400 Days of Oppression

V

“Contrary to popular belief, female house-slaves were often treated worse than their counterparts in the tobacco and cotton fields. They were frequently raped by their masters and would bear the master’s half-white children. These children, along with their mothers, were subject to the scorn and abuse of their half-siblings and worse, that of the mistress of the house, for whom they were a reminder of the master’s infidelity. Beatings were an almost daily occurrence. Life in the house was a unique type of hell for the female house-slaves.”

That’s all he said, then he patted me on my greatly diminished ass and walked out the door, leaving me at the mercy of the new mistress of the house. I stood a moment, watching the door close behind him as he entered the garage. I heard him start up the Chrysler, the garage door squeal and whine as it rose then rattled back down behind him as Kenyatta exited the garage and drove to work.

“You’re not done.”

Angela’s voice roused me from my momentary torpor. I considered Kenyatta’s final words before he left. What he had set up here was no different from what his people had gone through. I couldn’t give up now.

“Y-yes mistress?”

“I said, you’re not done! There are still eggs all over the floor!”

I looked at the mess then slid down to my hands and knees to finish scrubbing. I scooped up the remaining eggs and shards of broken plate and dumped them in the wastebasket. When I looked behind me, Mistress was staring at me, smiling in a way that made my skin crawl. There was nothing warm or pleasant in the expression. I could almost see the loathsome thoughts slithering around behind her eyes like maggots through a corpse.

I told myself I was just overreacting, but there was cruelty and lust sparkling in her eyes like naked electricity. It was the expression I’d seen on the faces of so many men as they shouted crude seductions from passing cars and pantomimed lascivious acts they wanted to perform on me. The same expression I’d seen on the faces of men who got too grabby in bars and followed me out into the parking lot, causing me to pull the pepper spray from my purse and occasionally to actually use it. The same expression I’d seen on the faces of the men who got violent after I made the mistake of inviting them into my bed.

“Come here, white bitch,” Mistress hissed.

I cringed at the sound of her hateful voice. There were a dozen vile names I wanted to call her in return, a dozen sardonic retorts. Instead, I shuffled over to her, nervously wringing my hands and staring down at her tiny pedicured feet.

“Yes, Mistress?”

“Tell me something, how did such an ugly, flabby, pale thing like you wind up with my man? Hmmm? Tell me that.”

“I don’t know, Mistress.”

She snorted in derision.

“Go make me a fucking drink, a bloody Mary, and hurry the fuck up.”

Kenyatta had chosen well for this part of the experiment. Angela didn’t have to fake animosity toward me. Her enmity was genuine. I could feel it boiling off her in waves, radiating from her skin like August sunrays off asphalt. Angela was a total bitch, and I would soon discover that her imagination for cruelty went every bit as far as anything I would have expected from Kenyatta. She was heartless and she hated me. I was, after all, fucking her husband. It didn’t matter that they were divorced. She had him first and, in her mind, he still belonged to her and she no doubt knew that if I could endure this trial, I’d be his new wife.

I walked into the dining room, removed a bottle from the wet bar, and poured two fingers of vodka into a glass. I added tomato juice, Worcestershire sauce, a splash of lemon, horseradish, Louisiana hot sauce, and a dash of pepper and celery salt. I was tempted to spit in it, but was afraid she was watching me somehow. I walked back into the kitchen and handed her the drink. She took a sip, closed her eyes, and let out a sigh.

“That’s good.”

She squinted at me as I stood there in the middle of the kitchen in my raggedy, secondhand house dress, hands clasped in front of me, eyes averted from her scrutiny.

“Why are you doing this? Do you know how crazy this shit is? Why are you letting him put you through all this bullshit? He’s sick, you know that? He’s a twisted motherfucker and you’re a goddamn fool for putting up with all this. You should run as far away from his crazy ass as you can.”

I stood there, unmoving, head bowed in supplication, not responding, holding on to the memory of that beautiful diamond ring Kenyatta held out to me the day he proposed this experiment to me.

“You’re fucking pathetic, you know that? You’re a disgrace to women letting a man walk over you like this.”

She spit at me and I stood there and took it without flinching. Her saliva struck me in the face and oozed down my cheek. I didn’t respond, didn’t even bother wiping it off. I knew the sight of it would disgust her and my own unwavering obedience would frustrate her even more. My obedience would be my defiance, and she would spend every day trying to break me, trying to make me go back on my commitment to Kenyatta.

“Wipe your face.”

She threw a towel at my feet. I picked it up and wiped her spittle from my face.

