Rule of the Bone

by Russell Banks

  There were maybe a few hundred people living in the village of Accompong and a few hundred more living in the surrounding area and everybody said they were Maroons and were related to everybody else or that’s how it seemed anyhow and I guess it was true because you couldn’t be one without being the other, so the Maroons were like a tribe, you could say. They owned all the land in the Cockpit together and shared it on account of the treaty their great-grandfathers’d signed with the Queen of England more or less like the Mohawks at home and other American Indians. Except the Maroons didn’t call the Cockpit a reservation, it was more like an independent country called Accompong inhabited and ruled exclusively by the Maroons, at least the way they talked about it it was. They had a chief and everything and even a secretary of state who were these really old guys that I saw a couple of times from a distance but never got to talk to because I-Man right after we got there set me up out in the bush far from the village where he had his groundation and that’s pretty much where I stayed.

  He didn’t exactly say it but I-Man was protecting me I think by having me sattar way out in the Cockpit a couple of miles from the village basically to watch over his ganja patch which was pretty sizable, hundreds of plants that I was also supposed to water from this spring way down in the bottom of the pit. But having white strangers or any kind of outsider camped in the village was definitely not encouraged or at least that’s the feeling I got from I-Man because when we first got there and he introduced me to a few people like the woman he said was his kids’ mother, not his wife I noticed or one of his cousins hanging in his yard he’d say Bone jus’ be passin’ through. Plus with his kids and all he didn’t have any room for me in his cabin. They only had two little rooms where everybody slept, all the kids on one bed and I-Man and the kids’ mother on another and the rest of the time everybody hung in the yard where they cooked under a thatched roof on poles and sat around on little stools and an old car seat.

  Where I was was wicked cool though. Out there in the Cockpit up on a ridge with panoramic views and a cleared slope in front with these terraces where the ganja grew I had my own cabin made out of bamboo with a thatched roof and a hammock for sleeping in and a stone fireplace for cooking and the necessary pots and other utensils and lots of food around like breadfruit and yams and akee and coconuts and calalu plus stuff I-Man brought out from the village that his old lady made. It was the best squat I’d ever had. I was happy and besides I think I needed it, being alone way out there with plenty of time to like think and remember things except when in the evenings mostly I-Man’d come out with a couple of his Rasta cousins and they’d sit around and meditate over a chillum and do some African-style drumming on these excellent homemade drums and put out deep reflection until dawn some nights. Mainly I’d hang back and watch and listen because these were wicked heavy dudes who talked about killing guys down in Kingston and Mobay and except for I-Man they weren’t too interested in me and probably just thought I was some American white kid who was into weed that I-Man was using as a watchdog.

  Which was basically true. I was a regular herb boy then and I did work for I-Man who’d spent one whole day teaching me how to blow through a conch shell like a horn in case somebody tried to steal his crop. But there were other things in life that interested me even more than weed and watchdogging I-Man’s crop and I-Man knew that so lots of times he’d come out to the groundation alone or with one of his pick’nies he called them, his kids of which he had four and after he’d checked his plants and talked to them awhile and done some weeding and nipping the buds and shown me some new tricks of the ganja grower’s trade and so on he’d sattar in the yard by the cabin and Rasta-rap his way through another chapter in the history of the African captivity in Babylon.

  By this time my hair was pretty long, down to my shoulders and in my eyes and I had this nervous habit when I was thinking of twirling it with my fingers and one day in the middle of telling me about how Marcus Garvey’d been poisoned by the capitalists for trying to take the Africans back to the promised land in their own ark I-Man noticed me doing it and got up and went into the bush and came back with a bunch of leaves that he crushed and squeezed some juice out of and said to rub it into my locks. The juice smelled like licorice but it worked because the next day when I woke up I had regular dreadlocks growing, not big time but these loose springy dark reddish-brown locks about a foot long that I couldn’t really check out since I didn’t have a mirror but I could feel them and could tell they were cool-looking. Also I’d only been wearing shorts out there on the groundation and no shirt and had gotten real tanned so this one day I was standing alone dribbling water from a pail onto the plants like I-Man’d showed me and I flipped my head to chase off a mosquito and saw dreadlocks swirling through the air in my shadow. Then I looked down at my arms and hands which were like coffee-colored and when I saw I didn’t look like a regular white kid anymore I put down the bucket and did a little Rasta dance right there in the sunshine.

  It’s funny how when you change the way you look on the outside even if it’s only with a tattoo you feel different on the inside. I was learning that it’s true what I-Man’d said, if you work at it long enough and are serious you can become a brand-new beggar which is like if you’re a carpenter you go to the worksite and discover all new material to work with so you can change your plans and start building yourself a bigger and a better house to live in. I’d even started talking different, not saying cool and excellent to everything anymore but instead I’d go Irie, mon, and when I used to refer to myself only as I or me now I said I-and-I which makes you feel slightly separate from your body, it makes you feel that your true self is like this spirit that can float through the air where it communes with the universe and it can even travel backward and forward in time.

