Russell Banks - Rule of the Bone

I said I was an outlaw too and Bone wasn’t my real name and I-Man said every honest man was an outlaw and every free man if he didn’t want to carry a slavery name had to choose a new one. He wouldn’t tell me his slavery name, he said he couldn’t actually say it anymore and I didn’t tell him mine either, the same as my stepfather’s. Although I did say I used to have two names, Chappie and something else but now I only had one, Bone. He thought that was cool.

He was definitely the most interesting guy I had met in my life so far. I dug his dreadlocks, these long thick black whips about forty or fifty of them that hung down almost to his waist which actually wasn’t as long as it seems because he was pretty short for an adult, my height but very muscular especially for an old guy who I think was around fifty. The dreadlocks were only two and a half feet long or so but probably if you straightened them out they would’ve reached all the way to the ground because his hair was springy and like coiled the way black people’s hair is naturally and he’d never cut it since he’d come to his lights, he said which was when he first came to know I-self. That’s how he talked. Rastas weren’t supposed to cut their hair, he told me or shave either which wasn’t a problem for him since he almost didn’t have any more hair growing on his face than I did which was basically none. I thought he might be part Chinese on account of some of his looks but when I asked him once he said no, one hundred percent pure African blood.

Of great interest to me naturally was the fact that like it was a commandment from the old African king of kings himself all good Rastafarians were required to smoke ganja pretty much on a daily basis. They smoked it in order to ascend to the heights and penetrate to the depths was how I-Man put it when what I think he meant was just getting high. Getting high was like a religious experience for him which was cool but from the way he talked about it religion was also a way to be free of control by white people, English people mainly who he said had taken his ascendants out of Africa and made slaves of them in Jamaica and many other places. Then later on when the English found out how colonization was a cheaper and less vexatious way than slavery for getting rich without having to leave London except on vacation, they went and freed all their slaves and colonized them instead. And after that when the English queen finally died and they had to let Jamaica go free the Americans and Canadians invented tourism which was the same as colonization, he said only without the citizens of the colony needing to make or grow anything.

I liked his words, ascendants and vexatious and so on which made the subject of history interesting to me for the first time, and considering it was a religion Rastafarianism made a lot of sense too, at least the way I-Man explained it.

I didn’t think a white boy could get into it without fakery like the kids wearing dreads I’d seen around but he said sure if you smoked enough ganja you could because once you got to the depths of understanding and came to know I-self you’d see that everything and everyone was the same I-and-I. One love, he said. One heart. One I.

I told him I wasn’t really into going that far yet but maybe when I was older and had put travel to foreign lands and sex and eating meat and some other important experiences behind me I’d be willing to check out the depths of understanding where everything and everyone was the same. For now though I was still into differences.

That first night when me and Froggy showed up at the schoolbus the reason it smelled so good was because I-Man had turned the bus into like a greenhouse. I couldn’t know it until the next morning of course because it was dark when we got there and I was high for the first time in a while and a little confused by everything that had happened but the first thing I saw when I woke up was the sunlight streaming in through the windows and then I saw all these incredible plants in cans and jars and wooden tubs and old barrels. They were set all over the bus wherever the sun could hit them, on boards and bus seats and plastic boxes and hanging from the ceiling by wires, even on the driver’s seat up front and the dashboard and it was like I was waking up in this beautiful tropical garden instead of what used to be a crack den and before that a regular schoolbus.

I sat up on the mattress and studied the place. The plants were mostly young and not too leafy yet but they looked real healthy and green, all kinds of vegetables growing, some of which I could recognize myself like corn and tomatoes and others that I-Man had to tell me later like potatoes and peas and string beans and cabbages and yams and chili peppers and this Jamaican stuff called calalu but it looked like spinach and even carrots and some cucumbers and squashes. Naturally he was into glowing weed. I didn’t have any trouble recognizing that even though the plants were only a few inches high. You smoke enough skunk you develop a sense for spotting it, like you turn into one of those drug dogs they use. When you water it or after it rains the smell enters the air and you can pick it up from a long ways off like lilacs or roses and that first morning when I woke up I inhaled and knew it was the smell of freshly watered cannabis. I-Man had all these small pieces of hose and tubing connected to each other and running into the pots and jars and on to the next ones with water dribbling at the connectors and out of these tiny holes he’d poked in the hosing and in I could hear the drip-drip-drips and the light breeze coming through the windows and the new leaves brushing each other and with the smell of fresh green marijuana in the air it was a nice way to wake up. A super-nice way. It was like the Garden of Eden.

I noticed that the hose came into the bus through the window by the steering wheel and when I stood up and looked out I saw that it led back across the grassy field and there was I-Man in floppy green shorts and yellow tee shirt way in the distance by one of the old cinderblock warehouses where I figured there was a water spigot he’d tapped into. Then I looked around for Froggy but didn’t see her anywhere. I yelled, Hey, Froggy, where are you, man? No answer so I’m thinking she must’ve gotten scared when she woke up and found herself in this weird garden with a little old black dude who talked funny and as soon as he left to turn on the water she must’ve sneaked out and gone back to find Buster although I sure hoped not. I didn’t want him or anyone else finding out where I was presently located and also I kind of felt Froggy was my personal responsibility now and with I-Man’s help I might get her situated with some real parents instead of a guy who maybe he did manage rap groups and run a religious organization but as far as I was concerned he was still the psycho porn king of Plattsburgh who kept kids on junk.

Then I looked out the window again and saw I-Man coming across the field toward the bus and beside him is Froggy holding his hand like she was his kid. As they get closer I can see that he’s talking to her a mile a minute and pointing out the different kinds of weeds and grasses and flowers, teaching her things it looks like, probably the first time anybody’d taught her anything good in her life.

They made a real nice picture, the two of them and it made me think of that book Uncle Tom’s Cabin which I got from the library and read in seventh grade for a book report but my teacher was wicked pissed at me for saying it was pretty good considering a white woman wrote it and gave me a D. My teacher was a white woman herself and thought I was being disrespectful but I wasn’t. I just knew it would’ve been different if it’d been written by a black man, say or even a black woman and it would’ve been better too because the old guy Uncle Tom would’ve kicked some serious ass and then he’d’ve probably been lynched or something but it almost would’ve been worth it. In those old slavery days white people were really fucked up was what I meant in my book report and the white lady who wrote it was trying not to be, that’s all. Of course white people are still fucked up, no surprises there but sometimes I forget like with the book report.