Wendy S. Walters’ “You Are Pip,” featured in the new Ocean State Review

You Are Pip

Though you love life and all of its peaceable securities what is subdued in you sparks and burns with jolly brightness, and you are a small black boy. Because it defies your nature to be dull and torpid in intellect, you board a rare old craft with masts that stand like three kings, each one weather-stained by typhoons of the four oceans. Against a bulwark adorned with the sharp teeth of the whale, you try to forget the face of the slave-catcher who carries no authority in these waters. Once this ship commits to its three-year voyage, you will accept this doomed and melancholy home as your first, and you are Pip. Those with a plain and business-like manner watch you with a half-humorous look upon their faces. You worry about being lost among the creatures of the sea. Still, it would be a far better sensation than ropes wrapped several turns around your chest and neck, cords to slow the ambitions of your heart. You hope to change your fate by securing a catch, willing the grandest life into your snare.

If you depart in winter, the wind will soften your skin as you make your way down the coast. If sailing in summer, the wind will harden your bones, leaving your stance stronger than you ever before had will to hold it. On this day, cast your eyes away from safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that’s kind to our mortalities. To look back is to be reminded of what you’ve forgotten about your life. Other peoples’ stories about you could sweep you away like a river, if you let them. Your will to carry the line evidences your good instincts, so, of course, you are Pip. With each nautical mile passed, you grow more capable, more important to the crew. Along with a desire to see the world open to you, you want to subdue something immense and imagined: the sea, the whale, the voyage, your fear of dying alone. Who knows which fate will suit you best?

It’s clear that you desire to be other than the one you are called—Pip. Just as no true places can be found on any map, so it follows that no true person can be drawn without family, a point of origin. As much as they try to pin you down, you move in many directions. It is most polite to enter a whale through the mouth, to follow Jonah. This way allows you to bargain for your freedom should you desire it, after all. To come into a whale through its skin is rude—even if the lamps’ light at dusk in each whitewashed house along the shore depends on it. You watch the men cut further in to bleed the animal, heave out its fat and brain. But the men don’t know how much of themselves they give away with every cut.

Men in Delaware bet their fortunes on whaling fleets, on your and your shipmates’ ability to kill. The term for this trade in paper, this kind of optimism, is speculation. But those who ride the currents know paper cannot hold against the wind. A corporation is a fiction about the future. It takes up all the space wherein it resides. So, if a corporation begins in the sea, Pip, what monster could best it? Perhaps the fabled Kracken might have fortitude enough to throttle it, as no one knows the true force of its tentacles that seek with such energy succor for their wanderlust.

As for you, dear Pip, do you always die at sea? Remember if you don’t survive, there will be those who will forget you, treat you as if you never had been written. So why not catch a boat homeward, return to shore, settle near a salt pond, instead? Why not berth in the cut that is its narrowing, a river called Acushnet? In this land of steady habits, this Connecticut, people tell others how they should live. Men talk openly about how they write new rules to try to keep you from making your life as they try to flourish in their own. They will call this pitiful habit of degradation progress, note it as a kind of courage, though not necessarily aimed at the future.

On this ship, you are the smallest soul of many lost ones. Together you complain of the cold, the damp conditions, and your paltry shares of the lay. You lament over the narrow quarters in which you rest, how poorly your garments shield your limbs from the harsh gale. At night, the crew whispers rumors about the diminishing fortunes of whale men all over the world. They recount the prophecy about an ancient monster who escapes a wicked king bent on revenge. They call out the monster’s name to distract each other from the horror of themselves. By dawn, each man yearns to restore his value through duty to the chores at hand.

