Latitia Ch. 08

Latitia hadn't been the only one doing some shopping.

For her, it had been easy. I mean, who hasn't seen one of those Adult Toys or Adult Entertainment signs along the Interstate highway or even, sometimes, in town, although never in the, well, the "better" parts of town.

For me, it had been much more difficult. The leather collar I bought for her was okay for The Dark Side, but not so much for what I had in mind for Daisy.

I descended into that weird area they call the "dark web," to find what I wanted. I was in that part of the virtual world where Google search terms didn't go. The site from which I had made my purchases was accessed only by a seemingly random sequence of letters, numbers, and special characters. Something like - Zz*l84!mMm - and, no, that's not it.

I had teased my way into the address, using the screen name "Good Old Days - 1619" in the chatrooms that offered "adult" chat, to find those of similar interest.

What's 1619 you ask? Well, in "late August 1619" (the actual date is uncertain) the English privateer White Lion landed at Hampton, Virginia with the first African slaves brought to the North American colonies. The "1619 Project" is a program to demonstrate that America was founded on racism.

In a chatroom called CollarMe I "met" a woman with the screen name OvereducatedNegress, who said her real name was Abigail (making me think of Mother Abigail, the ancient Black character from Stephen King's The Stand and, I rather suspect, a character of whom the Abigail I was chatting with was aware. While Abigail was fun as a chat partner, she couldn't offer me any leads to what I was seeking. She did tell a story that I found eerily similar to Daisy's.

It was in the chatroom Chatropolis that I finally found what I was looking for. I saved the exchange that led me to the sites I was seeking. Here it is -

Proud Dominant (MWM 54): In the real world or just here in fantasyland?

Good Old Days - 1619: huh?

Proud Dominant (MWM 54): Your interest in 1619. Real world or just in here.

Good Old Days - 1619: Oh, we're kind of experimenting.

Proud Dominant (MWM 54): We?

Good Old Days - 1619: My wife and me.

Proud Dominant (MWM 54): Oh. Nigger?

Good Old Days - 1619: She's Black, yes.

Proud Dominant (MWM 54): What? Are you some pussy whipped white boy afraid of the word? Afraid your house nigger will cut you off?

Good Old Days - 1619: ((chuckles)) It's all still pretty new to us. But yes, she's a nigger.

Proud Dominant (MWM 54): You brand her yet?

Good Old Days - 1619: Brand?

Proud Dominant (MWM 54): ((image of a very fat black woman's back with a clear letter "S" showing in a white brand scar on her right ass cheek, exactly where she would sit)) My house nigger and broodmare.

Good Old Days - 1619: Jesus. Ummmmmmmmm "brood mare?"

Proud Dominant (MWM 54): Yeah. I've sold off four pickaninnies out of her. Good money if you get a good nigger.

Good Old Days - 1619: Jesus. Are you serious?

Proud Dominant (MWM 54): Look, man. You're either into this or you're not. There's no halfway. Look, try this site ((one of those long complex series of letters, numbers, and symbols)). Look me up sometime, I'm usually here around this time. For now, though, I gotta go throw a fuck into the house nigger. She should be ovulating and I'd love to get another pickanniny before she's too dried up and I sell her.

Good Old Days - 1619: I, umm

Proud Dominant (MWM 54) leaves the room

So I went to that site. It was bare bones really, lacking the fancy graphics you associate with today's websites. White letters on a black screen proclaimed that I had arrived at Celebrating 1619.

Under the outsized headline were a series of links -

Equipment for Sale

Gallery

Literature

Videos

Fellow Travelers

I spent the rest of that morning working my way through the links. Well, okay, not in order. I started with "videos."

The first two I looked at were obviously homemade and even more powerful for the lack of professional production values. Oh, don't get me wrong. The picture was clear. Hell, you get high definition from the cheapest cellphone these days. But it was handheld and jerky. The sound quality was terrible and, in some ways, even that made the whole thing more believable.

The story was obvious in the first one.

It was a woman, and this was a woman with no white overseer in her gene pool, being drug forward by two black men as a white man looking like something out of a civil war movie the way he was dressed in white with a broad-brimmed Panama hat to complete the image, walking beside her. He was talking to her, but only the occasional words were clear enough to understand. "Lesson." "Obey." "Dare." "Run."

