squall! But those chaps there are worse yet—they are your white squalls, they. White squalls? white whale, shirr! shirr! Here have I heard all their chat just now, and the white whale—shirr! shirr!— but spoken of once! and only this evening—it makes me jingle all over like my tambourine—that anaconda of an old man swore ‘em in to hunt him! Oh, thou big white God aloft there somewhere in yon darkness, have mercy on this small black boy down here; preserve him from all men that have no bowels to feel fear!

And then came a sighting, and another, and another.

Pip’s work however, appeared to be below rather than above. He cleaned the Captain’s cabin and washed the walk before it, and now and then helped the cook with the cutting of the meat and the mixing of the dough. (Dough-Boy, less fortunate, did not work on his name-sake but rather spent most of his waking days polishing brass and swabbing decks.) On calm days Pip slowed down, and now and then caught a glimpse of sailors he had noticed before and upon the sailing, that tattooed Islander, for example, sitting upon his bunk, his hand holding close up to his face a little negro idol, peering hard into its face, and with a jack-knife gently whittling away at its nose, meanwhile humming to himself in his heathenish way. The wash of nostalgia for a home he could not remember splashed over the young boy so that for a moment or two he wanted to burst into tears. And then he watched the ginger-haired sailor who had accompanied the larger harpooner, him sitting also, reading from a book whose title Pip, as he meandered past him, caught a glimpse of: Metaphysics.

It was but some few days after that a most significant event befell the most insignificant of the Pequod’s crew; an event most lamentable; and which ended in providing the sometimes madly merry and predestinated craft with a living and ever accompanying prophecy of whatever shattered sequel might prove her own.

Now, in the whale ship, it is not every one that goes in the boats. Some few hands are reserved called ship-keepers, whose province it is to work the vessel while the boats are pursuing the whale. As a general thing, these ship-keepers are as hardy fellows as the men comprising the boats’ crews. But if there happen to be an unduly slender, clumsy, or timorous wight in the ship, that wight is certain to be made a ship-keeper. It was so in the Pequod with the little Pippin by nick-name, Pip by abbreviation. Poor Pip! ye have heard of him before; ye must remember his tambourine on that dramatic midnight, so gloomy- jolly, just a moment before.

It came to pass, that in the ambergris affair Stubb’s after-oarsman chanced so to sprain his hand, as for a time to become quite maimed; and, temporarily, Pip was put into his place.

The first time Stubb lowered with him, Pip evinced much nervousness; but happily, for that time, escaped close contact with the whale; and therefore came off not altogether discreditably; though Stubb observing him, took care, afterwards, to exhort him to cherish his courageousness to the utmost, for he might often find it needful.

Now upon the second lowering, the boat paddled upon the whale; and as the fish received the darted iron, it gave its customary rap, which happened, in this instance, to be right under poor Pip’s seat. The involuntary consternation of the moment caused him to leap, paddle in hand, out of the boat; and in such a way, that part of the slack whale line coming against his chest, he breasted it overboard with him, so as to become entangled in it, when at last plumping into the water. That instant the stricken whale started on a fierce run, the line swiftly straightened; and presto! poor Pip came all foaming up to the chocks of the boat, remorselessly dragged there by the line, which had taken several turns around his chest and neck.

Tashtego stood in the bows. He was full of the fire of the hunt. He hated Pip for a poltroon. Snatching the boat-knife from its sheath, he suspended its sharp edge over the line, and turning towards Stubb, exclaimed interrogatively, “Cut?” Meantime Pip’s blue, choked face plainly looked, Do, for God’s sake! All passed in a flash. In less than half a minute, this entire thing happened.

“Damn him, cut!” roared Stubb; and so the whale was lost and Pip was saved.