  All the drumming and long meditation and all the late-night reflection sessions with the Maroons and their Ashanti ascendants who were with us in spirit like I-Man said and the detailed instruction in history and daily life I was getting from I-Man plus the regular partaking of the sacrament of kali at the chillum with the Rastas and the everyday solitary exploration of I-self I’d been doing with the assistance of excellent weed ever since the first day I met I-Man at the schoolbus in Plattsburgh, all this’d been having a deep gradual effect on me without my actually knowing it, until one morning I woke up in my hammock and looked up at the thatched roof overhead and I knew I’d like finally cast off my old self and was lying naked in the universe as the day I was born fifteen years ago in Au Sable, New York, United States of America, Planet Earth.

  Then on the night of the full moon when the ganja plants were taller than my head and were supposed to be harvested the next day I-Man and three of his Rasta brethren from Accompong came out to the groundation all serious and carrying machetes, and when they told me they were taking me to the secret Maroon cave fe see in de true lights of I-self, I was ready, man. I was fucking ready. In the old days I probably would’ve said cool or whatever and maybe tried to postpone the whole thing without them knowing I was scared but now I just said, Dat be irie, and followed I-Man in the moonlight straight into the bush with the brethren coming along behind and no one talking.

  It wasn’t like I wanted to be made into an honorary Negro or anything. The truth is I really believed in wisdom then, that there actually was such a thing, I mean and a few people had it, like I-Man mainly and under the right conditions they could pass it on even to a kid and I believed, with my background and being a white American and all I especially needed some wisdom if I was going to grow up and be better at living my life than most of the adults I’d known so far were.

  We didn’t seem to be walking on a regular path and sometimes I-Man had to hack the macca bushes away before we could pass through one cockpit and climb over the ridge and descend into another but I guess we were on some kind of known path because I-Man didn’t hesitate any or change his mind about this way or that. We walked for hours it seemed like, up steep inclines in zigzags an
d then down again until I started feeling like I was on a whole other continent than the one I’d lived on all my life, like I was in Africa and I was a little nervous because I knew they had these wild pigs out here that people said were dangerous and I was glad the brethren and I-Man were carrying machetes.

  I knew the brethren pretty good by then, Terron and Elroy and Rubber who were in their thirties or forties, older Rastas with wicked massy dreads. Terron and Elroy were I-Man’s cousins and like junior partners in his groundation and Rubber whose name came from his face which he could twist into all these different expressions anytime he wanted but mostly looked sad was his nephew and had his own groundation in the cockpit next to I-Man’s. They were heavy dudes, darker and fiercer than the ant farm posse, expert machete men with great builds who looked like they could pull your arms out if they wanted. I-Man who was a tiny old guy compared to them they treated with total respect and Terron once told me that someday I-Man when he ascended unto the fullness of his age and completed his trampoosing among the various peoples of the world would probably become the chief of the Maroons in Accompong or at least the secretary of state.

  Finally we were way down in the bottom of one of the cockpits where the moonlight couldn’t reach and you couldn’t even see the stars and I was just following I-Man in pitch darkness by the sound of his footsteps now. Then suddenly I couldn’t hear him anymore so I stopped and after a few seconds I said, Yo, I-Man, where you at?

  Rubber who was right behind me said, Keep movin’ Rasta.

  But I-and-I cyan see nuttin.

  No matter, mon, he said and gave me a little push on the shoulder with the tip of his machete and that got me going again. On and on I walked in total darkness like for a quarter of a mile maybe, thinking, Well, if I walk off a cliff I won’t know it till it’s too late so why worry, when I noticed that the air had gotten cool like a fan was blowing and I could feel through my sandals that I was walking on smooth flat rock now not dirt or grass anymore and I could hear water dripping. I knew I must be in a cave but it was like I had a blindfold on and I started imagining bats and snakes and shit darting at me out of the darkness and my skin got goose-bumped all over and for a second there I was scared I’d lose it completely and start trying to claw my way back out to the moonlight and for the rest of my life I’d have to live with the shameful knowledge that I’d panicked at the very moment I was supposed to be viewing the lights of I-self and ascending in that irie glow to the heights of I-and-I where I’d finally come to know Jah.

  I heard a match then and saw the flame and I-Man’s craggy brown face as he lit up a spliff and took a deep hit off of it and with the same match lit a candle and then took it and went around lighting more candles that were in these nooks and crannies in the walls of the cave. The darkness disappeared and tall shadows flashed and fell all around like I-Man was dropping solid dark gray wool blankets off of a clothesline and revealing behind them this humongous room with yellowish-white rock walls that were curved and smooth like they’d been carved out of solid rock by water over millions of years. It was like being inside a gigantic human skull and we’d come in through the mouth. Up above there were a couple more dark caves leading out that looked like eye sockets and in back where I guess the spinal column was I could see another dark hole and I could hear water running down there like that was the ancient riverbed and it was still carving its way deeper and deeper into the earth.

  I-Man sat me down on a little ledge and sat beside me and pointed out a bunch of red pictures up on the top of the skull of these weird squiggly signs and a couple of animals I recognized like turtles and birds and snakes and stick figures of guys with spears who were fighting each other, some lying down with the spears sticking out and some with their heads cut off and the rest whaling on them. The pictures were way up on top, higher than you could reach without an extension ladder which they didn’t have in those olden days so I wondered how they got up there to paint them.