You’ve made it back to port before. There white men claimed you wanted more than your share, which was less than half of what you had earned. They abandoned you in town as if they hardly knew you. Not to worry. Many affordable distractions flickered beyond the docks—chowder and ale, troubadours, fistfights—but what you yearned for was to be welcomed by a familiar face. Could there be someone who awaits your return? Beyond the lamplight of the docks, you followed a path of broken white shells brightened by moonlight to a house deep in the woods. Here, a family anticipated one who is lost, one who is remembered, one who is longed for. You wanted to believe the beloved could be you. But when the door opened, their faces fell, failed to register with any recognition. Suddenly you were an orphan once more, Pip. As they turned away from your humble introduction, you felt ready, once more, to run. Before dawn, you convinced some wild Captain, a man burning with grimness, to let you board his ship.

You ask to man the crow’s nest to see the horizon as the others do, a thin line of constancy but never within reach. This taste of conquest, an eternal elixir, helps you seek the largest catch in the long hours of the lookout. For a moment, you stand above all and come to appreciate some of your solitary feelings. You know the difference between being held dear and being studied though you do not say how you know this. For your sake, Pip, may you never exceed the expectations the men you ride with have for you, may you never demand they become better. May you never witness their need to hide their weakness of spirit through violence. May you never sacrifice yourself for their progress, what you will not inherit, and which would roll over you as if you had never been there. If only you could remain small and unknowable, dear Pip, you would never again need to board a boat!

But here you are. Startled by a thump on the hull, you leap from the boat’s security into the swell. The moment you get tangled in the line, a sailor from the Azores plans to toss you a tambourine. He says, Now play. Hurrah, boy. Make fire-flies! Rig the jinglers! You can’t hear his words but, even in the midst of panic, you know your suffering irritates him. Another crewman struggles to decide whether to capture you or the whale, neither of which has ever hunted him. In an uncharacteristic display of fraternity, the man chooses you. But regret for his own lack of opportunity kicks in, and the second mate tells you not to get yourself caught up that way again. This incident has sparked his appetite, like the tip of a shark fin in a pickle. It has revealed how he longs to be in business with your body. Once you sang or danced for him, and he thinks he is forever owed the pleasure you bring. When you are sodden and shaken from the fall, he says, a whale would sell for thirty times what you would in Alabama, as if gouging a mouthful of your remaining courage.

Your name, Pippin, means “the best one.” It also means there will always be another who may take your place. The Captain says in time you will come to enjoy your lack of particularity, your diffusion. Getting caught up in these thoughts is what distracts you from noting the crimes of the Captain, who has already sentenced you to devotion and loyalty. You are a coward to him, Pip. He can’t see you at all. But some men, who note your habit of stumbling about the kitchen, harbor sweet feelings for you. You won their attention with your wit and tender-heartedness, as all you do comes with a great display of expression. These ones want to be like you, to share losses they’ve held back for fear of showing too much emotion. Isn’t one truth of every man the desire to cast a line of hope alongside others during the catch? They show their scars to you to disclose how they spent their luck, to prove they have battled fear. You did not turn away from them even when you wanted to. If service to the Captain means one must diminish feelings of intimacy, then the dollar counts for a good deal less than what it affords.

Did you jump from the crew the first time out of fear or courage? By your second time in, you knew you would be abandoned. Though you called out to indicate your position, they only seemed to hear each other. Your Captain does not worry when he can’t find you, not with his naked eye and superstitions, not through his trusted telescope, because he believes he will catch you no matter how far away you run. The Captain draws out the sextant to locate your position, Pip, which he suspects may now be eternal, heaven-bound and he is not wrong. The practice of navigation requires twin mirrors. The first one allows light to pass through. The second catches the sun’s reflection. But the Captain can see no illumination. This is why he did not notice how fast you slipped away, just as he did not realize you don’t belong on a boat at all. Perhaps your vanishing better serves a tale of doom they had already foretold for themselves. Perhaps they mistook your body for a world they failed to conquer. The men also know the whale to be a better being than they are. One more fact they can’t stand about themselves.