So soon as he recovered himself, the poor little negro was assailed by yells and execrations from the crew. Tranquilly permitting these irregular cursings to evaporate, Stubb then in a plain, business-like, but still half humorous manner, cursed Pip officially; and that done, unofficially gave him much wholesome advice. The substance was, Never jump from a boat, Pip, except—but all the rest was indefinite, as the soundest advice ever is. Now, in general, Stick to the boat is your true motto in whaling; but cases will sometimes happen when Leap from the boat, is still better. Moreover, as if perceiving at last that if he should give undiluted conscientious advice to Pip, he would be leaving him too wide a margin to jump in for the future; Stubb suddenly dropped all advice, and concluded with a peremptory command, “Stick to the boat, Pip, or by the Lord, I won’t pick you up if you jump; mind that. We can’t afford to lose whales by the likes of you; a whale would sell for thirty times what you would, Pip, in Alabama. Bear that in mind, and don’t jump any more.” Hereby perhaps Stubb indirectly hinted, that though man loved his fellow, yet man is a money-making animal, which propensity too often interferes with his benevolence.

But we are all in the hands of the gods; and Pip jumped again. It was under very similar circumstances to the first performance; but this time he did not breast out the line; and hence, when the whale started to run, Pip was left behind on the sea, like a hurried traveller’s trunk. Alas! Stubb was but too true to his word. It was a beautiful, bounteous, blue day; the spangled sea calm and cool, and flatly stretching away, all round, to the horizon, like gold-beater’s skin hammered out to the extremest. Bobbing up and down in that sea, Pip’s ebon head showed like a head of cloves. No boat-knife was lifted when he fell so rapidly astern. Stubb’s inexorable back was turned upon him; and the whale was winged. In three minutes, a whole mile of shoreless ocean lay between Pip and Stubb. Out from the center of the sea, poor Pip turned his crisp, curling, black head to the sun, another lonely castaway, though the loftiest and the brightest.

Now, in calm weather, to swim in the open ocean is as easy to the practised swimmer as to ride in a spring-carriage ashore. But the awful lonesomeness is intolerable. The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it? Mark, how when sailors in a dead calm bathe in the open sea—mark how closely they hug their ship and only coast along her sides.

But had Stubb really abandoned the poor little negro to his fate? No; he did not mean to, at least. Because there were two boats in his wake, and he supposed, no doubt, that they would of course come up to Pip very quickly, and pick him up; though, indeed, such considerations towards oarsmen jeopardized through their own timidity is not always manifested by the hunters in all similar instances; and such instances not unfrequently occur; almost invariably in the fishery, a coward, so called, is marked with the same ruthless detestation peculiar to military navies and armies.

But it so happened, that those boats, without seeing Pip, suddenly spying whales close to them on one side, turned, and gave chase; and Stubb’s boat was now so far away, and he and all his crew so intent upon his fish, that Pip’s ringed horizon began to expand around him miserably. By the merest chance the ship itself at last rescued him; but from that hour the little negro went about the deck an idiot; such, at least, they said he was. The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then as uncompromised, indifferent as his God.

Oh, Pip, this was but a portent and a premonition of things to come! Pip himself had no sense of this, but others on board the Pequod, even in the midst of their grinding work, saw a certain dark glow about him as they went about their work and mulling on the sea around them, much of that glow insidious and off to the side, like the light of a star.

Had you for example stepped on board the Pequod at a certain juncture of the post-mortemizing of a whale, with the cutting and flensing almost accomplished, and had you strolled forward nigh the windlass, pretty sure you might have scanned with no small curiosity a very strange, enigmatical object, which you would have seen there, lying along lengthwise in the lee scuppers. Not the wondrous cistern in the whale’s huge head; not the prodigy of his unhinged lower jaw; not the miracle of his symmetrical tail; none of these would so surprise you, as half a glimpse of that unaccountable cone,—longer than a Kentuckian is tall, nigh a foot in diameter at the base, and jet-black as Yojo, the ebony idol of Queequeg. And an idol, indeed, it is; or, rather, in old times, its likeness was. Such an idol as that found in the secret groves of Queen Maachah in Judea; and for worshipping which, King Asa, her son, did depose her, and destroyed the idol, and burnt it for an abomination at the brook Kedron, as darkly set forth in the fifteenth chapter of the first book of Kings.

Walking up to this phenomenon, Pip could not have known all this, and yet he felt drawn to it the way he had been drawn to the smaller idol of the tattooed heathen harpooner.

