49 pages • 1 hour read
Russell BanksRule of the Bone
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 1995A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 7-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary: “The Bone Rules”
After getting their tattoos, Russ and Bone decide they shouldn’t go back to the school bus. Russ knows about an empty summer home in Keene, so the two take a public bus, sitting separately in case someone is looking for two missing boys. A young man in the military sits next to Bone; Bone proceeds to tell him a made-up story about returning to Israel, which in the story is his ancestral homeland. Bone continues the story, including that he is the descendant of Jews and Native Americans and has been trained in tracking and survival.
After the bus ride, Russ leads Bone on a long walk to the summer home. It’s abandoned, and they cut open a screened-in porch to get inside. Russ tells Bone that his uncle is paid to keep an eye on the house, and as long as they keep the windows shuttered they’ll be fine. Bone learns the house belongs to the Ridgeways, who Russ thinks are artists or professors.
The two find canned food, hook up the water, and settle in to squat there until summer comes. While Bone is searching the house for marijuana, he finds a bag of joints and a gun; he keeps the gun hidden from Russ. Their first few days in the house are a great time—they eat canned goods and spaghetti, watch TV, and make fires by busting up furniture in the house—but they quickly grow bored. The boredom grows into annoyance with each other, then anger, and Russ announces that he’s leaving. He has called his aunt, and she has agreed to let him stay at her house for a while. He gives Bone his aunt’s phone number and leaves.
Without really processing it, Bone starts to cry, then becomes angry at Russ and at the society that rejects people like him unless he submits to what they want. He packs up a bag with the gun, steals some of the Ridgeways’ clothes and classical music CDs as well as a stuffed bird, and cuts off his mohawk. As he’s about to leave, he looks around the house, which the two boys have trashed, and thinks he must have forgotten something. Then he takes the gun out of his bag and shoots out a large window. He steps through it and surveys the beautiful nature surrounding him, then shouts, “The Bone rules!” (133), into the evening air.
Chapter 8 Summary: “The Soul Assassins”
Bone walks out to the highway and tries to hitch a ride east. He’s stuck there for quite some time until a van pulls up, and Bone gets in without thinking about it. As it happens, this is Buster Brown’s van, and Buster tells Bone that he has to help him deal with a band that he’s managing at a club in Plattsburgh. Froggy is still with Buster, but she looks considerably worse than before. Bone has no choice but to go along with Buster.
Buster is managing a rap group called the Hooliganz, and they are refusing to play the show with the Soul Assassins unless Buster pays them what he owes them. Buster is scornful of the whole thing, addressing everyone involved with racist language. His plan is to have Bone hold the money while he works out the details with everyone. He gives Bone a roll of cash, which Bone hides inside the stuffed bird he took from the Ridgeways.
They park outside the club and wait until dark. At one point, Bone realizes the Adirondack Iron biker gang is there, and he ducks down. When the bands arrive, Buster gets out of the van to negotiate. As Buster goes inside, Bone turns to Froggy and tells her they should leave. She reveals that her mother lives in Milwaukee and actually gave Froggy over to Buster’s care. Bone realizes that her mother is probably a drug addict and may have even sold Froggy to Buster. He tries again to convince her, telling her they can stay in the school bus until they find a way to get her home, but she is afraid of leaving Buster.
A fight breaks out in the bar, and a window is smashed: Racial tension between the bikers and the Hooliganz has boiled over into an all-out brawl. Bone uses this as their excuse to leave, and he and Froggy sneak out of the van, stealing Buster’s money, and head toward the school bus. They arrive to find the two brothers long gone. In their place is a late-middle-aged Rastafarian Jamaican named I-Man, who Bone says will become his best friend.
Chapter 9 Summary: “School Days”
Over the days and weeks staying at the bus, Bone starts learning about I-Man. He reflects on I-Man’s religion and vegetarian diet (known as Ital), which he has seen white kids coopt but never really known anything about. He is disdainful of the idea of white people taking things from Black people without having a clear understanding of the issue. He is taken with I-Man, though, and starts to appreciate what religion does for his new friend, even if he can’t understand it.
I-Man has come to America as a migrant farmer, but was dismayed about the conditions and felt that continuing the work was against his religion, so he moved to the bus to live peacefully, growing vegetables and marijuana and dumpster-diving to survive. Bone and Froggy join him, and for Bone it feels like an idyllic life. Froggy begins to open up to both of them, as well. Bone isn’t sure where the money I-Man has is coming from, but he assumes that he is dealing some on the side. For weeks and months, they take up an easy, familial relationship.
