Russell Banks - Rule of the Bone

Cool, I said and dropped the beam of my light.

Mon got to shine de light from out him eyes fe seein good, he said and he laughed from way down deep in his chest.

Racially this was getting to be quite an unusual night for me. I hadn’t seen this many black people on the same night in my whole life practically and these weren’t your usual black people either like Bart the security guard at the mall and the occasional Air Force dude you saw around town. These guys were seriously black, like, Africans almost.

What’re you doing here, man? I said keeping my light pointed down like he’d asked.

Same as you, mon.

What’s that?

Tryin to get home, mon. Me jus’ tryin to get home.

Yeah, well, I guess us too, I said. Then I introduce myself and Froggy and he said his name was I-Man and shook my hand like a regular white person so as to make me feel normal which it did. Afterwards me and Froggy settled on one of the mattresses and I covered her with my jacket and she fell straight to sleep. I was lying there thinking about all that’d happened when suddenly I smelled the sweet familiar aroma of burning marijuana and I-Man calls down from his seat in the back, You wan’ smoke some spliff, mon?

I said sure and went back there and we smoked and talked a while and before the night was gone I knew that I had met the man who would become my best friend.

It’s hard to think back to those days of living in the bus with I-Man and Froggy and not get all gummed up with feelings of like thankfulness although I don’t know who to thank and didn’t know then either since I-Man himself never took any credit and everything that seemed unusual to me was only normal to him.

Maybe it was normal and maybe what was unusual or weird was basically my life up to then. Because up to then for me living was the same as running through hell with a gasoline suit on.

You got to give thanks and praise, mon, he used to tell me whenever I’d say how cool things were now with me and Froggy and him living together in the schoolbus out there in the field behind the warehouses north of Plattsburgh.

I’d say, Yeah, right, who’m I supposed to give thanks and praise to? and I-Man always smiled that soft smile of his and said Jah which I guessed was his idea of God or maybe Jesus but different on account of I-Man being an old black guy and a Jamaican and all that. I wasn’t sure who Jah was really, the whole thing being still pretty new to me and when he told about how Jah was actually this African king of kings named Haile Selassie who drove the whites out of Africa and freed up his people I figured this was something white people probably couldn’t get or else I-Man was working from a different Bible than ours, one I hadn’t heard of yet.

Actually there were some Rastafarians who were like white Americans that I’d seen at the mall and elsewhere hitching et cetera, kids mainly who were into reefer but wanted a religion to go with it so they grew their hair out and twisted it into locks and put wax and other crap into it so they could make like dreadlocks out of it and these white Rastas when they talked about Jah and said give praise and thanks, mon, stuff they’d picked up mostly from Bob Marley songs they never mentioned the Haile Selassie guy. I knew they were in reality talking about God though and Jesus and suchlike only picturing Him as a way older black guy like Malcolm X with a gray beard so they could picture themselves as black too, like that was the whole point, to not have to be an American white kid worshiping the god of your parents which is why the Haile Selassie stuff got overlooked by them but it was important.

The thing is, reality, at least that part of reality which includes gods and saviors and so forth was different for I-Man than it was for us American white kids. Probably different even than for American black kids too but I can’t say much about that of course since I’m not one myself. I mean, who knows how black kids from America picture God? I guess if you judge from their parents’ artworks and church songs and suchlike it figures that they picture Him pretty much the same as white kids do only He’s a little less uptight maybe.

Anyhow whenever I-Man told me to give thanks and praise to Jah because I’d just said how cool everything was it was like he was telling me to thank the monkey god or praise the hundred-armed god with the elephant face or something weird like that. But when I thought about it since for the first time in my life I was actually happy it made more sense for me to be thanking and praising foreign gods like that than the bearded white American Methodist God and His skinny son Jesus that my mom and stepfather and my grandmother’d told me to thank and praise in church when I was a little kid. I would’ve been lying then since I didn’t exactly have a lot to be thankful for unless you count my real father taking off on me and my stepfather’s sicko visits to my room when he was drunk and my mom’s weepy dumb belief that everything was cool and my grandmother’s constant complaining. Giving thanks and praise to God and Jesus back then, that would’ve been the really weird thing and they probably knew it too. Then or now they themselves never went to church regular anyhow, not even one Sunday a month but only often enough so people knew they weren’t Catholic or Jew which I think was the main point.

It’s funny about religion, whether it’s the religion of white Rasta kids or even my own mom it’s usually got some other point than thanks and praise. For the people doing the thanking and praising, I mean. I’d actually never thought much about this stuff until I met up with I-Man that summer and then for a while before I realized it I really got into it and started making up some groundbreaking new opinions for myself. In religion I-Man was different than anyone else I’d ever met, he was actually sincerely religious I guess you could say but religious in the way that God or Jesus or whoever must’ve had in mind back in the olden days like in Israel when they first started thinking religion might be a pretty good idea for earth people since earth people were so selfish and ignorant and all and went around acting like they were going to live forever and deserved it too.

For I-Man religion was mainly a way to give thanks and praise just for being alive because nobody exactly deserved life. It wasn’t like you could go out and earn it somehow. Plus for him religion was a way to straighten out his diet and in general get his act together due to the fact that true Rastafarians weren’t allowed to eat any pork or lobsters or any of what he called deaders which meant meat basically and no salt on anything on account of Africans being allergic to salt he told me. And they didn’t allow alcoholic beverages either, he said due to the connection between rum and slavery days, a connection I didn’t quite get till later. Anyhow everything had to be natural, he said which was one reason why he’d run away from the farm camp, because of the unnatural food they had to eat there and because of all the insecticides they put on the apple trees was the second reason he’d split.

He’d come up from Jamaica in April with a crew of migrant farmworkers and the hiring guy hadn’t told him in advance that he wouldn’t be able to practice his religion here in spite of America being a free country because of how the food in America was all full of deaders and salt and chemicals. So I-Man’d just walked. The deal was they were supposed to work on the apple trees in the spring and then in June the same crew was supposed to go to Florida on a bus and cut sugarcane all summer for a different company and come back north in the fall and pick apples. Once you signed on you couldn’t quit until six months were up without losing all the money that you’d earned so far and your work permit so if you left the camp you were like an international outlaw, an illegal alien plus you were broke.