Meanwhile Queequeg, who had ordered the ship’s carpenter to construct his coffin, was busy with the measuring of it. He called for his harpoon, had the wooden stock drawn from it, and then had the iron part placed in the coffin along with one of the paddles of his boat. All by his own request, also, biscuits were then ranged round the sides within: a flask of fresh water was placed at the head, and a small bag of woody earth scraped up in the hold at the foot; and a piece of sail-cloth being rolled up for a pillow, Queequeg now entreated to be lifted into his final bed, that he might make trial of its comforts, if any it had. He lay without moving a few minutes, then told one to go to his bag and bring out his little god, Yojo. Then crossing his arms on his breast with Yojo between, he called for the coffin lid (hatch he called it) to be placed over him. The head part turned over with a leather hinge, and there lay Queequeg in his coffin with little but his composed countenance in view. Rarmai (it will do; it is easy), he murmured at last, and signed to be replaced in his hammock.

But ere this was done, Pip, who had been slily hovering near by all this while, drew nigh to him where he lay, and with soft sobbings, took him by the hand; in the other, holding his tambourine.

“Poor rover! will ye never have done with all this weary roving? Where go ye now? But if the currents carry ye to those sweet Antilles where the beaches are only beat with water-lilies, will ye do one little errand for me? Seek out one Pip, who’s now been missing long: I think he’s in those far Antilles. If ye find him, then comfort him; for he must be very sad; for look! he’s left his tambourine behind;—I found it. Rig-a-dig, dig, dig! Now, Queequeg, die; and I’ll beat ye your dying march.”

“I have heard,” murmured first-mate Starbuck, gazing down the scuttle, “that in violent fevers, men, all ignorance, have talked in ancient tongues; and that when the mystery is probed, it turns out always that in their wholly forgotten childhood those ancient tongues had been really spoken in their hearing by some lofty scholars. So, to my fond faith, poor Pip, in this strange sweetness of his lunacy, brings heavenly vouchers of all our heavenly homes. Where learned he that, but there?—Hark! he speaks again: but more wildly now.”

“From two and two! Let’s make a General of him! Ho, where’s his harpoon? Lay it across here.—Rig-a-dig, dig, dig! huzza! Oh for a game cock now to sit upon his head and crow! Queequeg dies game!—mind ye that; Queequeg dies game!—take ye good heed of that; Queequeg dies game! I say; game, game, game! but base little Pip, he died a coward; died all a’shiver;—out upon Pip! Hark ye; if ye find Pip, tell all the Antilles he’s a runaway; a coward, a coward, a coward! Tell them he jumped from a whale-boat! I’d never beat my tambourine over base Pip, and hail him General, if he were once more dying here. No, no! shame upon all cowards—shame upon them! Let ‘em go drown like Pip, that jumped from a whale-boat. Shame! shame!”

During all this, Queequeg lay with closed eyes, as if in a dream. Pip was led away, and the sick man was replaced in his hammock. Yet out on deck again with Master, not long after Pip witnessed the disaffiliation of the navigation system, with the log used to score along with the line having torn free from the ship.

Ahab saw this as the loosening out of the middle of the world.

“Haul in, haul in, Tahitian! These lines run whole, and whirling out: come in broken, and dragging slow. Ha, Pip? come to help; eh, Pip?”

Pip spoke up, as if out of his own body.

“Pip? whom call ye Pip? Pip jumped from the whale-boat. Pip’s missing. Let’s see now if ye haven’t fished him up here, fisherman. It drags hard; I guess he’s holding on. Jerk him, Tahiti! Jerk him off; we haul in no cowards here. Ho! there’s his arm just breaking water. A hatchet! a hatchet! cut it off—we haul in no cowards here. Captain Ahab! Sir, Sir! here’s Pip, trying to get on board again.”

“Peace, thou crazy loon,” cried the Manxman, seizing him by the arm. “Away from the quarter-deck!”

“The greater idiot ever scolds the lesser,” muttered Ahab, advancing. “Hands off from that holiness! Where sayest thou Pip was, boy?”

“Astern there, Sir, astern! Lo, lo!”

“And who art thou, boy? I see not my reflection in the vacant pupils of thy eyes. Oh God! that man should be a thing for immortal souls to sieve through! Who art thou, boy?”

