pg_dump in 1G VPS crashes

I'm trying to run pg_dump on a relatively small database (2G), but pg_dump keeps crashing with an out of memory error.

du -h --max-depth=0 9.4 1.9G 9.4

The command: pg_dump -Fp -h "$HOSTNAME" -U "$USERNAME" "$DATABASE" | gzip > $FINAL_BACKUP_DIR"$DATABASE".sql.gz.in_progress;

Any ideas on how to allow the dump to happen?

****  Edit *****
-bash-4.2$ pg_dump -t new_answers -F tar -b -f new_answers.dump mydatabase
out of memory

the new_answers table has a TEXT column, but all the objects in are < 1k. Also,there is only about 300 rows. "dmesg | grep OOM" turned up nothing.