The black men dragging her moved oddly and it took a minute for me to catch a glimpse and understand that their ankles were shackled and a solid bar about two feet long connected them, rather than a flexible chain. The men were barefoot and dressed only in loose pants that ended mid-calf while the woman was dressed in a shapeless sack of a dress.

They were outside, in a field, and the round bales and a single line of poles, maybe electric or telephone, I'm not sure, in the background were the first hint that this wasn't a movie set in the antebellum south.

The scene ran for a full minute by the little time bar across the bottom, before the camera stopped backing and a couple of trees showed up at the edge of the screen. The little entourage got closer and the sound got clearer.

Yes, Gentle Reader, my dick was hard. But my mind was working too. And after four decades as an analyst and researcher, well, I notice things.

Her voice sounded natural. She was, I thought, a true daughter of the South, and a South that existed before the Civil War at that. When she was pleading, "Please, suh, Ah knows Ah did wrong. Ah won't nevuh do dat agin'. Ah promises. Please, suh. PLEASE, Massuh," the accent felt natural to me. I pictured a fat Black woman with a gold front tooth putting fried chicken on the table.

The man in white, on the other hand, was clearly a transplant. Oh, he had the contractions, he could throw around "y'all" with the best of them. But it was like listening to a foreigner speak English. No matter how perfectly he had mastered the foreign language of the South, there were still hints of the Illinois or Michigan where he had grown up.

He talked of running and lessons while she bawled and pleaded.

"Strip her," he finally said and the two men stood her up and started to pull the sack dress off of her. When she struggled they simply ripped it off of her.

Naked, she was obviously pregnant. She wasn't at term, don't get me wrong. You didn't expect her panic to convert to contractions. But there was a clear baby bump with the protruding belly button I always associate with pregnant women. Very distinct stretch marks, at this point the camera operator had moved closer and was showing off her body, showed this would not be her first baby, and I chuckled as that word, pickaninny learned from ProudDominant (MWM 54) flashed through my mind. Her back was crisscrossed with welts. Clearly, this was not to be her first punishment.

And there, right where she sat, a big letter "M" had been branded into her. It was that letter, I couldn't help thinking, "'M' for Morgan," and picturing it on Daisy's ass, that got to me and I had to pause the video and masturbate furiously.

"String her up," the unnamed man in white said and the two black men drug the girl a little way, the hand-held camera was jittering and it was hard to tell distances, and then, under a tree, and my weird attic of a mind came up with the line "Under the spreading Chestnut tree," from a long-ago class in American Literature. I watched, mesmerized, as they lifted heavy ropes, the word "hemp" seemed appropriate, and pulled slip knots tight around her wrists before pulling on the ends of the ropes. The camera swung in that too-rapid, jerky way of an unprofessional cinematographer, and focused briefly on a big wooden pulley attached by a heavy iron staple to one of the big limbs of the tree. It looked like something that belonged in a museum.

As I watched her arms were pulled up until she stood, arms slightly more than shoulder-width apart, straight up over her head. Another tug and she started swaying slightly, her feet no longer touching the ground. She was crying and tears and snot ran down her chin, dripped onto her breasts, and then onto the roundness of her baby bump.

"Now Eliza," the man in white said and I felt a little rush at the obvious reference to Uncle Tom's Cabin, "you have a decision to make."

He released a whip from his belt, something straight out of an Indiana Jones movie, uncoiled it, and began brushing, almost caressing her body with the knob on the handle end of the whip.

"One quick hit," he said, lightly brushing her baby bump just below her belly button, "right here," and he slowly coiled the whip as he walked around her, the camera following, "or a real lesson here," and he drug the soft leather ends of the whip slowly up the back of her thigh to her ass.

"No, God, please no, Massah, not mah baby," she wailed.

"Are you sure?" he asked, his voice gentle, almost conversational, "just a quick strike and it can all be over," he finished, the knob on the end of his whip tracing the shape of her belly, lightly touching her belly button.

She squirmed away from him.

"No, God, please suh, no, not that," she wailed, "Not mah baby," and her voice was bubbly with tears and snot.