“Bell-boy, Sir; ship’s-crier; ding, dong, ding! Pip! Pip! Pip! One hundred pounds of clay reward for Pip; five feet high—looks cowardly—quickest known by that! Ding, dong, ding! Who’s seen Pip the coward?”

“There can be no hearts above the snow-line. Oh, ye frozen heavens! look down here. Ye did beget this luckless child, and have abandoned him, ye creative libertines. Here, boy; Ahab’s cabin shall be Pip’s home henceforth, while Ahab lives. Thou touchest my inmost center, boy; thou art tied to me by cords woven of my heart-strings. Come, let’s down.”

“What’s this? here’s velvet shark-skin, intently gazing at Ahab’s hand, and feeling it. Ah, now, had poor Pip but felt so kind a thing as this, perhaps he had ne’er been lost! This seems to me, Sir, as a man-rope; something that weak souls may hold by. Oh, Sir, let old Perth now come and rivet these two hands together; the black one with the white, for I will not let this go.”

“Oh, boy, nor will I thee, unless I should thereby drag thee to worse horrors than are here. Come, then, to my cabin. Lo! ye believers in gods all goodness, and in man all ill, lo you! see the omniscient gods oblivious of suffering man; and man, though idiotic, and knowing not what he does, yet full of the sweet things of love and gratitude. Come! I feel prouder leading thee by thy black hand, than though I grasped an Emperor’s!”

“There go two daft ones now,” muttered the old Manxman. “One daft with strength, the other daft with weakness. But here’s the end of the rotten line—all dripping, too. Mend it, eh? I think we had best have a new line altogether. I’ll see Mr. Stubb about it.”

The coffin laid upon two line-tubs, between the vice-bench and the open hatchway; the Carpenter calking its seams; the string of twisted oakum slowly unwinding from a large roll of it placed in the bosom of his frock.—Ahab comes slowly from the cabin gangway, and hears Pip following him.

“Back, lad; I will be with ye again presently. He goes! Not this hand complies with my humor more genially than that boy.—Middle aisle of a church! What’s here?”

“Life buoy, Sir. Mr. Starbuck’s orders. Oh, look, Sir! Beware the hatchway!”

“Thank ye, man. Thy coffin lies handy to the vault.”

“Sir? The hatchway? oh! So it does, Sir, so it does.”

“Art not thou the leg-maker? Look, did not this stump come from thy shop?”

“I believe it did, Sir; does the ferrule stand, Sir?”

“Well enough. But art thou not also the undertaker?”

“Aye, Sir; I patched up this thing here as a coffin for Queequeg; but they’ve set me now to turning it into something else.”

“Then tell me; art thou not an arrant, all-grasping, inter-meddling, monopolizing, heathenish old scamp, to be one day making legs, and the next day coffins to clap them in, and yet again life-buoys out of those same coffins? Thou art as unprincipled as the gods, and as much of a jack-of-all-trades.”

“But I do not mean anything, Sir. I do as I do.”

“The gods again. Hark ye, dost thou not ever sing working about a coffin? The Titans, they say, hummed snatches when chipping out the craters for volcanoes; and the grave-digger in the play sings, spade in hand. Dost thou never?”

“Sing, Sir? Do I sing? Oh, I’m indifferent enough, Sir, for that; but the reason why the grave-digger made music must have been because there was none in his spade, Sir. But the calking mallet is full of it. Hark to it.”

“Aye, and that’s because the lid there’s a sounding-board; and what in all things makes the sounding-board is this—there’s naught beneath. And yet, a coffin with a body in it rings pretty much the same, Carpenter. Hast thou ever helped carry a bier, and heard the coffin knock against the churchyard gate, going in?”

“Faith, Sir, I’ve—”

“Faith? What’s that?”

“Why, faith, Sir, it’s only a sort of exclamation-like—that’s all, Sir.”

“Um, um; go on.”

“I was about to say, Sir, that—”

“Art thou a silk-worm? Dost thou spin thy own shroud out of thyself? Look at thy bosom! Despatch! and get these traps out of sight.”

