400 Days of Oppression

XVII

There were exactly three days of normalcy and bliss. We went shopping together as a couple. Went to eat at an expensive French restaurant downtown. We even got dressed up one night and went to see the San Francisco Ballet do a performance of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. And, of course, we made love. We made love every day, two or three times a day.

The last day of my reprieve, I was awakened by Kenyatta’s tongue against my clitoris and his powerful hands cupping my ass-cheeks like he was holding a large bowl and drinking from it like a savage, greedily lapping up its contents. Judging from his enthusiasm, the bowl formed by his hands contained something singularly sweet and intoxicating. That this “something” was me, made me feel all the more special, loved, desired. His tongue swirled, flicked, and stabbed at my clitoris. I moaned until that was no longer enough to express the ecstasy I felt and then I screamed, exhaling my soul into the ether and inhaling it with the next breath as the little death overcame me. I had my first orgasm of the day mere moments after waking. Then Kenyatta fucked me.

He climbed on top of me and eased himself inside me. I was still tight after so long without him, and it hurt like I haven’t hurt since I was a virgin. But Kenyatta was uncharacteristically gentle...at first.

He whispered in my ear as he parted my labia with the head of his cock. I winced and whimpered.

“I love you, Kitten. It’s so good to have you back home. I missed your pretty smile. I missed your laugh. And I missed this wonderful pussy.”

My entire body quivered at the sound of his voice, a Pavlovian response that resonated to the core of me. Every compliment was like sustenance to the famished, libations to the weary and dehydrated. I gobbled them up, enjoying his words as much as his cock.

Kenyatta’s saliva and my own orgasm had left me slippery wet and he slid the rest of his length easily inside of me. The pain took my breath away before giving way to lubricious waves of pleasure as Kenyatta began to slowly grind and thrust, moving his hips in slow semi-circles as his cock seemed to touch my spine. He grabbed my full hips, using them for leverage, pulling me off the mattress to meet each thrust as his lovemaking became less gentle.

He tossed both of my legs over his shoulders, maintaining eye contact as he pounded himself inside of me, brutalizing my pussy. I pinched his nipples, trying to make him cum before he broke me, but finding my own flesh responding to his rough lovemaking with shocks of pleasure. An unexpected orgasm took hold of me as Kenyatta whipped his head back and roared. His body tensed as he shot his seed deep inside me. My vagina felt bruised and swollen. My clitoris felt like it had been used as a speed bag, nevertheless, I came hard. My body bucked and convulsed with the force of the sudden climax. Kenyatta was still staring into my eyes, watching me cum. When I lay still, spent and exhausted, he smiled at me.

“I love you, Kitten.”

“I love you too, Kenyatta.”

That day we went window shopping at a jewelry store. We picked out a wedding ring to match the engagement ring that was still in Kenyatta’s possession. We went to a bridal shop and I tried on gowns. I was beaming while the sales women buzzed around me, telling me how lovely I looked in this dress or that dress and what a lovely couple we made. I could not have imagined a more perfect day. Everything I had gone through the last 300 days seemed like a memory. Then we went home and reality put its foot firmly in my naive ass.

We had just walked in when I noticed my bags were packed and sitting by the door. The next thing I noticed was Angela reclining on the couch with an Indian woman in a beautiful red and gold saree whom I’d never seen before. I assumed the woman was Angela’s new girlfriend. But that didn’t explain why all of my shit was packed.

“Hi, Angela. What’s going on?” I turned to Kenyatta and gestured toward my packed bags. “What’s going on?”

This time, when Kenyatta opened the book, I knew I wouldn’t like what he was about to read me.

“Only ten years after the 14^th and 15^th Amendments were passed, granting freed slaves full citizenship and equal rights, federal troops withdrew from the South, returning it to local white rule. The Republican Party, then the champion of Reconstruction and Freedmen’s rights, had lost their hold on the reins of national power. From the late 1870s, Southern state legislatures, no longer controlled by carpetbaggers and freedmen, passed laws requiring the separation of whites from “persons of color” in public transportation and schools. Anyone strongly suspected of black ancestry was for this purpose a “person of color.” Parks, cemeteries, theaters, and restaurants were segregated to prevent any contact between blacks and whites as societal equals. In 1890, despite 16 black members holding office at that time and voting on the issue, the Louisiana General Assembly passed a law to prevent black and white people from riding together on railroads. A case challenging the law, Plessy v. Ferguson, reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1896. The law, along with similar laws on the state and local level, was codified by the Supreme Court ruling that public facilities for blacks and whites could be “separate but equal.” The immediate effect of the ruling was that, throughout the South, they had to be separate. Southern states began to limit voting rights to those who owned property or could read well, to those whose grandfathers had been able to vote, to those with “good characters,” to those who paid poll taxes, or could pass any number of tests not required of white voters. In 1896, Louisiana had 130,334 registered black voters. Eight years later, only 1,342—1 percent—could pass the state’s new rules.

