6. LITTLE RAY
What I remember of my winters, when I was a child and in my early teens, is that my grandmother was my mother. Nana, my name for Mildred Brewster, was my winter mom. And she was my mother’s most devoted apologist—for a while, it seemed to me, her only apologist.
“No one asks to be born,” I grew up hearing Mildred Brewster say—to which my audibly breathing aunts, Abigail and Martha, would roll their eyes and breathe more heavily.
“The poor-Rachel routine,” Aunt Abigail labeled it.
“Here comes the whaling ship,” Aunt Martha would whisper in my ear, “just when we were hoping it had sailed beyond the horizon.” But I loved listening to Nana’s story about my mother’s name. Mildred Brewster had studied English and American literature at Mount Holyoke, a Massachusetts liberal arts college for women; her favorite novel was Moby-Dick, the reason my mom was named Rachel.
Nana’s copy of the novel was always on the table beside her reading chair. Even as a child, I noticed that Moby-Dick was a more constant presence than the Bible; my grandmother consulted the story of the white whale more than she turned to Jesus. “One day, dear, when you’re old enough, I’ll read this to you,” Nana told me, holding the huge book in both her hands. She didn’t wait for me to be old enough. I was ten when she started reading the novel aloud to me; I was twelve, almost thirteen, before she finished. It’s a slow novel, but the chapters are short. An ocean voyage goes slowly, except for the sinking.
“Keep your eye on the cannibal, dear—Queequeg is important,” Nana was always saying. “He’s not just any harpooner; Queequeg isn’t a Christian. He’s referred to as an ‘abominable savage’ for a reason—not only to get your attention. Queequeg travels with a shrunken head; he’s heavily tattooed. And there’s his coffin. Please don’t forget about Queequeg’s coffin!”
How could I forget a coffin? Listening to Moby-Dick made me anxious. I was relieved to discover that there was nothing abominable about Queequeg; Melville doesn’t even take him to task for not being a Christian. “For all his tattooings he was on the whole a clean, comely looking cannibal,” as Melville puts it. Listening to Moby-Dick—for close to three years—had a life-changing effect on me. It not only made me want to be a writer; according to my cousin Nora, it essentially shaped and screwed up the rest of my life.
My grandmother was a tireless Moby-Dick reader, but I interrupted her, I asked a hundred questions, I was interested in all the wrong things—such as whale vomit, or what makes whales sick in the first place. Chapter 92, the “Ambergris” chapter, raises a lot of gastrointestinal questions. Highly valued by perfumers, ambergris is (in Melville’s words) “an essence found in the inglorious bowels of a sick whale!” It is produced only by sperm whales. I made my grandmother explain what would happen to a mass of ambergris that was too large to pass through the whale’s intestines. Nana took pains to tell me that such a large mass of ambergris would have to be vomited by the whale. Ambergris can float for years, before washing ashore. Lumps have been found weighing as much as fifty kilograms—imagine 110 pounds of whale vomit! This is the kind of thing that distracted me from what was important in Moby-Dick. My interest in whale puke drove my grandmother crazy.
But Nana and I understood one thing. We loved Queequeg, the cannibal harpooner. We were thrilled that he was heavily tattooed, and that he traveled with a shrunken head. We were excited that Queequeg wasn’t a Christian, because this meant he was capable of doing anything. Whatever came into Queequeg’s head, he might do it. He might even eat you. The savage from the South Seas was the opposite of an uptight, white New Englander. Nana and I knew what they were like.
Years later, when I read Moby-Dick to myself, I kept a close eye on Queequeg. My grandmother was right. If you pay attention to Queequeg, the cannibal harpooner, you will appreciate Moby-Dick. No amount of whale vomit will turn you against what D. H. Lawrence called “one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world.”
Not being a Christian has a marvelous effect on Queequeg. One day, Queequeg has a fever. He decides he’s going to die. Queequeg is right, but it’s not the fever that’s going to kill him, and he’s not the only one onboard the Pequod who’s going to die. Queequeg asks the ship’s carpenter to make a coffin. Queequeg even lies down in his coffin, to be sure he fits. But Queequeg’s fever goes away, and he uses the coffin for his clothes. This is not extraneous detail! Not long later, a life buoy is lost overboard. Queequeg hints that his coffin would work as a life buoy—he is a practical cannibal. The ship’s carpenter goes to work on the coffin, nailing down the lid, caulking the seams.
“Queequeg sees the world differently than his shipmates aboard the Pequod,” my grandmother explained. “Only someone like Queequeg would ask the ship’s carpenter for a coffin.”
I somewhat struggled to make this part fit with Queequeg’s not being a Christian. “Does Melville mean a Christian wouldn’t ask for a coffin while he’s still alive?” I asked my grandmother.
“The ones I know wouldn’t,” Nana answered me. “That’s more in keeping with what a cannibal would request, I think.”
Nana and I were a long way into Moby-Dick when we got to the moment when Captain Ahab comes on deck and makes whimsical remarks (mostly to himself) about the suitability of putting a coffin to use as a life buoy.
Dedicated lit student that she was, my grandmother often interrupted herself when she was reading aloud to me; she wanted to be sure I had noticed certain things. In the chapter where Ahab is musing to himself on the meaning of a coffin as a life buoy, Nana stopped reading to me and remarked: “I hope you noticed, Adam, that this is the same ship’s carpenter who made Ahab’s prosthetic leg.”
“I noticed, Nana,” I assured her.
Moby-Dick is a story about a seemingly unkillable whale. It’s also a story about absolute authority—a man who won’t listen to anyone. The captain of the Pequod, Ahab, is obsessed with killing Moby Dick. The white whale is responsible for Ahab’s losing a leg. Nana and I knew that Ahab should just get over it. Ahab refuses to assist the captain and crew of the Rachel, another whaling ship. The Rachel has encountered Moby Dick; the Rachel has lost a whaleboat with all its crew. Won’t Ahab help the Rachel search for its missing sailors? The son of the Rachel’s captain is among them. No, Ahab won’t help. Ahab only wants to find and kill Moby Dick.
We know what’s going to happen. Ahab finds what he’s looking for—the white whale kills him and sinks the Pequod. But wait a minute. There’s a first-person narrator. Ishmael is the storyteller. What can possibly save Ishmael? Did you forget that Queequeg’s coffin floats? It’s a good thing not everyone onboard was a Christian. Let this be a lesson to you: never take an ocean voyage without a tattooed cannibal.
“Do you see, dear?” Nana interrupted her reading to ask me. “It is Ahab’s refusal to help his fellow men at sea that dooms him—and all hands, but one, aboard the Pequod.”
“I see,” I said. How could I miss it? It took three years.
The white whale sinks the Pequod. Everyone, except Ishmael, drowns—“and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago,” as Melville puts it. That’s pretty clear.