Authors: Michelle Woodward
Ezrah feels queasy, but leafs through a few more pages before something interesting catches his eye. He did not expect his mother to be so frank, but when all her neighbors were prim and proper women, who else could she turn to
“June 3
rd
. I was taking the evening air on our verandah today when Richard Lee came by. He said he was looking for my husband, but when I informed him that he was off examining new stock a fortnight ago and would be back at any moment. Mr. Lee said he would be glad to partake of some of the lemonade I had in a pitcher on the table in the meantime. I’m well-known for my lemonade, and could not resist showing off a little bit, especially when the person in question was so handsome.
I must forgive myself, I write this in a state of shock, and every detail is hyper-realized, extremely sharp in my memory and of seeming complete importance.
I enjoy Richard Lee’s company a great deal. We always have the liveliest conversations; he is such a knowledgeable man, and one of the most upstanding members of the parish group, as well. His little boy Jeb is always so happy; I cannot imagine that anything untoward happens in that house. Of course, our evening together might be seen as improper, especially given how close we are sitting, but I do not care. I will never care again. Nobody has the right to tell me what is proper ever again.
I say this because of the loud crash that I heard coming from upstairs. Mr. Lee jumped to action almost immediately, that brave man, but I assured him it was a shutter that often came loose in our house slave’s attic quarters and that I would manage by myself. When I went upstairs, however, oh, what I saw!
I will never forget the crescent-moon birthmark on her shoulder. I will never forget the way he had bound her arms behind her and pressed her face into the bed; I felt the bile rise in my throat as I saw his hairy backside clench and unclench furiously as he pumped inside of Big Jim’s slave woman. I saw him finish, heard the tell-tale groan of him leaving his hot, sticky mess inside of her, and that is when I realized that this was not Mr. Langley taking liberties in my household with my property.
No, it was my husband. I swear, I could kill him…”
Ezrah trails off, noticing that Selema has gone white as a sheet. “What is it, Selema? What is it?”
“That mark she describes…” Selema manages to choke out.
“What mark?”
“The crescent moon…”
“What about it?”
Selema looks up at him, her features suddenly haggard. He feels a rush of emotion to his chest and knows that whatever she is about to say, he does not want to hear. He is sick himself, knowing that his father followed in the footsteps of the overseer, although who knows which came first, but from the expression on his sister’s face, he knows that whatever she has just realized is far worse.
“My father used to talk about it all the time. It is all that I remember of my mother.”
The sucked-in breath is collective amongst the trio in the room. Awash with pain, they close their eyes and try not to hear the screams that now echo large in the attic, already a place of wrongdoing, now contaminated forever in a way that fire or water can never wash away.
Ezrah kneels and gathers his sister in his arms. She cries quietly, unwilling to unleash the torrent of emotion within her as she imagines her mother’s hell. There is a warmth inside his arms, a safe haven, but she finally pushes him away and wipes her tears with her hands. “Do you think,” she begins, but her voice goes hoarse and she pauses to clear her throat. “Do you think that is why my father ran away?”
Jeb kneels beside the duo and places a gentle hand on either shoulder, for they are his people, his little humans. “He risked getting caught; I don’t think a case of injured male pride would be enough to risk that.”
Selema fixes Ezrah with a hard stare. “Keep reading.”
“Are you certain?” Ezrah asks, heart beating fast and furious. He is not sure he can read on, learn more about the secret life of the household he grew up in, all its sordid details on display in his mother’s delicate hand. At Selema’s nod, however, he picks up the pages and continues on.
“I watch the girl with the crescent moon on her shoulder constantly now. Was she always this reserved and withdrawn, or has what my husband done to her caused her to be this way? Master, they all call him, or rather, Mas’er, these uneducated brats who have never learned how to speak. No wonder he likes them, he is a brute himself. Mas’er, Mas’er; if I were a betting woman, I would say that that is what gets him going, that feeling of dominion, of being a lord and—oh how I hate to say it—Mas’er.
I have opened my eyes to things that I did not want to see before. The whole ugly truth is now apparent. I heard him in the parlor, having a conversation with Richard Lee, talking about how luscious the little girls on the field are, how they are put there by the devil himself to tempt the man into a life of sin. Mr. Lee, to his credit, kept quiet; as a God-fearing man himself, I suspect he does not want to indulge my husband.
But there is something else, something I wish to close my eyes to forever, but cannot. The girl with the crescent moon. I have seen the flat slope of her belly begin to round, and it has brought back that night, that terrible night. I am caught between my sympathy for her and my utter rage at the situation. How dare he? How dare he? It is not enough that he makes light of his infidelity to me to our neighbors, but now he has gone and impregnated one of our girls? The scandal of it, oh!
More than that, however, more than that, I have investigated and found that the girl has a mate, Big Jim they call him. I have seen him, a giant of a man, like our chestnut tree; what must my husband have felt like there inside her after a bull like that? I do not know how these creatures go about it, but I imagine that if he is anything like me, the rage that he feels now that the girl has quickened might well kill my husband.
Would that it would.
November 22
nd
. I watch him while he is out in the field. The way the sun gleams on his dark shoulders as he is coming back to his shack. I know why they call him what they call him. He is so powerful, so broad in his shoulders. The way he tucks his shirt in at the waist, the way that his body tapers in the middle, why, he is a sight to behold. And I know he must do anything I ask. That great big beast, and he must do my bidding or else I will get the overseer to pull his whip on him. I wouldn’t mind a whip myself every now and again, but I’d wield it gently, stroking it along the length of him until he asked me for more. More and more and more. That large man, that man who is double my size, why, he might split me in half…
December 5
th
. And today he nearly has. I pulse and throb from where he entered me last night. I was right, he could not say no to me. The crescent moon girl’s baby was born today, a little half-breed that whose parentage we will never be able to fully discern. It is her stigma to live with, and if she grows up light, mine.