“These new laws separating blacks from whites were known as “Jim Crow Laws,” a derogatory epithet for blacks that came from a minstrel routine (Jump Jim Crow) performed beginning in 1828 by its author, Thomas Dartmouth (“Daddy”) Rice, along with many imitators. Jim Crow laws spread throughout the South and quickly became a way of life. In South Carolina, many businesses would not allow black and white employees to work in the same room, enter through the same door, or even gaze out of the same window. Many industries wouldn’t hire blacks at all. Unions passed rules explicitly excluding black workers from joining, which then excluded them from union jobs, beginning a cycle of chronic unemployment and economic disenfranchisement, which continues to this day.

“In Richmond, blacks could not live on the same street as whites. By 1914, Texas had six entire towns that excluded black residents. In Mobile, Alabama, blacks could not leave their homes after 10 p.m. “Whites Only” or “Colored” signs became common sights throughout the South, separating pools, bathrooms, restaurants, theaters, ticket windows, drinking fountains, even entrances and exits. There were separate parks, phone booths, prisons, hospitals, orphanages, churches, schools, and colleges. Black and white students had to use separate sets of textbooks. Some jurisdictions wouldn’t even allow the books to be stored together. Courts kept separate bibles for swearing in a witness: one for black witnesses and one for whites.

“States in the North did not go unaffected by Jim Crow. Discrimination spread like a cancer. Unwritten rules barred blacks from white jobs in New York and kept them out of white stores in Los Angeles. In 1915, the Ku Klux Klan was revived and lynchings and cross-burnings ‘punished’ blacks who disobeyed Jim Crow laws, using the fear of violence to keep blacks ‘in their place.’”

I shook my head. Again, joy was replaced by pain, elation with disappointment. Hours ago we were picking out wedding rings and now my life, my world, was about to be turned upside down again,

“This is Shakeela Geeti. She is a Mehndi artist.”

“Mehndi?”

“A tattooist. She does henna tattoos.”

“Henna tattoos?”

I looked at the woman in the colorful saree. Then at Angela who smiled at me. None of the hostility she’d shown to me when we first met, before we’d fucked, was reflected in her expression. What I saw there was something new, something worse...pity.

“Who’s getting the tattoo?”

Kenyatta smiled. It was a horrible sight. There was nothing warm in the expression. For the first time I recognized a hint of mischief and malevolence. He was getting off on this.

“You are. On your face.”

“My face? Why?”

“How else will you learn about discrimination? You want to know what it’s like for black people to walk into a job interview, apply for a bank loan, walk into a department store, and be judged, dismissed, despised the minute they look at your face? Your face will make you a second-class citizen just like we were for seventy years following the Emancipation Proclamation, free but not free, emancipated but still oppressed. Everywhere you go, people will take one look at you and attach half a dozen negative stereotypes to you.”

I shook my head. Tears wept from my eyes.

“Come on, Kenyatta. No. I-I can’t do that.”

The whips. The chains. The hard labor. The terrible food. The pain. I could endure it all again if I needed to, but going out in public to be looked down upon, ridiculed, rejected. It was too much. It had only been a few days since I was given my freedom and now this new humiliation… It was too much.

“You want to quit?”

“No...but...not this. Come on, Kenyatta. This is too much. I can’t do it.”

“You know what to say if you want it to end.”

I looked at him, at Angela, at the Indian woman, and the thought crossed my mind. The word crossed my mind.

“Why are my bags packed?”

“You’re free. You can’t live in the Master’s house anymore. You have to get a job and find your own apartment.”

I dropped my head and shook it in disbelief.

“With a fucking tattoo on my face?” I practically screamed the words at him. I was hysterical. This was just too much.

Kenyatta was still smiling when he answered.

“Yes. With a fucking tattoo on your face. It isn’t permanent. It’ll fade away in two or three weeks. I promise.”

I felt like I was going to throw up. Everything we’d done so far had been private, between him and I and other people in the BDSM scene. People who would understand. Going out in public like this was something I hadn’t counted on. I tried to imagine walking into a job interview with my face covered in tattoos. There was no way. How would I support myself?

As if in response to my unspoken question, Kenyatta read from the book. I wanted to snatch it out of his hands and rip it to shreds.