“He goes aft. That was sudden, now; but squalls come sudden in hot latitudes. I’ve heard that the Isle of Albemarle, one of the Gallipagos, is cut by the Equator right in the middle. Seems to me some sort of Equator cuts yon old man, too, right in his middle. He’s always under the Line—fiery hot, I tell ye! He’s looking this way—come, oakum; quick. Here we go again. This wooden mallet is the cork, and I’m the professor of musical glasses—tap, tap!”

Ahab to himself.

“There’s a sight! There’s sound! The grayheaded woodpecker tapping the hollow tree! Blind and dumb might well be envied now. See! that thing rests on two line-tubs, full of tow-lines. A most malicious wag, that fellow. Rat-tat! So man’s seconds tick! Oh! how immaterial are all materials! What things real are there, but imponderable thoughts? Here now’s the very dreaded symbol of grim death, by a mere hap, made the expressive sign of the help and hope of most endangered life. A life-buoy of a coffin! Does it go further? Can it be that in some spiritual sense the coffin is, after all, but an immortality-preserver! I’ll think of that. But no. So far gone am I in the dark side of earth, that its other side, the theoretic bright one, seems but uncertain twilight to me. Will ye never have done, Carpenter, with that accursed sound? I go below; let me not see that thing here when I return again. Now, then, Pip, we’ll talk this over; I do suck most wondrous philosophies from thee! Some unknown conduit from the unknown worlds must empty into thee!”

Ahab moving to go on deck; Pip catches him by the hand to follow.

“Lad, lad, I tell thee thou must not follow Ahab now. The hour is coming when Ahab would not scare thee from him, yet would not have thee by him. There is that in thee, poor lad, which I feel too curing to my malady. Like cures like; and for this hunt, my malady becomes my most desired health. Do thou abide below here, where they shall serve thee, as if thou wert the captain. Aye, lad, thou shalt sit here in my own screwed chair; another screw to it, thou must be.”

“No, no, no! ye have not a whole body, Sir; do ye but use poor me for your one lost leg; only tread upon me, Sir; I ask no more, so I remain a part of ye.”

“Oh! spite of million villains, this makes me a bigot in the fadeless fidelity of man!—and a black! and crazy!—but methinks like-cures-like applies to him too; he grows so sane again.”

“They tell me, Sir, that Stubb did once desert poor little Pip, whose drowned bones now show white, for all the blackness of his living skin. But I will never desert ye, Sir, as Stubb did him. Sir, I must go with ye.”

“If thou speakest thus to me much more, Ahab’s purpose keels up in him. I tell thee no; it cannot be.”

“Oh good master, master, master!”

“Weep so, and I will murder thee! have a care, for Ahab too is mad. Listen, and thou wilt often hear my ivory foot upon the deck, and still know that I am there. And now I quit thee. Thy hand!—Met! True art thou, lad, as the circumference to its center. So: God for ever bless thee; and if it come to that,—God for ever save thee, let what will befall.”

Ahab goes; Pip steps one step forward.

“Here he this instant stood; I stand in his air,—but I’m alone. Now were even poor Pip here I could endure it, but he’s missing. Pip! Pip! Ding, dong, ding! Who’s seen Pip? He must be up here; let’s try the door. What? neither lock, nor bolt, nor bar; and yet there’s no opening it. It must be the spell; he told me to stay here: Aye, and told me this screwed chair was mine. Here, then, I’ll seat me, against the transom, in the ship’s full middle, all her keel and her three masts before me. Here, our old sailors say, in their black seventy-fours great admirals sometimes sit at table, and lord it over rows of captains and lieutenants. Ha! what’s this? epaulets! epaulets! the epaulets all come crowding! Pass round the decanters; glad to see ye; fill up, monsieurs! What an odd feeling, now, when a black boy’s host to white men with gold lace upon their coats!—Monsieurs, have ye seen one Pip?—a little negro lad, five feet high, hang-dog look, and cowardly! Jumped from a whale-boat once;—seen him? No! Well then, fill up again, captains, and let’s drink shame upon all cowards! I name no names. Shame upon them! Put one foot upon the table. Shame upon all cowards.—Hist! above there, I hear ivory—Oh, master, master! I am indeed down-hearted when you walk over me. But here I’ll stay, though this stern strikes rocks; and they bulge through; and oysters come to join me.”

