Rule of the Bone

by Russell Banks

  It’s a sugar factory and as soon as I pull up in my wagon a bunch of older guys and women and teenaged kids, all blacks and really sweaty and filthy come over and start to unload it. Nobody talks. They just work. I don’t know what to do now so I’m just sitting there waiting for instructions or maybe the oxen will know what to do when I notice off to my right a white man whaling on a black woman with a short whip. He’s got her shirt pulled off and she’s down on her hands and knees on the ground and every time he hits her her tits shudder and all the time I can hear the same drum thumping like before only now it’s in time to the whip coming down. The white guy is all sweaty and has a mustache like my stepfather although it’s not quite him and he’s going about his business whipping the woman like he’s splitting wood, nothing personal or emotional about it, just part of the job. I look around and the other black people are all going about their business too. Just part of the job.

  Then suddenly somebody grabs my arm and yanks me down from the wagon to the ground. It’s another white guy, shirtless and young, like in his twenties or so and tough-looking with muscles and a hairless chest with great definition like ol’ Bruce but no tattoos or nipple rings or anything. For a second the blacks stop working and look at me but then they turn away and go back to work. The white guy’s got kind of a blond buzz-cut and good teeth and he reaches down, clamps his hand onto my arm and yanks me up from the ground like I don’t weigh anything which compared to him I don’t and without saying anything he drags me around behind one of the barns like I’m a chicken and he’s got to cut my head off for the cook. When we get back there out of sight of the others the white guy unbuttons his pants and flings a huge boner out which he makes me jerk off with my hand while he holds me next to him real tight and when he comes he gasps and kisses me hard on the back of my neck. Then he stuffs his unit back into his pants and buttons up and shoves me back in the direction of the wagons and the other people and follows along behind like nothing happened. I’m actually relieved that nothing worse happened but I’m feeling pretty shitty anyhow so I’m glad to see that my wagon’s empty and when I climb back up onto the box the oxen turn and move back down the long curving driveway between the cane fields to the road by the sea the same way as we came before.

  All day long it goes like that, real slow and mindless in the sun when I’m alone with the oxen driving the wagon across the cane fields and while the wagon’s being loaded or unloaded by black people but then as soon as I’m around white people everything gets crazy and speeded up and violent. I see an old black guy get kicked in the balls by a white man who then throws a bucket of cold water on him and walks away. I see two white guys screaming at each other, the cords in their necks sticking out and spit flying while a young good-looking black female stands off to one side looking at the ground and waiting. I see a white man in a suit and broad-brimmed hat galloping toward me on horseback and I pull my oxen out of his way into a cane field and the wagon smashes some of the cane while he races past and afterwards another white guy comes running out of the field and beats the shit out of me with a bamboo cane and calls me a fucking idiot. I see a black man hanging from a tree at the edge of town and white kids throwing stones at his body and John Crow birds waiting in the top branches of the tree for the kids to get bored and go away.

  And at night after everybody’s come in from the fields and most of the blacks have gone to their cabins behind the greathouse which is a lot like Starport but not as fancy and not up in the hills, I have to carry food and drinks to the white people at their table who talk like I can’t understand English and don’t know that all they talk about is how lazy and stupid and dishonest the blacks are. There are four or five men, I can’t remember them all individually because they kind of blend together and whenever I’m around them I’m scared and feel shitty or else I’m trying to get away from them but they’re related, fathers and sons and brothers. Plus there are a couple of females, a wife and mother of the sons and a younger one who’s either a sister or else is married to one of the sons, and there’s some little white kids I try to ignore except when they tell me to bring them something or take something away.