“The 13^th Amendment meant freedom for four million African-American slaves. However, faced with overwhelming discrimination, the majority of them soon found themselves poor and unemployed. For African Americans, finding employment in Northern cities was a difficult and sometimes impossible task. Discriminatory labor practices, demanded by European immigrants, often denied African Americans skilled jobs. Southern migrants were particularly disadvantaged since they were more likely than Northern-born blacks to have job skills. Many freed slaves were compelled to abandon their trades due to unrelenting racial prejudice and take menial, low-paying, unskilled jobs. Philadelphia employment records reveal that during this period, less than two-thirds of [black workers] who had trades followed them.

“In New York City, officials reneged on their promise to ‘issue licenses to all regardless of race’ and buckled under pressure from white workers to exclude African Americans from jobs requiring special permits. One foreign visitor reported seeing almost no black skilled workers in the North. The few exceptions were ‘one or two employed as printers, one blacksmith and one shoemaker.’ African Americans found it almost impossible to obtain licenses, denying them important opportunities to become small businessmen and elevate their economic status. Many former slaves were forced to go back to the plantations from which they were freed and work for their former owners in agricultural jobs for very little compensation.

“In an attempt to earn enough to avoid starvation, entire families would contract with a landowner to cultivate the land for subsistence wages or a share of the crop. Often their white employers continued to treat them as slaves and attempted to control their comings and goings, limit or prohibit visitors, and dictate their behavior. The struggle between former slaves trying, often unsuccessfully, to differentiate their employment from their previous servitude and former slaveholders, used to having total control over their workers, led to postwar workplaces that were tense, and often violent. Many former slaves did not receive the wages promised in their labor contracts, while others never found employment at all and were reduced to begging on the streets, crime, and prostitution.”

He closed the book and glared at me.

“Do you think you’ll have it any harder than those freed slaves?”

“No.”

“So, what’s it going to be? Are you out or in?”

Again, I looked at Shakeela, at Angela, and then back at Kenyatta who was tapping his foot impatiently. I let out a long sigh and wiped the tears from my eyes.

“I’m in.”

Kenyatta took my hand and led me to a seat opposite Shakeela.

“Relax,” she cooed as she cupped my face in two incredibly smooth soft hands. She turned my face left then right. Then picked up a little squirt bottle filled with a dark paste. It took her two hours to draw the design on my face and another six hours for it to set up, during which she would occasionally sprinkle lemon and water or eucalyptus oil on the paste to keep it moist.

I wasn’t allowed to look at my face in the mirror until the tattoo had properly cured. I imagined that Kenyatta was afraid I would quit and wash it all off before it could set up. When it was finally ready, I could tell from the expression on Angela’s face, eyes wide, brow furrowed, lips pulled back away from her teeth in a grim rictus, that Kenyatta had done something awful to me. He led me to the bathroom and watched as I got my first glimpse of the abomination she’d drawn on my face. It was all I could do to keep from screaming.

“No. No! What the hell did you do to me?”

On my forehead, cheeks, chin, nose, beneath my eyes, even my eyelids, were flowers, paisleys, leaves and various lines and squiggles forming geometrical patterns in a dark rusty red. But what made me want to scream was what I saw in those patterns, in the lines and squiggles...words. They weren’t immediately apparent, hidden in the highly stylized calligraphy, amidst the floral patterns and designs, hateful, despicable words. “Lazy.” “Stupid.” “Violent.” “Thief.” “Slut.” “Liar.” “Criminal.” “Drug Dealer.” “Gang Banger.” “Addict.” The closer I looked, the clearer and more prominent the words became. I had been labeled with every negative stereotype with which society had labeled black Americans. It stained my skin like the mark of Cain and it would remain there for weeks.

“The first thing black children all over America, for almost four centuries, learned was to hate their own skin, their own faces. That is part of the experience. Your disgust when you look in the mirror, seeing that you don’t look anything like the beautiful people on TV, that’s part of it. The other part will be the suspicion, hatred, disgust, and distrust others will show you because of your skin. That’s how you’ll really know what it’s like.”

Kenyatta paid the Indian woman and showed her to the door. Then he showed me to the door as well.

“I’ll give you twenty-four hours to find a job and an apartment. Then you’ve got to go.”

He shoved me gently onto the porch, kissed my forehead, rubbed, squeezed, then smacked my ample buttocks, and slammed the door behind me. I stood there on the porch, weeping for moments that felt like hours, before taking a deep breath and once again wiping the tears from my eyes. I had to at least try.