“Take off that dress. You want to be a slave, you’re gonna get treated like a slave. Put your hands against that wall.”

I complied without a word.

“You stay right the fuck there.”

Doubts sprouted like dandelions in my mind, multiplying until they filled my every thought as I stood waiting for Angela to return with some new punishment. For the first time I doubted my desire to proceed with the experiment, more than my ability to endure it.

I felt the crack of the whip a split second before I heard it. It cut deep into my skin, searing into the muscle like a heated knife and sending a spray of vaporized blood into the air. I clenched my teeth and waited for the next one.

“Don’t move and don’t fucking turn around.”

She cracked it again. It was obvious she’d used it before. You didn’t crack a whip like that the first time you picked it up. I wondered how much she and Kenyatta had “played” when they were married. Maybe this is what she meant by Kenyatta being a sick freak. Maybe he had convinced her to partake in his sadistic lifestyle when they were still together and now she was experiencing some guilt over whatever she’d done. If she was, then her guilt was obviously due in part because she’d enjoyed it. I could hear her rapid breaths and it wasn’t just from the exertion of wielding the lash. She was getting off on it.

The whip cracked again and I let out a whelp. The pain was intense. I had been whipped many times by Kenyatta and he had obviously taken it easy on me. I hadn’t imagined there was anything gentle about the whippings, canings, and spankings I’d endured from Kenyatta, but I’d had little to compare it to. Now, I knew that he’d been holding back, because this bitch wasn’t, and the pain was so intense I was having difficulty remaining standing. I felt like I was going to pass out.

Angela was breathing heavier now, she was practically panting. I heard her grunt each time she cracked the whip across my back. She was putting everything she had into each stroke, exerting herself in her effort to destroy me, but there was still something peculiar in the rhythm of her breaths. I could almost imagine her masturbating with one hand as she striped my back with bleeding welts.

The tip of the lash wrapped around my body and cut into my belly. My knees buckled. I had to hold onto the refrigerator to keep from falling. The whip cracked again and this time she wrapped the whip completely around so the tip cut into my breasts. This time I did fall. I collapsed to my knees, bleeding and sweating, trembling in agony, waiting for the next blow in silent dread, but it never came. I could still hear Angela panting heavily behind me. Finally, I dared turn to look.

Angela’s robe was open and she was naked underneath. Her body was a work of art, hard, lean, shaved, glistening with a sheen of perspiration. But it wasn’t her physique that caused the sharp intake of breath. Just as I had imagined, she was furiously masturbating and she was staring right at me.

“Come here, bitch.”

I guessed bitch was my new name. I did as commanded and crawled over to her on my hands and knees. I was still in agony from the whipping and could not have walked if I wanted to. Angela was still fingering her swollen clit unselfconsciously. She sat down at the kitchen table, turned the chair so she was facing me and threw one of her legs up on the table, baring her sex to me. She beckoned me forward.

“I said come here. Get over here!”

I crawled closer and she took her finger out of her pussy and rubbed it against my lips.

“Open your mouth.”

I opened my mouth and she slid her finger, wet with her vaginal juices, between my lips. Obediently, I sucked her finger clean. I thought I could taste Kenyatta’s semen inside of her. I was probably imagining it, but I wouldn’t have put it past either of them. She had fucked him and she wanted me to know it.

“You like how I taste, bitch?”

I didn’t answer. I didn’t know what to say.

“Lick my pussy.”

I knew it was coming, but it was still shocking to hear, like a splash of cold water in my face. One minute she was beating the shit out of me, hating me for stealing her husband, and the next she was asking me to get her off. She placed her hands on either side of my face and guided me down between her thighs. She smelled like Kenyatta. Not like she’d had sex with him, but like she was him. They smelled exactly the same. When I sucked her engorged clitoris between my lips and flicked it with my tongue, it was easy to imagine that I was pleasuring Kenyatta. I imagined I was sucking his cock as I swirled my tongue around the little nub and heard Angela’s deep-throated moans. Her legs quivered and her long manicured nails snarled in my hair, pulling me deeper, grinding her sex into my face.

“Oh, shit! Oh. Shit! Lick this pussy, bitch! Damn, that feels good.”

I didn’t know what was happening, what this meant. I wasn’t sure if this was meant to be another humiliation or if Angela was really into chicks, if she was into me. I slid my tongue up inside her, straining to find her G-spot with the tip of my tongue. Angela pulled my face hard against her sex until she was practically smothering me. I went back to sucking and licking her clitoris, replacing my tongue with my fingers. I fucked her with two fingers as I flicked my tongue across her engorged nub. Angela’s legs shook as the first orgasm struck.

