Rule of the Bone

“Basically people don’t know how kids think, I guess they forget. But when you’re a kid it’s like you’re wearing these binoculars strapped to your eyes and you can’t see anything except what’s in the dead center of the lenses because you’re too scared of everything else or else you don’t understand it and people expect you to, so you feel stupid all the time.” 

Chappie is saying this about Froggy, but it’s an apt description of Chappie’s own thinking about his situation. His homelessness, as well as the sexual violence he’s faced at the hands of his stepfather, has left him unable to think beyond his immediate situation. He’s also, in many ways, still a child. His plan in this chapter reflects this: He decides he will take the place of Froggy without clearly thinking on what that means (further sexual violence at the hands of Buster Brown), and then abandons that plan when confronted with an image that reminds him. Chappie’s actions throughout the early parts of the novel are reactionary; he’s still wearing binoculars, so to speak.

“When we get closer I see that the mannequins are like in pieces with their arms and hands lying on the floor and some of them don’t even have any heads and the ones that do are bald. They have breasts and all but no nipples or pubic hair. It’s like they’re adults but they’re really little kids […] I’d never seen mannequins like that before […] it was the grossest thing I’d ever seen, at least at that moment it was which is strange I guess because I’d seen lots of really gross things by then.” 

Chappie has just negotiated a sexual transaction with Buster Brown in the hopes of getting Froggy away from him, but he’s stopped by this image of mannequins. He sees himself in them: the odd sexualization of prepubescent forms and the implicit violence of their unattached limbs. When Chappie reacts impulsively in the novel, it’s often because some image or thought has triggered a memory of sexual violence that he cannot deal with.

“The new rule was basically don’t bother your parents and don’t bother the cops or one of them will sic the other on you.” 

In the early parts of the novel, Chappie often thinks of himself in relation to the rules of society or of family. He’s driven to act out because of his trauma, but he must stay within the confines of the power system or else face consequences. The book is in many ways a journey toward Chappie living by his own set of rules instead of the rules of others.

“The more power you’ve got the more you’re able to do the right thing which is whatever you can get away with and at that point in my life I had no power whatsoever, I couldn’t get away with anything so I had to do the wrong thing and tell the truth.” 

Chappie thinks often about the conflict at the center of truth-telling, particularly when it will hurt other people, as it will here. As long as he’s powerless, he’s forced to bend to those around him who have power, and he sees power as a kind of selfish liberation (likely because the people he’s known who have power thus far in the novel—Ken and Bruce—have lived this way). He will come to reject this kind of thinking when he gets to know I-Man later in the book.

“Anyhow I figured a tattoo is like a flag for a single individual so I decided on the skull and bones flag like Captain Hook’s only without the skull in it. Just the crossed bones. […] Plus when they saw it people’d still think I was evil even without the skull part which was cool. And whenever I looked at it myself I’d remember Peter Pan and my grandmother reading to me when I was a little kid.” 

It’s telling that the symbol Bone chooses for himself, both in his new name and in the tattoo he gets, is rooted in his dual desire to be powerful and scary and in his desire to actually live the childhood he has been denied by a history of sexual violence.

“They never did respect us in the first place unless we were willing to want the same things they wanted. They never respected us for ourselves, for being humans the same as them only kids who people are constantly fucking over because we don’t have enough money to stop them. Well, fuck them. Fuck him. Fuck everyone.” 

This sounds like petty teenage rebellion, but Bone’s painful upbringing gives this quote a necessary tinge of liberation: Bone is starting to realize that the system that allows people like his stepfather Ken to have power is not a system he wants any part of.

“It’s funny about religion, whether it’s the religion of white Rasta kids or even my own mom it’s usually got some other point than thanks and praise. For the people doing the thanking and praising, I mean.” 

The religion that Bone has encountered so far in his life is rooted in hypocrisy and selfishness, but I-Man’s connection with Rastafarianism is different. It seems genuine in a way that pierces Bone’s skepticism. This contrasts with the white Rasta kids Bone has known, who he believes are running away from their identity rather than embracing something, as I-Man does.

