The mystical City of Bones—which is inhabited by the souls of enslaved Africans who died on slave ships—symbolizes the unexpected benefits of uniting with others in a sense of shared suffering. When Aunt Ester helps Citizen Barlow visit the City of Bones, he has a chance to experience the horror that many enslaved Africans underwent on the slave ships. He looks around at one point and realizes that everyone around him in the hold of a slave ship bound for the City of Bones has his own face—a symbolic representation of the fact that he’s witnessing his own history, or at least the history of something that has a direct impact on his life in the present. Although he himself has never been enslaved, he has experienced racism and discrimination that is directly tied to the lasting effects of slavery in the United States. Interestingly enough, his terrifying journey to the City of Bones ends up helping him immensely, making him feel at peace with himself. Part of this has to do with the fact that he confronts Garret Brown in the City of Bones, thus owning up to his guilt about having wronged him. But another element of his sudden transformation has to do with the experience of communing with people who have gone through much more intense suffering than he himself has encountered. By contextualizing his own hardship, then, he manages to move forward with his life, and the City of Bones itself comes to represent how helpful it can be to engage with one’s own cultural history.
The City of Bones Symbol Timeline in Gem of the Ocean