  Later the men sit out on the porch looking across the fields in front to the sea sparkling in the moonlight and I’m supposed to stand behind them and wave this palm leaf to keep the mosquitoes away while they drink and smoke and worry about money and slaves and tell weird stories about the sex lives of black people until finally they say they’re going to bed and they stumble off and leave me by myself. With the white people gone I don’t know what to do next so I wander around the big empty house for a while and then go outside and start toward the slave-quarters in back when all of sudden standing in the path in front of me there’s I-Man and his Maroon brethren Terron and Elroy and Rubber, all of them carrying machetes and looking serious. There’s blood on the machetes and a big splash of blood across Rubber’s shirt that I figure came from the white overseer who lives in the barn or the white clerk who has a room in the office building by the blacksmith shop.

  Before I can say anything I-Man puts his finger to his lips to shush me. Then I see behind them in the shadows a bunch more black people, mostly men but some women too with little kids even, the black people I’ve been seeing all day out in the fields and at the sugar factory and up in the greathouse, the woman who was being whipped and the old guy who got kicked and the young woman the two overseers were fighting over, all the people who were working alongside me like silent machines without any thoughts or feelings.

  They’re carrying machetes too, plus scythes and sickles and hatchets and they quickly brush past me following I-Man and the other Maroons toward the greathouse. I want to follow them but something stops me, like my feet are suddenly made of lead and I can’t walk so I have to stand there in the bushy shadows at the edge of the big wide lawn and watch the blacks enter the darkened house at all the entrances, front and back and side. Except for the steady drumming which I’m totally used to by now like it’s my own heartbeat and the sound of the wind off the sea clattering the moonlit palms it’s completely silent. I stand there for a long time wondering if maybe I was dreaming, when I hear a shriek that makes my blood go cold followed by screams and someone, a woman wailing for a second until she’s abruptly shut off and then a white man is begging, No, no, please don’t! and he’s cut off too. Then silence again. Until I hear some glass breaking inside and then I notice someone, a child creeping on hands and knees across the porch in front. It’s a blond-haired white boy barefoot in a nightgown, like five or six years old and he makes his way along the length of the porch and climbs down to the ground there and starts running straight toward where I’m standing. He comes up suddenly on me all wild-eyed and pumping his arms and legs like mad and just as he’s about to pass me by I reach out and grab him and clap my hand over his shocked mouth and pull him back into the shadowy bushes and hold on to him tight.

  A minute later I can see flames flaring up at the back of the house and up on the second floor somebody’s smashing the windows and tossing stuff out, books fluttering down and dishes and piss pots and a tailor’s dummy. The drapes on the first floor are on fire now and I can see black people with their machetes and so on coming out of the house and gathering together on the far side. Me and the white kid who’s shivering in my arms back off a few more steps into the bushes as the blacks check each other out and then start running. There’s about twenty or thirty of them waving bloody machetes and hatchets as they cross the great wide lawn in the moonlight headed toward a grove of live oak trees and a long sloping field where the cows are kept. The house is really on fire now, huge sprays of sparks’re flying up and the sky is glowing orange and yellow.

  Behind me the long driveway curves away to the road by the sea and I see in the distance the first of the white men on horseback coming with a second batch a short ways behind. The blacks have disappeared into the cow field and beyond the field is the woods and then the hills and beyond the hills is the Co
ckpit. There’s no one left here now, no one alive but me and the little blond-haired white kid sobbing in my arms. And here come the white men riding up the driveway like mad with guns and swords glinting in the moonlight ready to slay the first black they see. They’re hungry for killing a black and spattering his blood and no little white kid is going to be strong enough to save him.

  Suddenly someone touches me on the shoulder and I turn and it’s I-Man. He says, Comin’, Bone?

  What about him? I say and show him the little white kid.

  Forget-tee, Bone.

  Practically crying I say, Oh Rasta, I-and-I cyan’t do dat! Up to you, Bone, he says and he walks off toward the bush and disappears into the darkness.