“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.” 

“I was still into differences” will be the central tension of Bone’s relationship with I-Man. The two are very different people, but they come to love and respect each other, and Bone has a strong desire to be like I-Man. He knows, though, that the central difference of their race is, in some ways, insurmountable, and he has spent so much of his life in survival mode that making intentional choices about who he is seems untenable to Bone.

“Because I wanted to kill him. I have never wanted anything in my life as much as I wanted to kill my stepfather at that moment. But I knew I couldn’t do it unless he said one more bad thing to me or took one more step toward me. It was like a deal I had made with God, like I had been given legal permission by God to shoot the fucker in the face but only if he went one step further than he’d already gone in my life […]”

Bone is finally in a position to kill his stepfather, yet when the time comes, he hesitates. He knows that this won’t bring him any peace, so he leaves it up to his stepfather to make the choice for him.

“I was trying to figure out how to tell her for the first time about Ken, about what he’d done to me when I was a little kid. I wanted her to know about the ugliness that still connected me and him and how I hated it and was dying to get it out of my life but couldn’t as long as I had to deal with him as the price for being with her and keeping everything a secret. It meant that I couldn’t actually be with her, I couldn’t be with my own mom in a clean way until her husband, my stepfather was out of her life once and for all […]” 

The tragedy of Bone’s life is now clear to him: His behavior, his drug abuse, and his homelessness are all rooted in the sexual violence he’s endured, and he cannot go home until he tells his mother about it, but he is so crippled by shame that he can’t do it. The first time he walked away from his mother, it was with the glib pronouncement that he was a criminal; this time, he is fully aware of the sadness of the act.

“Instead I was always called over early in the game and got captured and even though I said like Oh no and all, I was secretly glad to be captured. I never wanted to be the big tough kid who ended up on the other side all by myself and unable to say Red Rover, Red Rover, let even the littlest kid in the school-yard, let Chappie come over.” 

Bone is thinking about the game of Red Rover here, and he’s realizing that the powerful men in his life have been the ones most willing to hurt him. He doesn’t want to be that kind of man, and he finds the game, which is essentially one of belonging versus not belonging, to be a troubling metaphor for his own place in life.

“No, actually it was more like I was this human mirror walking down the road and all people could see when they looked in my direction was some reflection of themselves looking back because the main effect was nobody saw me myself, the kid, Chappie, Bone even, no one saw me except as a way to satisfy their desires or meet their needs, the nature of which sometimes they didn’t even know about until I showed up on the scene, like my stepdad’s needs for instance.” 

As he spends time at his grandmother’s house, Bone realizes that no one has treated him with dignity. His stepfather is the most obvious example, but he has just endured his mother using him as an excuse for her troubled marriage within moments of realizing he was alive. He is starting to realize that his desire to go home is inherently unhealthy and that he needs to think about himself first.

“Sometimes I guess you do a bad thing in order not to do a worse thing that you can’t stop yourself from doing.” 

Bone is referring to his fantasy of killing his whole family, but these words could apply to any of the actions he’s taken so far. He’s been a reactionary trying to manage disaster upon disaster up until this point. It’s only after this realization that he decides to change, which leads him toward I-Man’s lifestyle.

“I remember thinking you live from moment to moment and the moments all flow into one another forwards and backwards and you almost never catch one like this that’s separate from the rest. It felt like a precious diamond and I was holding it up to the sunlight between my thumb and forefinger and all these cold blue and white and gold colored sparks of light were jumping off of it.” 

This moment—Bone and I-Man on the ferry to Burlington—is one of the few moments of peace in the novel. Bone will come to associate this feeling with I-Man and Rastafarianism.

“[…] suddenly this spider came drifting down from the ceiling and hovered over the flame for a minute and then like it’d gotten too hot the spider started trying to climb back up on its web. It struggled and fought but it was too late, the web turned into a gold wire and the spider lost it and dropped onto the flame where it got instantly crisped and its tiny ashy body floated up on the heat a ways and then it disappeared into thin air.

I was almost crying then. I’d done it, I’d moved the candle under the spider on purpose, it was all my fault.” 