The Captain’s feelings of loss do not differ from other mistakes that caused him to feel regret. But what is he sorry for? That is a thing he cannot put a finger on, even though he prepared himself to own up to every error. His pain begins like a second beat thumping in his chest. His nerve feels flimsy then his bitterness seems to repair it, veiling the initial rupture with a mix of gumption and fury. The Captain chides from the distance: Why can’t you be still, Pip? Why won’t you be our pet forever? The flap of a sail’s canvas in the wind calls the Captain to look for you in the water one more time, just like the bells of a cathedral beckon those who cast their eyes to the sky for direction. There’s no level place where we seek the future, only the rocking of the waves. What choice can anyone make in a tempest but to love slapdash? The crew pines for your smallness as the Captain believes he sees you shooting across the sky, a fireball. He thinks it is not your business to put on such a show, when his story is so much bigger than yours.

Then just as quickly as you were lost, Pip, you reappear, bobbing in some reachable distance. The Captain unfurls the map, revealing waters he hardly knows. At the center of this world, a pulse beats out the contour of waves. The Captain’s eye traces a line from where he stands to the place in the water where he longs for you, and this is where they find you again, Pip. By small boat, the crew lends you a hand, and you continue your habit of staying alive. But now you move like a shadow, half-mad from the sense of isolation you cannot shake. You lived only because you wanted to, Pip. How easy it is for the men to despise and admire that competency in you. How eager they are to wear the albatross. Your time alone has made you ghastly, and all your body can do is represent the desolation now inherent to your character by meeting small gestures of affection with a stiffness that affronts kindness. So remote is your expression that not a soul can reach you with a put-down or kind stroke. Such a gloomy countenance you carry, as if you know you’re already forever gone, and no man who wishes to stay alive on a ship should hover around you, unless he, too,

wishes to be lost. The Captain says it is far better to follow his command if it is safe passage you seek to your future. Stick to the boat, Pip, he tells you. But what you know is that this ship will never take you where you want it to, though it will always arrive, looking like it could, at your most desperate hour.

Time spent adrift made you realize you have been an orphan twice: one who is forsaken by all and the other who lives in the company of those who see him only through glass at a distance. While you ponder these loomings, two sky hawks, as if from the sea’s own army, peck at the flag on the mast as if to destroy any proclamations of allegiance to land. The boat rolls with white caps beating against its steep sides, and the air smells as if it blew from a far-away fire. Amidst serenity all around, you watch the sea heave a rhythm with long, strong, lingering surges. In the case of shipwreck, you might have clung to some wooden box until a boat in search of its lost child finds you. But then it would be you, Pip, who represented a country’s hope for itself: a brown boy born into servitude meets the monsters and survives to tell the story. How that would change every ending.

Wendy S. Walters‘ current projects address class and racial disquietude in the industrial Midwest; intersections between writing and design; climate change and its reverberations; and organic forms in the essay. She is a 2020 Creative Capital Awardee in literary nonfiction and the author of a book of prose, Multiply/Divide: On the American Real and Surreal (Sarabande Books, 2015), named a best book of the year by Buzzfeed, Flavorwire, Literary Hub, The Root, Huffington Post, and others. She is also the author of two books of poems, Troy, Michigan (Futurepoem, 2014) and Longer I Wait, More You Love Me. Her work has been published in The Normal School, The Iowa Review, Fourth Genre, Full Bleed, Flavorwire, and Harper’s among many others. 

A recipient of fellowships from NYFA, the Ford Foundation, and the Smithsonian Institute, she has a broad history of engagements with writing in and about performative contexts. In 2018-19 she was artist-in-residence at BRIClab in Brooklyn, where she worked on developing the book for the opera, Golden Motors with Derek Bermel. Their lyrical work has been performed widely, including at Carnegie Hall, Joe’s Pub, Louisiana Museum for Moderne Kunst in Denmark, The Institute for Advanced Study, and the Pittsburgh Symphony. 

Walters holds a MFA/PHD in Poetry and Literature from Cornell University. She is the former Associate Dean of Art and Design History and Theory at Parsons, The New School. Currently she serves as Director of the Nonfiction Concentration and Associate Professor of Writing, Nonfiction in the School of the Arts at Columbia University.

Read more about Walters at https://walterspot.com/