I called him inside on the pretense of offering him some lemonade after a hard day’s work; he was suspicious at first, and I cannot say I blame him. He followed me into the house, hesitantly, and then when I got him into the parlor, I locked the door behind us. He lunged for it, but I hid the key in my chemise and told him to get it. He looked like he felt trapped at first, but I sat down on that little ottoman and lifted my skirts.
‘Go on then,’ I told him, already wet just from the sight of him. ‘Take me. I promise I won’t yell.’
It took a bit more commanding, but finally, finally, those glorious haunches of his bucked in rhythm as he pumped me full of his seed. Oh the ecstasy I knew then! The visceral reality of it all! When my muscles clenched around him and my legs branded his hips, I yelled despite my promise.
‘Big Jim!’ I cried, over and over. ‘Fuck me, fuck me Big Jim!’ “
Here Ezrah breaks off, unable to read any further. His head is reeling with what he has just learned, and he cannot bear to speak it aloud, despite the fact that both Selema and Jeb are staring at him with the biggest eyes in the world. They are new eyes, eyes that see Ezrah in a way that they have never done so before.
That full bottom lip. The dusk on his skin, sure as a sunset, and the curl of his hair, coarse and strangely soft at the same time. They bate their breath, holding it as if not breathing will keep the terrible secret inside.
“Ezrah,” Selema begins, reaching out a hand to him, but he pushes her away and drops the papers behind him on the chair. One of his fists lunges out and punches the wall, startling Jeb and Selema with its violence. And then, most terrifyingly of all, a low chuckle emanates from Ezrah’s throat as he leans his forehead against the wall, resting both palms against the flat surface, a man forever condemned.
“I guess I don’t have a sister after all,” he finally says, and picks himself up off the wall. “It’s the oldest story in the book, is it not?” he says, shooting Selema a terse glance before he walks over to the attic door. “The story of no parents at all.”
* * *
“It’s not so bad, Ezrah,” says Jeb an hour later, wrapping his arms around the darker man. “Your mother took her revenge, and it sounds like her revenge was sweet after all.”
“She asked me not to read it, and now I know why. I know why, and I wish for any God who ever existed that I had followed her dying wish.”
“Shh. The truth is better. The truth is what makes you free,” Jeb says, touching a tender hand to Ezrah’s face. The great manly cowboy does not often show his feelings, but it has been a day of trials and tribulations for them all, and Ezrah allows himself to sink into the familiar embrace of the red-haired man, hoping that that particular version of home will erase, for however brief a period, this nightmare.
“It was not the truth,” comes a small voice from the edge of the bed.
Both men look up, startled. Selema is perched there, looking at the hands turned palms up in her lap. The bed undulates beneath his weight as Jeb makes his way over to her.
“What is not the truth?” he asks sharply.
She does not look at him as she speaks. “What I told you before, it is not the truth, at least not the whole truth. Before he died, Big Jim told me, he told me what happened in this house. Not about my mother, but about why he left. I never knew about…Ezrah’s mother, but I knew that the Master of this house had a special interest in the slaves. Even…”
“Even what?” Ezrah asks, making his way to the foot of the bed to sit by her side, her, this woman who was family to him and then snatched away in the blink of an eye.
Selema sighs deeply. “He said that the Master started lookin’ at me wrong. The way you should never look at a child, no matter how ‘advanced’ they are. He told me that he did not want what happened to my mother to happen to me, and until today, I never knew what that meant,” she finishes, choking back a sob.
Ezrah and Jeb flank her on the bed, and each man wraps an arm around her. Their sidelong glances reveal a throaty little sparrow in her sweetheart-cut dress, the blossom of her breasts blooming into a stem of a neck, cocoa-buttery and lovely. A pulse beating beneath it rapid as a hummingbird’s. One look passes between the three of them, and a silent contract is signed. Selema is not nervous. Instead, she rises from the bed, turns, and stands before them cool as a lake, with one ripple going through it—desire.
She might not have imagined it as such, this excitement of hers bleeding into something far more dangerous, pulsing through her veins like fire, the ebb and backwards flow of it taking her body by storm. She reaches her arms up above to release the butterfly pins that hold her curls in place; they tumble down on her neck, framing her face in a kind of primordial beauty, the type in which there is no place to hide, no modern inventions of clothing or rouge, just the truth of yourself in plain sight. The lushness of her plump bottom lip gives her a childlike air, one that is somehow not at war with her full woman’s body. Everything is in its place, perfectly as it should be.
Selema kneels and extends her arms forward, palms up, a silent question that is amplified as she lowers her eyes. She might as well be shouting.
The men stand before her, hesitant. Jeb unbuckles his pants, and Ezrah follows suit. There has never been a third player in their games, but as Selema wraps a hand around each cock, they realize how wonderfully sinful it is to include another. It takes a bit of concentration at first, working the penises in tandem, but Selema manages. She is kneeling between the two men, pumping them with her hands, slowly at first, then faster and faster, alternating that plush mouth of hers from Ezrah’s cock to Jeb’s, allowing her lips to wrap around the meaty flesh of them until they are rocking their hips against her, spurred on by the hungry little noises she is making in the back of her throat.
They are loved, in the strangest and most familiar way possible. Aroused by the ministrations of the sensual woman below them, the old childhood friends push down the shoulders of her gown until the banana-shaped breasts beneath it are visible, the darkness of her large nipples stark in the light of day. She is fantastically ripe, wanton with her green eyes looking up from either cock.