I-Man and Bone realize Froggy can’t stay, though, so they look for her mother and eventually find her phone number. I-Man is hesitant to make Froggy do anything she doesn’t want to, but Bone thinks it’s for the best, so he convinces Froggy to get on the phone with her mom.
Bone talks to the mother first and realizes he doesn’t know Froggy’s real name. Froggy tells him her real name is Rose, and Bone proceeds to get the mother to agree to speak with her. They all head to the grocery store pay phone, and they realize that it’s the Fourth of July. After Bone hands the phone to Rose, he begins to have doubts, but he knows she has to be with someone who can really take care of her. Rose’s mother says she needs more money if she’s going to take care of her daughter, arguing that she’s sick and has trouble working, that Rose needs her own room, that they need a new air conditioner for the summer. Bone begins to feel like he’s made a mistake, but he agrees to send some of Buster’s money along.
Bone tells I-Man the plan, and he is predictably relaxed about it, saying only “Mus’ be” (179). Together, they watch the fireworks.
The next morning, Bone packs up Rosie’s things and gives her some money, telling her that it’s hers alone, and she should keep it to herself. As he’s about to take her to the bus station, he realizes that he should go home too, or at least try to. He packs up his things and tells I-Man, who is pleased, because he sees it as part of Bone’s journey. Bone thanks I-Man, and they part ways.
Chapters 7-9 Analysis
The time that Russ and Bone spend at the Ridgeways starts comfortably but devolves into conflict that’s rooted in Russ’s view that nothing has changed in their life. Bone thinks, “it was like I had gone and changed completely who I was […] and he hadn’t changed anything. I was the Bone for sure but Russ was still Russ” (123). Russ’s attitude is to take things as they come, which is nearly identical to the attitude Bone adopts toward the end of the book. For now, the two are at odds, which is exacerbated by the stuck, timeless life they’re living at the Ridgeways. Bone is angry when Russ leaves because Russ has an escape; however, Bone doesn’t think he should need one, and he feels abandoned by the world.
The objects that Bone takes from the Ridgeways all play a role in the narrative, and each take on symbolic meaning: The hollowed-out woodcock initially serves as a hiding place for money but becomes a statement; the gun represents Bone’s rage at the world, which he ends up rejecting; and the classical CDs are a symbol of the adult (and white) world that Bone puts off engaging with. Bone relates to symbols, so each time they are mentioned in the novel, they take on more meaning and become further entwined with Bone’s sense of self.
It's important that Adirondack Iron is explicitly a white-nationalist/racist biker gang, and that Russ and Chappie see this as a normal facet of the world of upstate New York. The same is true of Buster Brown’s racist remarks—the villainy depicted in these characters has many facets, but racism is at the forefront. One of the major themes of the book is that of whiteness, especially in relation to the Black Diaspora, and these early chapters are setting up Chappie’s unthinking acceptance of the hostility and difference between the races and how his eventual rejection of those ideas will come from interpersonal connection and conflict. Russ and Chappie go through the initial steps of this journey together: Russ decides he wants to change his tattoo, which serves as a symbol of that progress, but it’s only after Bone leaves Russ behind, rescues Rose, and starts to connect with I-Man that he understands interpersonal race relations in any way besides the one he was raised to believe.
Bone comes to empathize with I-Man, who he is eventually portrayed as a complex, self-actualized man. In some ways, I-Man echoes Jim from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: He’s a person who has escaped a kind of servitude, who desires his freedom, and who takes up a paternal/familial relationship with a wayward young man. This becomes more complex, though, as Bone learns about Rastafarian culture and I-Man’s way of life, particularly because I-Man is a descendent of the Ashanti people who liberated themselves from slave-holders in the 1740s. That he ends up right back in servitude when he comes to America despite being a self-assured, powerful man is a critique of American capitalism and its interconnection with a history of slavery and 20th-century racism.
I-Man’s attitude of peaceful non-involvement in other people’s lives will continue, and the first example is his belief that Froggy/Rose should make her own choices. Bone knows that Froggy’s mother should not be in charge of a young child, but he is caught up in his own ideology of what should be happening to Froggy instead of thinking about Froggy as her own person. Disaster follows when Bone tries to do the “right thing” as prescribed by society (which is another echo of Huckleberry Finn); it’s only when he adopts and follows his own moral code that he feels good about his actions.
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