Russell Banks - Rule of the Bone

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 and 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.