400 Days of Oppression Read online

  When Kenyatta opened the lid of the coffin, I almost screamed. He stood there staring down at my nudity as I curled up, trying to hide my wretchedness from his eyes. I hated him seeing me like this. But that was the point, wasn’t it? It was the only way I would ever understand.

  He switched on the keyless light, little more than a bare light bulb attached to the trusses above our heads, and one hundred watts speared my retinas, unbearable after nearly ten hours of solid darkness. I recoiled from it, temporarily blinded, but more ashamed than anything. I knew how I must look to him, naked and unwashed. He continued to stare down at me as I squinted against the glare. He smiled and my heart felt suddenly lighter. Then his voice boomed, loud and stern.

  “Come out of there. It’s exercise time.”

  Oh God. How can I exercise with my bladder about to burst?

  He sat my meal of boiled yams and rice down on a stool and picked up a small talking drum and a stick.

  “Get out of there now! Dance!”

  He began to pound the drum. If I didn’t dance he would go for the whip soon. I had no choice but to obey. I crawled from my wooden casket and lowered myself unsteadily to the concrete floor. My stomach lurched as the casket wobbled and tilted, spilling me out. My legs shook and the room reeled as if everything were still swaying back and forth. I fought to maintain my balance and quiet the dizziness as I stood before him drenched in sweat and blood. Soon the room stopped swaying and the nausea in my stomach lulled into the dull ache of hunger.

  I stared at the floor, afraid to meet his gaze, forbidden to, but wanting so much to see his beautiful face and finely chiseled body. Kenyatta was an impressive physical specimen, six foot six with thick striated muscles coiled like pistons beneath his ebon skin. His head and face were clean shaven, and smooth, and his strong jaw, high cheek bones, and intense black eyes gave him the look of African royalty. He was the very definition of manhood to me and I adored every inch of him as I had proven on many occasions, as I was proving now by enduring his terrible lesson.

  I had lost a lot of weight in the week since my ordeal began. I knew that Kenyatta preferred me thicker. My hips were smaller now, my breasts and thighs not quite as heavy. My ass, which had been perfect for Kenyatta’s tastes, had dwindled away to nothing and I was embarrassed as I stood before him. His body was still perfect.

  I began to dance, trying to shut out my urgent need to pee. The drumbeat pounded through me as I gyrated my hips and stomped and wiggled and clapped. I was not a very good dancer and this was one of his favorite humiliations for me. Maybe if he had put on some country music. I knew how much Kenyatta hated country, but I could have done something with a little Toby Keith playing in the background. Maybe an old school two step and a twist. That drum playing alone like that was hard to get into, especially when I was hungry and needed to piss. Kenyatta called this exercise, but I knew it was just another way to further degrade me. I was grateful when he turned the hose on me.

  “Keep dancing!”

  I danced in the cool spray from the hose and I urinated freely, hoping the water would mask what I was doing. It didn’t work. Kenyatta turned off the hose, stood, and slapped me to the floor. I know, I’m starting to sound like the abused trailer trash wife again. But I liked it when he slapped me…usually…when he did it during sex. But not today, when I looked like shit and I was all miserable and hungry.

  “That’s not sexy, Natasha. Now dance again without the water sports.”

  I started crying again. This was so much harder than I had ever imagined it would be and it had only been a week. One week of constant torture. One week of unending insanity. There were still three hundred and ninety-three days left to go in my lesson. I was tough. I could make it. My life had been hell since I could remember and I’d survived it. I’d survive this too.

  I know men like Kenyatta…yeah…black men, think that pretty white girls like me have easy lives. But that’s bullshit. My life ain’t never been easy. I grew up poor. I grew up abused, and I’ve been abused by men in one way or another ever since the first time I let that Indian boy from the reservation fuck me in the back of his daddy’s truck. I was twelve years old and it wasn’t the first time I’d had sex, just the first time I’d consented to it. It didn’t make it any better. He was no nicer to me than the others had been.

  Kenyatta finished hosing me off and then I was ordered to stand there and drip dry. The chains were heavy. It made standing difficult, especially with all the weight I had lost on my diet of beans and yams. Despite the oppressive heat down there, I began to shiver. Finally, Kenyatta tossed the plate of food at my feet and watched as I greedily scarfed it up with my bare hands. He had reduced me to some undignified animal, but I could not hate him. I knew his people had suffered far worse at the hands of my ancestors. He was quick to remind me how much worse it would be if I were sharing my cramped quarters with six-hundred others, breathing, sweating, and defecating in the same dank humid air I was inhaling. Lying spooned together so tight that some suffocated from the sheer press of bodies and others died of dysentery and malaria. I knew he spared me these horrors out of no kindness on his part, but only due to the impracticality of trying to get another six-hundred slaves to willingly submit themselves to the ordeal I had volunteered myself for.

  Ever since I started teaching English to seventh and eighth graders, I’d had to deal with Black History Month and every year I had made sure to avoid exposing my students to the horrors of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. I would skip past it as if it were a mere footnote in the history of black people and not the single most impactful moment in black history. I would avoid talking about the beatings, the hangings, the families separated and destroyed and just rush right into talking about Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglas and then on to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Now, I wondered if I had been protecting the children or myself.