"Well, then," he said, stepping back and letting the whip extend with an expert flick of his wrist.

"Oh, God," she moaned and I saw her bladder let go.

I watched the whole thing, the tears and screaming, right until the screen went black and the credits rolled. The final credit was - Produced by: 1619. The Natural Way.

I was hard again after watching that, but I continued my exploration through another couple of over-produced videos before I got to another 1619. The Natural Way production.

This one had the same combination of shaky, hand-held cinematography along with the high definition of modern electronics. The opening scene involved following two men, one tall and thick, one tall and slender, as they crossed the parking lot. They were both dressed in what I think of as "agriculture chic," with denim jeans, shiny cowboy boots, and gingham cowboy shirts with pointed shoulder yokes. I made a small bet with myself that when they turned around their shirt pockets would have pearl snaps including snaps on the pointy pocket flaps. I could overhear their conversation, and I supposed it was part of the script although it was well done.

"You're 18 now, son," the thicker, "it's time you came to the auction. Now that you're legal, I want you to start help running things."

We followed them to the gate where the bigger man, I assumed the dad, swiped a silver card and a small personnel door to the left of the stockade door swung open. It was so well fit that I had not noticed it.

As the camera passed through the door it was like passing through a time warp. It felt more like 1619 than 2023. The streets were dirt, the buildings were wood, and there were no signs of electric lights or even, for that matter, sidewalks. A few buildings boasted boardwalks in front of them but most just opened onto the street.

A horse and buggy clop clopped by, leaving a thin cloud of dust in their wake.

The pair we were following walked down the street, carefully avoiding the occasional pile of horseshit until we got to the end of the street. An old, unpainted, weatherbeaten wooden building blocked the end of the street and the camera caught glimpses of the stockade fence behind the building. Across the top of the double-door entrance to the building at the end of the street, a painted sign proclaimed - 1619 Auction House.

The camera moved past the two men we had been following and approached a sign tacked to the wall beside the entry door. It was done in an antique style such as can be found in any textbook on the Antebellum South and Slavery. The sign the camera focused on proclaimed -

At auction - 2:00 p.m. Sharp.

No EXCEPTIONS!

A Fresh Shipment of Negroes.

15 Items.

Strapping Field Boys.

Well-Trained House Girls (One Showing A Cub In The Oven.

All Certified Healthy.

No Reserve.

Cash ONLY!

The camera followed another man, very tall with an outrageously oversized straw hat into the building, mostly an open barn with a small tiered stage at one end. As the camera panned around the room, picking up the general hubbub of what seemed to be about a hundred voices, I was surprised at how, well, "normal" the crowd looked. It was mostly men, but there were no wife-beater T-shirts or cut-off jeans over hiking boots to be seen. Rather, it looked like the crowd you might see at a meeting of the Planning and Zoning Commission when there was something controversial being discussed. There were no suits in evidence although there were a few light sports jackets. There were a few couples, three family units - mom, dad, kids - and a smattering of single women.

"Normal" was the word that sprung to mind as the camera continued its slow pan.

The camera pointed at a classic schoolhouse Regulator clock showing 2:00 and then swung in that disorienting cinema verite' style to the stage where a very fat man called out in a strong voice that carried through the general background noise easily - "Bring 'em out, boys. One hour for inspection folks."

The camera swung again, giving me a bit of vertigo, and the first, well, "batch," was my thought then but I later learned the word "coffle" for a group of slaves chained together, entered the open structure. It took a while since they had a big pole on their shoulders with a short chain and an iron collar about every two feet. I was reminded of movies I had seen about Navy Seal training where they seemed to do everything while carrying a damn telephone pole. This pole wasn't quite as big as a telephone pole, but the image was the same.

The pole had eight collars attached, and all of them were in use. As a second coffle entered the barn there were seven collared to it.

The next five minutes of the video involved the fat man showing each of the slaves and giving a brief description. It went something like this. He would have one of the, well, I thought of them as "stable hands" as I watched, big men in jeans and wife-beater T-shirts, unlatch one of the collars from the pole and then walk the, well, as strange as it seems in 2023 to use the word, the slave up onto the stage. The fat man would give a brief, well, combination biography and resume' of each before they were led across the other side of the stage and their collar chain attached to rings on the wall.