2. My Dream as Pip

Having completed a new novel and having sunk as I do into a middle state of light-headed being and heavy-hearted lassitude that comes with finding myself between finishing the writing of one book and the beginning of work on another, I turned to rereading some of the great pleasures of my life. Closed up in my office, seeing no one for days on end, after a week or so I finished Moby-Dick, closed the book, and closed my eyes. It had been a treat of a treat, with only so many pages I could take in an hour, the prose more like the finest cognac than fine wine, nothing you wanted to gulp down. As I had read it brought to the surface of my mind all sorts of thoughts and images and emotions, my father’s crash landing in the Sea of Japan in 1932, shipping on a freighter with my son from the Russian port of Nahodka to the port of Yokohama, living on the ocean littoral in the summer of 1972 and every summer thereafter, a month in Hawaii in the middle of the Pacific, our older daughter’s wedding at the Marine Center in Santa Cruz near the enormous skeleton of a whale. A bower in the Arsacides! One thing I certainly hadn’t counted on as I read this time around was the arrival in my life of a grandchild, born in Africa, whose face kept coming to mind with every reference to Pip. I had always noticed Pip while reading Moby-Dick but never looked at him directly until now, let alone looked him in the eye. Melville, triumphing over a few of his own racist tics, made a wonder of him. The entire experience made me dizzy and something like inebriated, and I soon fell into a deep sleep.

I found myself leaning over the railing of a boat in midocean, hoping to fish for the large golden carp I noticed swimming just beneath the surface. I leaned farther, and fell headlong into the ocean. The warmth of the water shocked me, and I called out, but my father, fishing from another boat some distance away, could not hear me. I paddled and paddled like a dog, but eventually my arms grew tired. And I sank . . . down, down, down, until I recovered my balance and felt the furry underfloor of the ocean beneath my bare feet. Ferns and wavery flowering plants tickled me as I passed and the air bubbles from my lips passed up in a sort of vertical musical scale—unreadable, unplayable, but still evident—up toward the faint light of the tropic sun. Was this near-dying? Was this near-death?

The currents turned me here, there, as though I were a pliant-limbed plant myself, but soon I became skilled in walking along the sea-floor in that whiplash fashion, shoulders twisting, legs lifted by the undersea streams so that I had to concentrate on placing one after the other after the other and continue on my way.

I saw what seemed to me as wonders—though I don’t remember them well enough to describe, as often happens in dreams—while I pushed myself along. Some distance above me, a shaft of bright sunlight veered down at a slight angle from the surface of the sea, silvery-yellowish light that reminded me of the color of old gold. Immediately in front of me the water swirled with all sorts of flotsam, from the tiniest specks of sealife to torn patches of plant. Beyond that the brownish-darkness of the seafloor’s false horizon loomed in the distance.

Half-sighted, half-blind, I moved along, to what destination I could not have said, except that I felt myself pushed by the current at my back in that murky direction. Murky! Oh, I did not know the half of it! Because now in the distance, across and through the waters, I heard music, the thump and tinny notes of a country band, the cheers and whistles of a crowd.

Oh, here he was, here was Pip! Dressed in a top hat and long coveralls of colored stripes of American red, white, and blue, he led the band, and danced in place as he conducted the music, looking as alive and as sprightly and as engaged as I had first imagined him while reading Moby-Dick.

I listened a while to the music—you know how it is in a dream, when everything comes together and nothing seems impossible—a version of “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” a Dixieland tune, a Christmas carol, as though the drifting bits and pieces of plant and fish in the waters surrounding us might have been snow, and then a Motown ballad and a Bob Dylan song.

“All along the watchtower,” he sang along with the music.

“Pip, my young man,” I said, not paying any attention to the fact that it is impossible to speak underwater, let alone sing, especially at the depth at which we found ourselves, “that is a modern tune or two. How can you know these?”