  I unwrap my arms from the white boy and release him and instantly he takes off running toward the men on horseback who have arrived in front of the house now and are shouting and firing their guns into the air looking crazy and wild until they see the kid. The head white man gets down off his horse real fast and sweeps the boy up in his arms, and right away the kid points straight at where I’m hiding in the bushes. The little bastard betrays me! The head white guy starts jogging toward me with his gun out ready to blow me away and several others come up behind him so I take off running, darting down behind the barns and the sugar factory where I scramble over a stone fence and plunge into the cane field there with bullets flying over my head and zipping through the cane snapping off stalks as I plow ahead like in a green endless head high sea of sugarcane expecting my next breath to be my last.

  But it’s not. Way out there in the middle of the cane field with my chest heaving and my legs almost too heavy to run another step I push away a clump of cane and see a hole in the ground. Quick as I can I check it out and observe that it goes a long ways in and is just big enough for a skinny kid like me to squeeze into but no regular white man can. I take one more look back at the greathouse which’s all aflame now and the white guys’re riding around it like they set it on fire themselves shooting their guns off in all directions even in mine still. Then I notice that a bunch of riders are torching the cane field on three sides and a bunch more are galloping their horses around to the fourth side by the road to wait there for me so I drop down on my hands and knees and crawl into the darkness of the hole in the ground.

  I’m surprised and a little scared to find that the hole just keeps going, it’s a tunnel and pretty soon it’s pitch dark and I can’t hear the gunfire and the roar of the fires and the white guys yelling anymore, all I can hear is the drumming, the same drumming as before only it’s getting louder now as I crawl along the tunnel feeling my way with my hands out in front of my face. I squirm and crawl like this for hours it seems like and all the time the drums keep getting louder until finally I work my way around a sharp bend in the tunnel and up ahead I catch a glimpse of a flickering light and before I know it I’ve reached the end of the tunnel.

  I pull myself forward and up out of it and when I stick my head up and look around I see that I’ve come out in the candlelit Maroon cave. I climb up out of the spinal cord hole at the rear of the skull and there’s I-Man kicking back with a spliff and ol’ Rubber’s working out like a madman on one of those little square goatskin drums and the other Rastas, Terron and Elroy’re rolling joints and everybody looks like even though they’ve been waiting patiently for me to get back they’re relieved to see me and are ready to book. Rubber lays off the drumming and stands and stretches and the other guys do the same. Then I-Man blows out the candles one by one and leads the way back out through the mouth into the darkness.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  SECOND THOUGHTS

  Things moved pretty fast after that and I didn’t really have time like for weeks, until I left Jamaica actually, for digesting the experience of coming to know I-self so to speak and how coming to see with the lights of I-self’d changed the way I saw everything else like it was supposed to do. And did. But the next few days we just worked all day and even at night harvesting the ganja plants, me and I-Man and the other guys cutting the plants with machetes on both plots, I-Man’s and Rubber’s next door and then hauling them up to my cabin where the drying racks were that they’d built out of bamboo, and then as soon as the plots were cleared we chopped up the dirt again with hoes and fertilized it with this powdery old bat-shit that we had to bag and lug from a cave a long ways into the Cockpit. It was hard work, harder than any I’d done before and you had to concentrate so I didn’t have much time for thinking or remembering, especially because it was so hot all the time. My head was like that kid’s I’d been in slavery days, pretty much a blank except I wasn’t scared or nervous about anything anymore especially white people.

  After we had the dirt ready we planted the seeds for the new crop and hauled water and got the rows real soppy and for shading them while the plants were still babies we ran strings from poles and hung these humongous thin camouflage sheets that I-Man said’d been left behind in Grenada after the United States Army finished invading and went home. Dem hiding sheets spread all over de Caribbean now, mon. Dem de bes’ t’ing ’bout dat invasion so as t’ mek de ganja reach him fulfillment undisturbed ‘neath de Jamaican sun an’ den return to Babylon an’ help create de peaceable kingdom dere. Jah mek de instruments of destruction come forward fe be instruments of instruction.