The first he introduced was an old woman. He looked quickly at the tag that had been clipped to her ear and said, "Strip now, Grace." She didn't hesitate, just pulled the bow at her throat and shrugged off the shapeless, well, "robe" is a good word. Naked, with the man next to her for scale, she appeared to be a little over five feet tall. I was pretty sure she would weigh about 250. She was a true butterball of a woman, all rolls and creases. Her hair was long and white and kinky, standing out in a big halo. Her face was wrinkled and she had the sunken-lipped look of the toothless.

"This is Grace," the fat man intoned, "She's past breeding age but a good girl just the same. She cleans, cooks, does laundry, and don't complain, do you Gracie girl?" She muttered, "Oh, no suh, nevah."

"And she is a great little bedwarmer, ain'tcha, girl?" he finished, lifting one of her breasts and letting it flop against the roll of her belly.

"Oh, yassuh," she said, smiling a toothless smile.

The stable hand led her across the stage and hooked her chain to the wall.

"Now this," the fat man said, "is Sebastian." The man was middle-aged, tall, handsome in that way of some black men with an almost dignified air. "Sebastian is one of the best house niggers we've ever had on the block," the fat man went on. "He used to be uppity and a runner, but he don't do that no more, do you boy?" the camera panned down and showed that his right foot ended above the toes and I had to stop the video and just stare while visions of that TV series from the 1970s, Roots flashed through my mind and I remembered the slave catchers cutting off Kunta Kinte's toes. I thought I was going to throw up but got myself under control before I did.

"No, suh, I doan do that no mo'," he said, his voice deep and almost musical.

And so it went. The fat man made the rounds, requiring each of the slaves, in turn, to strip and then giving a little one-minute sales pitch.

At Rufus, a young male who the fat man introduced as "The best handyman we've ever had on this block," making me wonder how many "bests" we would see before this was over, the camera stepped back a little and took in a woman looking him up and down. She was, I guessed, 50-something, with that lean, leathery, wrinkled look I associate with people, and especially with women, who spend too much time in the sun as exercise junkies.

Later, when Rufus had been hooked to the wall, the camera picked her up as she reached out and took his cock in her hand. He wasn't huge, but he was big, certainly bigger than me and the biggest of that group.

The camera moved until the screen was taken up by this exchange.

"Are you a good boy?" she asked.

"Yes ma'am," he said, not in that thick accent I had come to associate with Black people into a slave role, not that I had all THAT much experience with them. I noted that he met her eyes too, not defiantly, but as an equal.

"And all of this works?" she asked, tugging on his cock, bringing him, not erect but firm.

"Oh, yes ma'am," he said, his smile very white against very dark skin.

"Turn around," she said.

When he turned the camera showed a back crisscrossed with welts.

"Were you a bad boy?" she asked, her fingers lightly tracing the welts.

"There were lessons to be taught," he said.

Abruptly she moved away.

The fat man showed four more women of various ages and appearances, one of which was hugely pregnant, and one more man before he came to what he obviously considered the star of this particular show.

"Now, looky looky here," he said, as the pretty woman with long, curly, auburn hair let the robe fall, showing what I estimated to be C-cup breasts with no sag at all, a small waist, maybe 24 inches, and wonderfully flaring hips. The pale pubic hair was long and silky. She was pretty, close to beautiful, with fine features, good cheekbones, pale brown eyes that sparkled, a generous mouth, and a button nose.

"It's hard to believe this quadroon ain't white, isn't it now, y'all," the fat man said. "Hell, invest in a little bleach for this," and he ran his fingers through her hair, "and she'll be ready to get into any white bread sorority at any ivy league college you want to send her to. This is truly a High Yellow, folks. Make her a breeder and you'll have some prime stock."

I had to look up the words he used. It turned out "quadroon" meant she was one-quarter white. A "mulatto" was half white, and an "octroon" was one-eighth white. I found no language to define fractions of "whiteness" beyond that. "High yellow" was a slave who could pass for white but some part of his or her lineage was Black. "A single drop of nigger blood," was one description I read.

Lesson ends.

Third from last was a very black, very pretty woman. Her features were pure African. Broad nose. Thick lips. Small ears. Very dark eyes.