“Oh, Alan,” he said (yes, he knew my name! as if he might have learned it because I was reading about his life and fate, we had that kind of intimacy between us), “you learn a lot new about time here beneath the waves.” He set down his conductor’s wand and gazed at me. “The sea runs round the world, the same sea covering all the earth, and when you study it, as I have now in these amazing years of my days, you see the link between oceans and time, the way time rolls round our lives in similar fashion, making a steady stream of events that sometimes run in currents, swirling back on themselves, as in our little colloquy here, or surging ahead, as we will in a moment. Me talking to you, you talking to me, all of this underwater in a dream! Who could have imagined! Oh, for a life beneath a bower in the Arsacides! But then I am content to remain beneath the waves, this bath of life so vastly unexplored by all you who live above the surface.”

“Oh, Pip,” I said, “young Pip, Master Pip, Mister Pip—”

“Just Pip, as always,” he said.

“I agree. Who could have imagined? I read a book, a dream made out of language, and then dreamed this dream where we meet, but only because your master made the book in which you lived—”

“No past tense, sir, because I am still alive, in these parts, these pages, in your dream, and in your story made a dream of a dream . . .”

“But Pip . . . ?”

“Yes, sir, you, Alan, what may I tell you?”

Now he had drifted closer to me, and though quite short compared to my own height, he exuded a confidence you rarely find in the living, no matter how tall, and a sweetness, too, which reminded me of my new grandchild as well, the sweetness you can see in the young child when you are one generation removed from the grueling daily round of caring for them, grueling, no matter how much you love them, of course.

Feeling this bond with him, and yet free of a certain responsibility I asked him a question that came immediately to mind. “Down here,” I said, “do you see any of the other good men who went down with the Pequod?”

He smiled a smile so bright it lighted up the darker places where shadows surrounded us in the sea.

And then he began to speak again.

3. Pip, Redivivus

The first I saw was the mate, dear Starbuck, who had been a lamp-light to me in the darkest moments of our voyage, his ever-glowing strength of character a guide as I navigated the ways of the Captain and his mad quest. (Mad! Nothing so American as a white man obsessed with embracing what he cannot ever have! Black Americans, including now ever-young yours truly, see things differently. We want to keep what we have, we want to have as much as we can, but our obsession, if you can call our thirst for freedom by that name, remains only with an idea. But then this is a child’s-eye view, not that my old master Captain dignified an adult-eye view, not with his madness about capturing the whale that had taken his leg.

Ahab did not have a quest, though, did he? He had a love affair with a part of Nature he could never embrace.

Stubb, Flask, these were not so important to me in my way of seeing, but Dough-Boy, a boy I loved as my brother, gave me comfort in odd and difficult family moments, so that when he floated past me as our ship went down I reached over to him and held him by the hand and righted him, and we sank down brother-to-brother together. The difference between him and me became clear when I spoke to him and he did not blink, his open eyes gazing like a seal’s toward Paradise.

The dark-complected and tattooed harpooners danced around me in fast-moving currents as we floated toward the sea floor, their weapons gone but their long arms remaining, wavery, like long strands of sea-plant and weed.

Daggoo!

Tashtego!

Brothers, brothers!

And my, yes, beloved Queequeg! And was there a boy as lucky as I, who would meet his fate so young, who had ever been so blessed as to know this Polynesian prince before we all sank down?

And the Manxman, and others in the crew, and Sinbad the Sailor and Jinbad the Jailer and Minbad the Mailer and Winbad the Wailer . . .

Along alone . . .

Oh, a watery death, full fathom . . .

I watched these others of the crew sink around me, some upside down, some right side up, some sideways, some with their pockets of their britches turned out, some with hair flaring out around them.

Chunks and bits and parts of the ship came down with them. Oh, I had never been so deep, I swear, not even when I went overboard and suffered that vision of God’s Feet on the treadle of life!

Here was intense pressure all around us, our weight carrying us into it even as we left the light behind. One last glimpse I had in the growing dimness, that of the large oblong object floating slowly back up past me toward the surface, and clinging to it that young fellow I had first seen in the company of the Polynesian prince, the man from the provinces beyond where I had lived, who seemed to be the only one alone who would survive to tell the story.

I reached up and caught hold of his heel, which pressure he could not have felt given all the water pressing around him. And up he towed me, or heeled me, I should say, to be exact, to that point near the surface when light streamed down but not yet the air that would give me back my life to live. When something struck me from below, and turned me over on my belly, at which a long sleek fish of the air-spouting variety, no whale, but something modeled on a whale, turned its head and then a fin in my direction and I caught hold of that fin, and rode the fish up to where we broke the surface some many yards away from where the last boilings of the vortex that took the Pequod down had smoothed out into the rolling waves as before.