  The food tasted like warm shit. I was so hungry it didn’t matter. Besides, there was nothing I could do about it. I either ate this nasty crap or I starved. It wasn’t like Kenyatta was going to make me steak and eggs. This is what the slaves had eaten, so this is what I would eat until Kenyatta decided otherwise.

  I risked a glance up at him as I continued to scarf down my food. The look on his face could only be described as one of absolute disgust. There was something else there though. Pity? Sympathy? Sorrow? It was the look you gave to a crippled homeless person when he pissed himself. I just wasn’t sure if it was for me or for his ancestors. I suspected it was a little of both. If I hadn’t felt wretched and disgusting before, that look had solved that. I lowered my head back to my bowl, trying not to choke on my food as I began to sob again.

  Knowing that I could end it at any time made it worse. All I had to do was say that horrible word and he’d immediately unchain me and set me free. Of course Kenyatta, being the type of man he is, made the safe word something as reprehensible as the treatment I was now being subjected to. To go free, all I would have to do is yell “Nigger.” Not just say it. He didn’t want me to whisper it apologetically. He’d made that clear. I had to yell it at the top of my lungs. He knew I’d never do that. That would only multiply my “whitey guilt” as Kenyatta called it. So instead I endured.

  I hated Kenyatta standing above me with that look of pity and disgust twisting his features as I shoveled the mushy gruel into my face, kneeling on my hands and knees like an animal. I felt like some loathsome repugnant thing and I wondered if he still loved me after seeing me like this. I was afraid to ask, though I knew he would have answered me. I was afraid to hear the reply. Sometimes, on the days when the beatings were the most severe, he’d break character for a while and whisper to me that he still loved me and that he was proud of me for going through this for him. He’d hold me close to him as I wept and bled and swab my wounds with vinegar and alcohol before putting me back in my box. Both my love and my commitment renewed for a while, I’d lie in my box dreaming of being with him when this was all over. I’d imagine lying
in bed with him, nestled against his powerful body, my head on his chest, listening to his heartbeat and the soothing sound of his deep melodic voice as he stroked my hair and kissed my face.

  Kenyatta was the only man I’d ever felt safe with. He was the only man who’d ever bought me nice things and taken me to nice places, the only man who’d ever told me I was beautiful, and showed me the difference between making love and fucking. I imagined him saying I love you again as we made love, love without pain. I imagined what it would be like to be his bride. On those nights, the heat and the darkness and the hard claustrophobic confines of my box, even the weight of the iron chains around my neck ankles and wrists, became more tolerable. Everything was tolerable if it meant he would love me.

  I finished my food and Kenyatta removed my plate and walked me upstairs. I almost fell as I struggled with the weight of the chains. I had gone with him to purchase them. We’d bought them on a trip to San Francisco from a fetish store on Folsom Street that had a custom welder on staff. Kenyatta had shown them pictures of iron shackles recovered from the Henrietta Marie, the oldest slave ship ever discovered. By the end of the weekend the shackles were complete. We laughed about what the baggage handlers at the airport would think when our luggage went through the X-ray machine. I laughed now despite myself. Kenyatta looked back at me with concern on his face, checking to make certain I hadn’t gone insane. That made me laugh harder.

  He brought me into the kitchen. I was on my knees crawling by this point from the weight of the iron chains. That was how Kenyatta preferred me anyway. He kicked a bucket and a brush over to me and ordered me to scrub the floor while he stood over me with his flail. I went to work dutifully. I was grateful just to be in the sunlight. I knew Kenyatta would be raping me soon. Watching me scrub the floor naked on my hands and knees always turned him on, plus I knew he’d have to be going to work soon and this would be his last opportunity. My neck muscles throbbed beneath the weight of my shackles. I couldn’t have lifted my head no matter how much I wanted to. I wanted to see my beautiful master’s face. I finished scrubbing the kitchen floor and Kenyatta brought the flail down across my backside ordering me into the hallway to scrub the porcelain tile. I had barely begun scrubbing when I felt Kenyatta’s breath on the back of my neck, his chest against my back, the top of his thighs against the backs of mine. I let out a sigh as the weight of his body crushed down on top of me.

  CHAPTER II

  I was molested by a cousin as a child. I don’t say that to explain why I’m with Kenyatta. I don’t hate all white men for the degeneracy of one. I say it to explain all the fucked up choices I made before meeting him.

  It’s true that I hate my father. Not because he was a drunken asshole who beat my mother (though he was), but because all he did to my cousin was kick his ass. That solved everything in his mind. No police were called. I never went to counseling. My parents never even spoke to me about it. They never told me that what happened wasn’t my fault. They swept it under the rug, turned it into a dirty secret, and advised me to do the same. I never could. I still wake up screaming with his taste in my mouth. My parents never told me that what happened didn’t make me a bad person. So it did.