  Then we spent days sorting the dried ganja plants and pressing and packing them into burlap bales, about a hundred of them that we stacked under a lean-to we built and inside my cabin so I had to move out practically and hang my hammock from a couple of trees out behind it. But only for a few days, I-Man explained. De Nighthawk soon come, he said referring I figured to some guy with a big truck because that was what he’d need for hauling this many bales out of here. I never asked much about the higher workings of the ganja trade, how it got financed and all, I just let I-Man tell me what he thought I needed to know which actually wasn’t much since I was like a peon still and just did what I was told by the older heavier dudes in the posse. But I figured there were even heavier dudes in places like Kingston and Mobay or maybe the States who’d put up the money for the operation, for the camouflage sheets for instance and the plastic pails and hoes and all and for walking-around money since the only cash money I-Man or the other guys had came from dealing small load down in Mobay out of the ant farm. What they had going up here in the Cockpit was a major plantation though and that took cash no matter how much free labor we were putting in.

  After a few days of chilling and mainly tending the new green shoots I got waked up in my hammock by Rubber one morning to tell me that I-Man was down in Mobay making the final arrangements with Nighthawk and he’d sent word that we were supposed to get ready for delivery the next night. What this meant was lugging all the bales of ganja on our backs, on our heads actually over hill and dale about three miles still further into the Cockpit where there was a flat space about the size of a basketball court cleared along the ridge of one of the pits and no road in or out so I finally realized that Nighthawk was a guy with a plane although it was hard to see how a regular plane could land and take off on such a small space.

  We worked all that day and the next, me and Rubber and Terron and Elroy carrying the ganja from the groundation to the airfield where we stashed it under some more of Ronald Reagan’s camouflage. I could only lug one bale at a time on my head but the other guys could handle two so I felt kind of useless. They didn’t care though and we did a lot of joking and suchlike while we hauled the bales because spirits were up then. Everybody I guess was sniffing the end of another successful growing season and a big payday and I was starting to wonder if I was going to get a share of the profits too and if I did what I’d do with it. Rubber was going to buy a motorcycle, a Honda he said all excited like it wasn’t just Jap shit and then he planned to go out to Negril and fuck American college girls. Rubber was pretty weird-looking though, almost comical and could only talk the native language so I didn’t think he’d score much with American females even
driving a Harley which I don’t think they have in Jamaica. Terron was into buying a huge outdoor sound system and becoming a DJ with a friend who had a pickup and could carry it around the island to all the dance parties, and Elroy said he was going to pay for his mother to have an operation on her hips so she could walk again which I thought was cool. I-Man I didn’t know about since he never mentioned money except to put it down and diss people who liked it although I’d noticed that ever since I’d known him he always had a few bucks in his pocket when he needed it which wasn’t true of any other Jamaican I’d met so far. Of course the only Jamaicans I knew were really poor. But I think I-Man was one of those guys who decided in the beginning to live the same when he had lots of money as when he didn’t have a penny and it’d worked out that he lived somewhere in the middle all the time and never had to think about it much one way or the other. That’s pretty much what I was planning to do with my share if I got one.

  Anyhow the next night around seven we’d finally finished hauling all the bales to the airfield and were sitting around out there waiting for Nighthawk to make the pickup. After a few hours of nothing happening I-Man suddenly showed up, he like just stepped out of the bush and touched us on our shoulders without us once hearing him until there he was which was the way he usually came up on people, like he’d been beamed up invisible and then materialized right before your eyes. I was starting to take seriously all this stuff about I-Man being a magician that Rubber and the guys’d been telling me, an obi man they called him, even though I’d known him when he was an illegal alien escapee from an apple farm in upstate New York. Plus all the stories about those old Africans who could fly. There was even one I-Man’d told me about this famous Maroon female warrior named Nonny who could catch the slavecatchers’ bullets in her pussy and turn around and bend over and shoot the bullets right back at them with her ass.