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 13-15Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 13 Summary: “Mister Yesterday”
As Bone walks out of Au Sable in the rain, he has a recurring vision in his mind of killing Kenny, his mother, and then his grandmother. He plays the worst-case scenario backwards and forwards, thinking that if Willie the cat were alive things would have gone differently in his vision. He thinks to himself that “Sometimes I guess you had to do a bad thing in order not to do a worse thing that you can’t stop yourself from doing” (228). For Bone, the actions of the previous chapters are that bad thing.
Bone stops in the middle of the bridge over Ausable River and looks over the edge to the water hundreds of feet below. Bone steps over the railing and considers jumping, but the slippery concrete makes him realize that he doesn’t actually want to die. Before he can cross back over, though, a car comes by, which causes him to slip. He catches himself on the iron bars. Hanging there, he thinks of the classical music he heard once from someone’s car radio. For some reason, this memory gives him the strength he needs to pull himself up and over again. Kneeling and panting in the road, he digs the gun out of his bag and tosses it over the bridge.
Bone arrives back at the bus feverish and in a daze. I-Man finds him and nurses him back to health using his knowledge of herbal remedies. When Bone is better, they spend time harvesting I-Man’s marijuana crop, and Bone starts to think about needing to come into his own self.
One night, Bone wakes to find I-Man up and listening to mournful reggae. I-Man says that it’s time for him to go home to Jamaica. He has a family in Accompong, and he misses the land and his spiritual connection to it. Bone takes the money that’s left over from Buster Brown and tells I-Man that he’ll pay to get him back and will come along with him to the airport to wave him off. The thought of losing I-Man makes Bone cry, and I-Man lets him have those emotions without trying to fix them. Bone realizes that he loves I-Man deeply, more than he loves his family.
Chapter 14 Summary: “Crossing the Bar”
In the morning, Bone packs up enough things that he can drift around in Burlington if any opportunity arises. I-Man approves of this plan, saying that he’s on his way to being “a brand new beggar” (241). I-Man has packed a bag and carries a large boombox and his Jah-stick—a walking stick that is taller than he is that he’d been carving all summer, topped with a dreadlocked lion’s head. While they wait for the ferry, Bone reflects on his tattoo, which he thinks no longer suits him. He decides that even though it belongs to a past version of him, he doesn’t regret it.
As they wait for the ferry and then board, Bone observes the people and sees that he and I-Man don’t fit in at all. He likes this, but worries over what that means for staying behind. He has more in common with I-Man now than these people; even though he still has disdain for white people pretending at Rastafarianism, he’s feeling the pull of I-Man’s thinking more and more. Bone turns to I-Man while they’re smoking marijuana on the ferry and asks if he should come along to Jamaica. I-Man answers with what will become a frequent refrain: “Up to you, Bone” (246). Bone decides that if there’s money enough for two tickets, that’s Jah’s will.
When they get to the airport, there’s enough for both of them, but Bone realizes that neither of them have the legal right to travel. I-Man has a Jamaican passport, and Bone only has an ID. As the counter woman looks at their documents, she says that I-Man cannot take his Jah-stick. Bone says that it’s a religious item, and no one can touch it. She mocks him and grabs the stick, only to snatch her hand back in pain. This distraction is what the two need to get through the transaction and aboard the plane. On the plane, Bone asks how I-Man did that with his Jah-stick (it will later be revealed that there are needles driven into the wood that are difficult to see), and I-Man just shrugs.
Chapter 15 Summary: “Sunsplashed”
At the Miami airport, Bone talks to a group of “Miller-timers,” all of them older people who intend to treat Jamaica like their own party. When they get to Jamaica, though, the Americans seem bewildered and scared, and I-Man leads Bone past them all to a security checkpoint, where he talks to the guard like old friends until he and Bone are allowed through. They set off toward I-Man’s home; Bone feels nervous, but soon realizes that winter in Plattsburgh all alone would be terrible, and he’s made the right decision. They arrive at a compound made almost entirely of bamboo, with a large, labyrinthine house that’s more like a cave system. The two get high together, and Bone becomes distraught over letting a spider fall into a candle’s flame. He leaves the compound and heads out to the beach, where he spends the night.