  I started sleeping around, got pregnant, lost the baby, started doing drugs, got kicked out of the house, started using more drugs, moved to Las Vegas, got a job and started attending UNLV, met a lot of men and slept with most of them, got off drugs, began drinking more. Somehow, through all the drinking and partying, I managed to squeak my way through college. I got a B.A. in English with a guaranteed student loan that has been in default for five or six years, got my teaching credentials and started teaching English at a middle school in Green Valley. I continued drinking and partying and sleeping with the wrong men, barely managing to drag my tired ass out of bed each morning to teach spelling and grammar and literature to kids who didn’t want to hear anything poetic unless it was accompanied by a drumbeat and included the words “bitch” and “ho” interspersed at regular intervals. Then I met Kenyatta. None of the rest of that shit matters. This is where the story begins.

  From the moment I met him I didn’t think I was good enough for him, which is weird considering that I come from a family that thinks the polite word for African Americans is “coloreds,” and they don’t use the polite word much. Kenyatta was so different from everyone else I’d ever met. There was something so regal about him, something princely. His eyes were wise and strong, cruel at times, but even that was sexy. His voice was deep, Lou Rawls/Barry White type basso profundo. Sultry, smooth, and sensuous, yet still forceful and commanding. I hate telling you that he was surprisingly articulate. I know that sounds like some kind of off-handed racial insult. As if I’m implying that most black men are not. The ones I’d fucked in the past definitely weren’t, neither were the rednecks, junkies, and trailer trash. I didn’t come from a world of articulate people. It had taken four years of college to correct my own trailer park drawl. So that was the first thing that impressed me about him. His voice, his words, his eyes. Those were the things that made me think I could love him. His body was what made me want to fuck him.

  We’d met at a nightclub six years before when he was still married. I was walking upstairs to the bar and he was walking downstairs. He was wearing this tight black nylon shirt that hugged his chest and biceps in a way that would have made most men look effeminate but looked sexy as hell on him. Muscles seemed to be bulging from everywhere. My girlfriend and I looked up at him, smiling from ear to ear because he was fucking huge and gorgeous and he was looking at us. We passed on the stairs and his eyes bored into mine. He wasn’t smiling, just staring, staring in a way that made his intentions absolutely clear. There was such raw sexuality in that stare that it made the temperature in the room jump and the moisture on my body increase, especially between my thighs. I felt like I should have said something, but no words would come, so I just stared back, smiling nervously and perspiring.

  He turned to look back up at us as he continued down the stairs and we turned and looked down at him. His eyes went from my friend Tina back to me and then to Tina again. I knew the look. He was deciding which one of us to pursue. I would have laid bets that he wouldn’t have picked me, not with Tina standing there.

  My girlfriend Tina was thin and pretty and easy and drunk. She had fake breasts that still barely increased her bra-size to a C-cup. She was dressed in a tight baby-t to show off the surgeon’s work and her thin waist. The mini-skirt she wore just barely covered her tight little ass and her legs were long and slender. She dressed like a slut because that’s exactly what she was and she wanted to make sure that every man in the club knew it. I was sure she would wind up sucking his dick in the parking lot if he wanted her to. When he started walking back up the stairs toward us, I was certain the evening would end with her head bobbing up and down in his lap while I waited for her at the bar. When he walked right past her and took my hand I almost fainted. I was fat then, not obese, not the kind of fat that made people pity me. I was just a little chubby, thighs thicker than I would have liked, hips wider, ass bigger. My waist was actually rather small for a large woman though I still had that unsightly bulge where my lower abs should have been. Tina had once called it my FUPA—Fat Upper Pussy Area. I hated her for that even though I laughed when she said it. Laughing is what fat girls are taught to do when insulted. It is the most common defense mechanism in the world. That’s why I was so surprised by Kenyatta’s actions. I knew I was fat and men didn’t often pass up women who looked like my friend Tina for women who looked like me.

  “Hello, ladies. My name is Kenyatta.”

  His voice was deep and warm, and he continued to hold my hand and look into my eyes when he spoke to me, still ignoring my Barbie-like friend, still looking at me like I was something on a dessert tray.

  “M-my name is Natasha and this is my friend Tina.”

  He never looked at her. Not even once. He kept his eyes on me the entire time.

 
“Are you ladies having a good time this evening?”

  “We’re doing great,” Tina interjected.

  Kenyatta turned toward her, looked her up and down, then turned back to me. I didn’t even have to look at Tina to know she was insulted. I looked at him quizzically, wondering what his game was. Then I turned to Tina and shrugged my shoulders. I didn’t know what I could have possibly done to single myself out for his attention, what might have made me stand out above Tina. Tina looked pissed. She crossed her arms beneath her hard surgically enhanced breasts, pushing them up even further so that there would be no mistaking what she had to offer, and started tapping her foot impatiently waiting for him to notice her. Kenyatta seemed to enjoy ignoring her. I began to wonder if he was just using me to get a rise out of her.

  He began asking me about myself, where I was from, what I did for a living, what I did for fun, why I was at the club tonight. He never let go of my hand and never broke eye contact.

  “I’m a teacher. I teach seventh and eighth grade English.”

  “Cool. You like kids?”

  “Most of the time. Sometimes it can be rough. I used to work at a group home for girls when I was in college. The whole reason I went to school was so that I could get a job helping children. I thought I wanted to be a social worker or a child psychiatrist for a while.”