Over the course of the events in America, Bone has struggled with the idea of his own agency. He longs for power and control over his own life, but he worries about how that means he would be hurting those around him, because most of the models of power he’s seen have done just that. This spider’s death is emblematic of that struggle in him.

“The good thing about I-Man was he never laid his agenda down on top of mine. Unlike certain people. He always just said, Up t’ you, Bone.” 

“Up to you, Bone” will be echoed many times, most often by I-Man, but also once by Bone’s father. Bone initially regards the phrase as a passive statement, but he comes to see that it represents his ability to be in charge of his own destiny, which he embraces through I-Man’s gentle guidance.

“Then he said, Ah, Jesus, Chappie, thank God you’ve finally found me, son, and he pulled me against his chest and hugged me hard and my own eyes filled up but I didn’t cry because even though I knew that from now on everything was going to be different I didn’t know in what way so in the middle of the moment that should’ve been the happiest moment of my life so far I was scared instead.” 

When Bone meets his father, he’s forced to confront the reality of something that he has fantasized about frequently over the course of his life. It seems like a happy reunion, but there are a lot of warning signs that his father is not the person Bone needs, and he’s also grappling with whether he’s capable of being part of a family at all, especially after what happened with his stepfather.

“It’s hard to explain. I usually don’t give a shit what other people do so long as it’s what they want to do. But it was like the white American females were into young black guys and were probably scared of hitting on a regular black guy from the States who would’ve known where they were coming from and would’ve told them to fuck off so instead they hooked up with these black dudes who were basically permanently broke and didn’t even know anybody they could steal off of for a living.” 

The parts of this book that take place in Jamaica make plain what has been subtext up until now: Bone’s growing awareness of the racial power structures he lives in. Here, he’s realizing that the tourists in Jamaica are recreating the central evil of slave ownership: using someone else’s body for one’s own ends. This isn’t the first thing about race that has troubled him—most of the white men in his life have been openly racist, after all—but it is the thing that gets him to start thinking about the long history of racism that surrounds him.

“I hadn’t figured out yet why I’d done it and I couldn’t ask I-Man the way I usually did when I couldn’t figure something out so I was slipping into blaming white people generally and saying to myself I must’ve done it because of my background in lying and betrayal that I’d learned as a child from my stepfather and other adults who all happened to be white.” 

Bone’s self-education in the problems of race continues here, as he begins to associate everything wrong with him with his whiteness. While his personal history bears this out (in that the people who have been awful to him have all been white), the answer isn’t as simple as he’s making it out here, especially given that he’s willing to sell out his one true friend to earn his father’s love. The interpersonal and the racial are inextricably linked, and Bone is starting to realize this.

“I guess they’re still Africans and to them this isn’t normal yet.” 

During his drug-induced vision, Bone sees violence against Black enslaved people, and he identifies with the victims. At one moment, he sees terrified, newly-arrived Africans and says this, speaking to the numbness that repeated trauma creates.

“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.” 

Again, Bone is experiencing a vision that aligns his own history with the history of racial violence in the colonized world. It’s telling that every white person in his vision has at least one characteristic in common with the white men in his life, as they are the root of the violence that he has endured.

“Quick as I can I check it out and observe that it goes a long ways in and is just big enough for a skinny kid like me to squeeze into but no regular white man can.” 

The key to this quote is to understand that Bone doesn’t think of himself as a “regular white man” anymore. He has just experienced a moment where he tried to save a young white boy in his vision, which ended up being his own undoing. He has come to understand that he can’t fully embrace either Blackness or Whiteness; he must live with that tension between the two.

“Stealing is only a crime but betrayal of a friend is a sin. It’s like a crime is an act that when you’ve committed one the act is over and you haven’t changed inside. But when you commit a sin it’s like you create a condition that you have to live in. People don’t live in crime, they live in sin.” 

In believing he must undo the sin of selling out I-Man, Bone has come to define his own moral code, and it’s one that exists outside of the legal structures and the rules that he knows. He is finally starting to take responsibility for himself and realize what having agency means.