Rule of the Bone (26 page)

Rubber who was right behind me said, Keep movin' Rasta.

But I-and-I cyan see nuttin.

No matter, mon, he said and gave me a little push on the shoulder with the tip of his machete and that got me going again. On and on I walked in total darkness like for a quarter of a mile maybe, thinking, Well, if I walk off a cliff I won't know it till it's too late so why worry, when I noticed that the air had gotten cool like a fan was blowing and I could feel through my sandals that I was walking on smooth flat rock now not dirt or grass anymore and I could hear water dripping. I knew I must be in a cave but it was like I had a blindfold on and I started imagining bats and snakes and shit darting at me out of the darkness and my skin got goose-bumped all over and for a second there I was scared I'd lose it completely and start trying to claw my way back out to the moonlight and for the rest of my life I'd have to live with the shameful knowledge that I'd panicked at the very moment I was supposed to be viewing the lights of I-self and ascending in that irie glow to the heights of I-and-I where I'd finally come to know Jah.

I heard a match then and saw the flame and I-Man's craggy brown face as he lit up a spliff and took a deep hit off of it and with the same match lit a candle and then took it and went around lighting more candles that were in these nooks and crannies in the walls of the cave. The darkness disappeared and tall shadows flashed and fell all around like I-Man was dropping solid dark gray wool blankets off of a clothesline and revealing behind them this humongous room with yellowish-white rock walls that were curved and smooth like they'd been carved out of solid rock by water over millions of years. It was like being inside a gigantic human skull and we'd come in through the mouth. Up above there were a couple more dark caves leading out that looked like eye sockets and in back where I guess the spinal column was I could see another dark hole and I could hear water running down there like that was the ancient riverbed and it was still carving its way deeper and deeper into the earth.

I-Man sat me down on a little ledge and sat beside me and pointed out a bunch of red pictures up on the top of the skull of these weird squiggly signs and a couple of animals I recognized like turtles and birds and snakes and stick figures of guys with spears who were fighting each other, some lying down with the spears sticking out and some with their heads cut off and the rest whaling on them. The pictures were way up on top, higher than you could reach without an extension ladder which they didn't have in those olden days so I wondered how they got up there to paint them.

Dem fly up, Bone, I-Man said. Dem ol' Africans could fly lak birds, mon.

I figured there'd be some kind of ceremony now and I was really hoping it wouldn't involve any cutting and blood but I'd come this far without turning back and was ready to go the whole route no matter what the drill was. So I was really relieved when Rubber reaches into the cloth bag where I'd been thinking they had the knives and bowls for collecting blood or whatever and instead he pulls out this cool little clay chillum made in the shape of a pregnant African woman sitting with her legs crossed and her arms folded under her huge tits and I-Man immediately fills it from a pouch and says, Dis be some special herb, Bone, and lights it. He passed the chillum down to Terron and Elroy and Rubber who all took huge hits and then to me and I gave it my usual medium-sized whack and passed it on to I-Man but before the tube'd even reached I-Man's mouth I felt myself whirling like in a barrel going over a waterfall and for a second it was completely dark again and I couldn't see anything except I knew I was still spinning in the barrel. Then my eyesight came back and I was in a totally different place than the cave and with different people.

I'm remembering it now while I'm telling it so I'm like in two places at once, here and now and then and there, but when it was happening I was only in the one place which was not a limestone cave in Cockpit Country in Jamaica with I-Man and his Rasta brethren, and it wasn't like any tripping on acid I'd ever done where you're also in two places at once and one of them is weird and the other normal. Even dreaming you're usually in two places at once. No, this was like real and I didn't have any memory of how I got there or any plans for getting out.

A drum was beating, real heavy and slow like thump, thump, thump, and it didn't let up or change, it just went on and on, a sort of sound track on a continuous loop that seemed to come from the place itself the way the sound of the wind does, like it was coming right out of the trees and fields and sky and not from outside. I wasn't scared or anything yet, I just went with it and discovered one thing at a time and dealt with it, like the fact that I was up on a wagon driving a team of oxen I guess they are, like cows only bigger slowly along a lane that cuts across a wide green cane field and my wagon is heaped up with cane stalks. There's the sea in the distance with waves breaking on a thin sandy beach and rocky ledges further on and a bright blue sky overhead and a burning sun and behind me the dark green mountains.

I'm all alone out there on my wagon and it's hot under the noonday sun and it takes me a long time to get across the cane field to the line of trees at the edge and when I pass into the shade of the trees it's cooler and a light breeze blows and I'm pretty happy for a few minutes then. There's a little stream flowing by and where the trail crosses it I stop the wagon and let the oxen drink from it and drink a little myself and wet my doo-rag and wipe my face with it.

Then I get back up on the wagon box and drive on and cross some more cane fields until finally I come into this little town where there's a regular stone church and some stores and so on and lots of people walking around, mostly black people barefoot and in work clothes and a few white people dressed more or less the same until I get to the town square where there's more white people than black now and the whites are wearing straw hats and these old-fashioned suits. Nobody pays any attention to me so I go by real slow and try to catch the scene although it makes me feel ashamed and I don't want to look. But I do.

The white people are buying and selling black people. A white guy up on a kind of stage in the middle is showing off a naked scared-looking black kid about my age, making him turn around and bend over and spread his cheeks and show his ass and balls to the crowd which has a fair number of females in it and different whites in the crowd are bidding on the kid while another white guy off to the side of the stage, the auctioneer I guess points to this or that bidder and keeps the price going up. Everybody acts like it's normal. Even the black people. Little pick'ny kids are running around and black women are carrying bundles on their heads and white men are smoking cigars and talking. Nobody's crying or looking embarrassed or pissed off, everybody's relaxed and easy and familiar with each other, white and black alike although obviously the whites are the bosses and tell the blacks to do this or that which they do but not too fast.

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 undl 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 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.