So amazed I was that I had been saved that I forgot entirely that I had not been breathing air and now I was, taking in huge gulps as a thirsty fellow would take in water or beer, or a guilty man might wish to gulp down the famous wine which good Christians purport to stand in for the blood of their Saviour.

My Saviour in this instance was a fish!

Not a whale, of course. Because I was not a Jonah but only myself, a Pip, whose story you know shows how innocent he was, and how much a victim of accident he was, beginning with the complected quality of his skin. Pure chance, born this black! But not a chance, or a chance of a chance, that the Fish that saved me had only been accidentally passing by.

It saved me for further things, for a life beyond the brief years I lived within the shores of that whale story. It carried me, this fish, along until I had caught enough air to gain my strength and then I stood upon its back and rode it, rode it all the way through another day of sun and then a day of light storms, and then more days of sun, until we reached an island—a chain of them, as a law abiding man might call it, or a necklace of them, as someone more attuned to the beauty of the world might proclaim. There I disembarked, to be met by local men and boys who had been fishing near the white-pearl beach, men and boys whose complectedness seemed quite close to my own. And in this world of darker hue, I found my welcome, and learned the language, married the daughter of a chief who reigned some distance inland and desired a husband for his lovely daughter whose own people came from farther away rather than closer, the better to make, as the local shaman-doctors would have it, a better combination of peoples than if she married someone closer in.

And so I married, and grew to become a skilled hunter, and negotiator, and husband, and father—and to dance and bundle and sometimes snuggle and nip the light-tinted ears of other dark girls with whom we all laughed—laughter being the prime motive of all life in these watery parts of the world. My own little boy, the first of my children, I call Little Pip, and after him a Pippa and then another Littler one of myself, and all of us laughing our way to the depth of things and back to the airy part of the world.

When I first arrived here, before I learned the depths of the ways my new people lived, I would upon occasion feel a certain longing for my home state, and a certain regret, feeling it as a wincing tinge around my heart space, that I would not ever return to that country from which I had first set out. But this I conquered with a large lotion of laughter and the necessity to make the others around me live and laugh. Only once, in fact, did I ever see another former countryman of mine, when a raggedy old bearded white man in a stump of a boat was washed up in a storm upon our beach. I stayed apart from him, while cousins by marriage tended to his needs. One night I stole up close to the hut where he was living, and heard the sound of his voice as he talked to himself amidst what turned out to be the heat of a raging fever contracted while floating his many weeks upon the ocean, and it was a kind of music to my ears, thought it meant not much. Raven, he called out, quoth you what? come hither and dance with me. Raven? Do you know the way to Baltimore? Is my grandfather alive? How will I know him? How will I know him? Oh, say, can you see? Oh, say, can you see? Over and over again, and within a week or so the poor pale-skinned wretch succumbed to that fever.

And after him, no other American crossed my sights.

Until now. Until we met. In your dream.

Or is it a dream? Or simply another permutation of the world as we know it, whether in sleep or in the vivid territory of the imagination. I had gone out for a ride on my ocean board, which I learned to negotiate with a steadiness I learned from that first long journey on the back of the dolphin, and a huge rogue wave slapped me from my perch, and I sank a while, down to this level—or was I floating up? Wherever we are, wherever we have met to make this gam, to salute each other, as one passes one way, and another the other the world has been ours, and the world will be ours again, if not in our own lives but in the lives of others.

And now, my last words and thoughts, oh, that water is best. . .

Yours truly, I call out to you across these surging currents, some slow and some fast, some cold, some warm, where the fish fleet sails and the currents within me match the currents without.

And here, he said, bidding a familiar man come forward out of the darkness of the distant waters, not a drowned man but a man who had died, I don’t know how this happens, Pip said, but it does.

Father! I said aloud into the waters. To see you here! Even if it is only but a dream!

Holding hands, the three of us made a circle beneath the flood, and we danced, in tune with the flow, we danced around and around and around.