“Oh, my God! Oh, shit! Oh, fuck!”

I lifted her legs up onto my shoulders and licked even faster, then I did something Kenyatta had done to me many times, but that I’d never done to anyone before. I licked my way down past her vagina to her perineum. I licked the small flap of flesh there eliciting even louder moans from Angela then I went lower, easing my tongue into her rectum, flicking it in and out. Angela went wild. This time she screamed when she came.

When it was over, Angela sat staring at me. The expression on her face was no longer one of anger, but simple curiosity. I wondered how this fit into Kenyatta’s plan. I wondered if his book had described a scenario like this between the mistress of the house and the house slave. I wondered what Kenyatta would say when he found out. Had I broken some rule? I didn’t know.

Angela shook her head then reached out and rubbed a hand over my breasts. Then down between my thighs. She was still rubbing my tits when she began talking to me. She slid down from the chair onto the floor with me.

“Kenyatta and I didn’t break up because of you. Not just because of you anyway. We broke up because, after countless threesomes with dozens of different women, I realized that I preferred the women to him. I realized I wasn’t bisexual. I was a lesbian.”

I was shocked. Did Kenyatta know? What the fuck did this have to do with the oppression of black folks?

“I’m sure this sort of thing happened all the time back in the days of slavery. A lesbian had to be careful in those times. She couldn’t just go to the local dyke bar and pick up a chick, but here were these beautiful helpless slaves who had to do whatever she said. You think they didn’t take advantage? Gay men too.”

Of course it made sense, but I knew she was just rationalizing her own exploitation of the situation between Kenyatta and I and now the three of us. Shit had just gotten a hell of a lot more complicated.

“What do I say to Kenyatta?”

Angela shrugged.

“Tell him whatever you want. I don’t care what that nigga thinks.”

She laughed at the shocked expression on my face.

“Oh, does that word offend you? Nigga? You sayin’ you’ve never said it?”

I shook my head.

“Bullshit,” she said. “And if you haven’t said it, you’ve damn sure thought it. The difference is I’m allowed to say it. You ain’t. I don’t care what Kenyatta puts you through, you ain’t never gonna be down enough to use that word. You ain’t never gonna earn the right to use it. Because at any time you can just say fuck this and go back to your little privileged lily white world. Ain’t none of this shit real. You’re just pretending. See we didn’t choose this shit like you did. Nobody gave us a choice or a safe word we could use to escape anytime we wanted. This is real for us.”

The mean, hateful Angela was back. The taste of her pussy was still lying heavy on my tongue. She still had one of my breasts in her hands and she was already back to talking shit.

“What have you gone through to give you the right? You were never a slave. You were never oppressed,” I said before I could stop myself. Angela’s caressing hands became vises, clamping down and twisting my breasts until I squealed and pleaded with her.

“Ouch! Ouch! Stop!”

“I haven’t suffered? I haven’t suffered? Bitch, what the fuck you know about me?”

As always, I had said the wrong thing, but this wasn’t Kenyatta, always the master of his emotions, this was an unstable dyke with a bullwhip I had just pissed off.

“I don’t… I-I don’t know anything about you.”

“Damn right you don’t know shit about me. I’ve been struggling and suffering since the day I was born because of the color of my skin. Looked down upon by stuck-up white bitches like you, followed around department stores by security, passed over for promotions, passed over by all the good black men who would rather chase white pussy!”

I wanted to point out the obvious fact that she was clearly gay and ask her what difference it made since she wasn’t interested in men anymore anyway. I wanted to tell her that no man was promised to any woman. That it wasn’t like she had put her application in and been passed over in favor of the less qualified white applicant like some kind of reverse affirmative action. All men were up for grabs, regardless of race. Instead, I stayed quiet.

“Get the fuck back out in the yard. Get out of my sight, you stupid bitch!”

She stood up and began kicking me in my ribs and arms, before landing her heel square in my ass as I scrambled out the door to my little shack in the backyard. I wasn’t tired, physically, but mentally I felt like I’d just run a marathon wearing a fifty-pound backpack. I was so confused, so aggravated, angry, sad, excited, aroused, and lost, completely and utterly adrift. My entire world had been stripped away from me. The ground had dropped out from beneath my feet and left me floating in space with Kenyatta as my only anchor to earth, but he wasn’t here and the bitch who used to be his wife was. I knew Kenyatta would make it all better when he got home. He had to, because I didn’t know if I could take this shit much longer.