Russell Banks - Rule of the Bone

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 until 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.

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 a 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.