  Dem fly up, Bone, I-Man said. Dem ol’ Africans could fly lak birds, mon.

  I figured there’d be some kind of ceremony now and I was really hoping it wouldn’t involve any cutting and blood but I’d come this far without turning back and was ready to go the whole route no matter what the drill was. So I was really relieved when Rubber reaches into the cloth bag where I’d been thinking they had the knives and bowls for collecting blood or whatever and instead he pulls out this cool little clay chillum made in the shape of a pregnant African woman sitting with her legs crossed and her arms folded under her huge tits and I-Man immediately fills it from a pouch and says, Dis be some special herb, Bone, and lights it. He passed the chillum down to Terron and Elroy and Rubber who all took huge hits and then to me and I gave it my usual medium-sized whack and passed it on to I-Man but before the tube’d even reached I-Man’s mouth I felt myself whirling like in a barrel going over a waterfall and for a second it was completely dark again and I couldn’t see anything except I knew I was still spinning in the barrel. Then my eyesight came back and I was in a totally different place than the cave and with different people.

  I’m remembering it now while I’m telling it so I’m like in two places at once, here and now and then and there, but when it was happening I was only in the one place which was not a limestone cave in Cockpit Country in Jamaica with I-Man and his Rasta brethren, and it wasn’t like any tripping on acid I’d ever done where you’re also in two places at once and one of them is weird and the other normal. Even dreaming you’re usually in two places at once. No, this was like real and I didn’t have any memory of how I got there or any plans for getting out.

  A drum was beating, real heavy and slow like thump, thump, thump, and it didn’t let up or change, it just went on and on, a sort of sound track on a continuous loop that seemed to come from the place itself the way the sound of the wind does, like it was coming right out of the trees and fields and sky and not from outside. I wasn’t scared or anything yet, I just went with it and discovered one thing at a time and dealt with it, like the fact that I was up on a wagon driving a team of oxen I guess they are, like cows only bigger slowly along a lane that cuts across a wide green cane field and my wagon is heaped up with cane stalks. There’s the sea in the distance with waves breaking on a thin sandy beach and rocky ledges further on and a bright blue sky overhead and a burning sun and behind me the dark green mountains.

  I’m all alone out there on my wagon and it’s hot under the noonday sun and it takes me a long time to get across the cane field to the line of trees at the edge and when I pass into the shade of the trees it’s cooler and a light breeze blows and I’m pretty happy for a few minutes then. There’s a little stream flowing by and where the trail crosses it I stop the wagon and let the oxen drink from it and drink a little myself and wet my doo-rag and wipe my face with it.

  Then I get back up on the wagon box and drive on and cross some more cane fields until finally I come into this little town where there’s a regular stone church and some stores and so on and lots of people walking around, mostly black people barefoot and in work clothes and a few white people dressed more or less the same until I get to the town square where there’s more white people than black now and the whites are wearing straw hats and these old-fashioned suits. Nobody pays any attention to me so I go by real slow and try to catch the scene although it makes me feel ashamed and I don’t want to look. But I do.

  The white people are buying and selling black people. A white guy up on a kind of stage in the middle is showing off a naked scared-looking black kid about my age, making him turn around and bend over and spread his cheeks and show his ass and balls to the crowd which has a fair number of females in it and different whites in the crowd are bidding on the kid while another white guy off to the side of the stage, the auctioneer I guess points to this or that bidder and keeps the price going up. Everybody acts like it’s normal. Even the black people. Little pick’ny kids are running around and black women are carrying bundles on their heads and wh
ite men are smoking cigars and talking. Nobody’s crying or looking embarrassed or pissed off, everybody’s relaxed and easy and familiar with each other, white and black alike although obviously the whites are the bosses and tell the blacks to do this or that which they do but not too fast.

  The auctioneer who’s a tall skinny hawk-faced guy like Pa makes the naked kid on the stage squat down and jump like a frog and everybody laughs, even the few blacks who are among the crowd although there’s a line of other blacks I now see standing on the ground behind the stage, men and women and some kids and babies all of them naked even the older ones and they’re all chained together at the ankles and scabby and sorrowful and none of them laughs at the kid leaping around on the stage like a shiny black frog. I guess they’re still Africans and to them this isn’t normal yet.

  The whole scene creeps me out so I give a little flick of the stick and keep my oxen moving on out of town along the track, keeping close to the sea for a while. After a few minutes I don’t have any complicated thoughts or memories anymore or even any stupid or simple thoughts, I’m just catching the rays up on my box and digging the smell of the cane and the feel of the light sea breeze on my face and now and then brushing a fly away and letting the oxen make all the decisions. The track turns gradually uphill between more cane fields undl I come to a big stone gate and turn in and drive the wagon up to a bunch of buildings like barns where there’s a dozen or so black dudes and some women unloading cane from different wagons and carrying it inside this one barn and stacking it. There’s also this huge grinder with a blindfolded ox hitched to a long pole going around in a permanent circle and a building with a tall brick chimney sending up a cloud of white sweet-smelling smoke and various other smaller buildings, offices and workshops and the such.