The next morning, I-Man introduces Bone to his posse: Fattis, Buju, and Prince Shabba. Bone spends some time watching and learning—he can’t speak the language, and he knows he’s on I-Man’s turf, so he tries to do what he’s told and not be a nuisance. The posse reminds him of the biker gang, except more mellow, though they clearly would be violent if they needed to be, as there are guns around. They spend most nights listening to reggae music, getting high, and telling stories, sometimes while swinging machetes. Bone realizes from the comings and goings of other people that the posse is a pretty high-level drug operation, and his opinion of I-Man shifts accordingly, though he still respects and loves him, and everyone treats Bone as though he’s under I-Man’s protection.
One day, I-Man invites Bone along to Mobay, which is what the locals call Montego Bay. I-Man is making a drug run, and while he’s doing business Bone mingles with the crowd. At first he tries to get spare change from people, but soon he realizes that he should probably serve as a dealer for I-Man, selling to American tourists who might be too scared to buy from a Black local. As he’s thinking of this, he spots a couple that makes him stop in his tracks. They’re both white locals in their forties. Bone instantly recognizes that the man is his birth father. He runs toward them, but they don’t see, and he chases them in their Range Rover until he’s exhausted. He stops in the road, feeling a profound sense of relief.
Chapters 13-15 Analysis
Bone’s long walk through the rain is a pivot in his character arc. He spends the time leading up to the bridge playing and replaying the violence he could have inflicted on his family and trying to determine if his inaction was right or wrong; the imagined version of himself regrets what he did, but Bone feels that even without doing anything he’s killed his family. He is thinking about the intentionality of his actions and whether that matters. When he thinks of killing himself, he stops because the concrete is slippery: He doesn’t want it to be an accident; he wants to really mean it if he commits suicide, echoing his belief that he accidentally killed his family by trying to not kill Kenny. Bone throwing the gun away is a symbolic act of rejection, both of violence and of his old self. It’s also worth noting that the memory of classical music is one thing that stops him from wanting to die, as classical music becomes a symbol of Bone’s identity and enlightenment at the end of the novel.
From this point on, I-Man becomes his surrogate father and teacher in Bone’s new pursuit of becoming a brand-new beggar, which is a Rastafarian phrase and the name of a song by reggae group Third World; Bone doesn’t know this, but the lyrics of that song echo closely the journey he’s about to go on. I-Man’s repeated assertion that things are “Up to you, Bone,” would initially seem nonchalant but are actually empowering for Bone. I-Man is the first person to treat him as a person whose opinion matters. Bone initially sees this as leaving things up to fate—in other words, it’s the same thing as Russ being unwilling to make plans in his life. However, I-Man means more than that, and for I-Man, divine intervention and self-actualization go hand in hand; when he uses his Jah-stick to distract the woman at the ticket counter, it’s the needles he’s embedded in the wood that perform the miracle, but for I-Man, there’s little difference.
When Bone arrives in Jamaica, he comes to understand that I-Man is similar to Bruce: the head of a gang, a drug dealer, and capable of ordering and committing acts of violence. However, the differences outweigh the similarities, notably I-Man’s commitment to his religion and culture and his empathy for Bone. That empathy, and the model that I-Man provides, will come to matter more when Bone meets his father and sees the contrast between the two. One of the central themes of the book is loyalty to oneself and to found families; Bone and I-Man’s relationship is a rejection of social mores, traditional notions of family, and the norms of race relations in both America and Jamaica at the time. Bone becomes keenly aware of the two of them as a radical spectacle as they travel together, and he even revels in it. This awareness sets up the two intertwined conflicts that will be the climax of the book: Bone reckoning with his whiteness in Jamaica, and Bone reckoning with his father.
Related Titles
By Russell Banks
