400 Days of Oppression (7 page)

This was so different from the memory of my assault. Kenyatta wasn’t ramming his cock down my throat, choking me with it. I felt in control. I could feel his organ pulsate, nearing orgasm, and each time I would ease it out of my throat and lick it up and down.

“Stroke it with your hand and lick the tip. Just like that, like you’re licking an ice cream cone. Suck the tip.”

I sucked and licked and stroked until I could feel him about to cum.

“I’m going to cum and I want you to drink every drop. You understand?”

I nodded my ascent as I continued bobbing my head up and down on his tumescent manhood. I tried to hide my panic at the idea of him filling my mouth with his semen, of being compelled to swallow it. I felt myself beginning to hyperventilate. I had to get myself back under control. I was beginning to feel nauseated and feared I would vomit when Kenyatta’s cum filled my throat. That would almost certainly end things between us, I feared.

I tried to distract myself with other thoughts. I thought about how wonderful Kenyatta was. I recalled how his lips felt on my nipples, how his tongue felt on my clitoris. It was only fair that I reciprocate. Kenyatta was nothing like the fat cousin who had raped me in my parent’s basement. I wondered if perhaps his cum would taste differently, if I might even enjoy it. I took his cock deeper, pushing it past my tonsils, choking myself, but not caring, wanting to please my man, and when I felt Kenyatta’s body tense, heard his low, growling, guttural moan, felt that thick, warm, salty, eruption splash across my tonsils, I did as Kenyatta asked. I swallowed it all. That’s when I knew how much I loved him. It wasn’t long after that Kenyatta brought up the subject of the box.

I had already committed myself to the experiment by then, even though my insides roiled at the thought of being locked inside a wooden coffin for who knew how long, so I couldn’t back down. I needed to see it through. But Kenyatta wanted me to know exactly what I was getting into and why. He pulled out a book he’d found at the library when he was a boy. I was surprised by the profoundness of his emotion as he opened the book.

“
Roots
had just come out on television and I was so affected by it that I wanted to know more about the slave trade and what had happened to our people two hundred years ago when they came to America. I asked my Mom about it and she took me to the library to look it up for myself.”

He paused. His strong regal face cracked and trembled, twisting into a scowl as whatever he was feeling inside broke through to the surface and tears welled up in his eyes. He looked up at the ceiling and inhaled deeply, fighting to control his emotion. I could tell this was a painful memory for him. The chords in his neck bulged as his body tensed, struggling for control. When he looked back down at me, his face was hard and stoic. He forced himself to look me in the eyes, but I knew it was taking a great effort for him to do so. I knew he wanted to hang his head or lower his brow into his hands, anything but look at me. But it just wasn’t his way to show weakness in front of me and giving in to his emotions would have seemed weak to him. I suspect he also knew that it would hurt me more to see the pain on his face as he struggled to suppress it.

“This was the book I picked up. It’s called
400 Years of Oppression
. It contains, among other things, detailed descriptions of life aboard a slave ship pieced together from various accounts and historical documents, most of it told by former slaves who traveled through the Middle Passage. It contains slave narratives all the way up to the emancipation proclamation. It follows the life of African Americans from the time they were kidnapped from their homes in Africa, to the civil rights movement, right up to today’s struggles with drugs, crime, and poverty. I cried when I read it. I wept out loud and I couldn’t stop crying even when my mother held me in her arms. I had no idea how bad it was. I had no idea how many Africans they stole from their homes and brought here. In that book, they estimated that about fifteen million slaves were brought here from Africa and at least another five million never made the trip due to disease, malnourishment, suicide, murder, and slave revolts. Then all the hell they went through for more than four hundred years in this country as they struggled to find freedom and equality. I had no idea. You could not imagine what my people endured aboard those ships.”

Kenyatta opened the book and I prepared for the worst. But just as he had been unprepared when he’d picked up the book twenty-five years ago. I was completely overwhelmed by what I heard. I could never have imagined that human beings could have been capable of such cruelty to one another.

“Africans were treated like cattle during the crossing, wedged together below deck as tight as they could pack them in, chained together and stuffed in narrow, three feet high compartments too low for standing. Most of these compartments had no light or fresh air except for those immediately under the grated hatchways. The stifling heat was unbearable, and the humid air nearly unbreathable.

“In the latter 18
^th
century, most slave ships were “tight packers,” squeezing as many slaves as they could fit into their cargo holds, crowded together in spaces smaller than a grave, stacked on top of one another like spoons, breathing each other’s sweat and body odor. Disease and suffocation below deck were common. Men were often chained in pairs, manacled together in twos and threes, shackled wrist to wrist or ankle to ankle. They were forced to lie on their backs with their heads between the legs of others. This meant they often had to lie in each other’s sweat, feces, urine, and, in the case of dysentery, even blood, covered from head to toe in lice and other parasites, a number of them in different stages of suffocation; many of them foaming at the mouth and in their last agonies, dying of oxygen deprivation.

“The floor of the ship’s hold resembled a slaughterhouse covered with blood and mucus. The confined air was rendered noxious by the sweat, urine, feces, blood and vomit evacuated from their bodies and being repeatedly breathed.”

I didn’t want to hear anymore. I wanted to clap my hands to my ears and scream.

What he was describing was too horrible to have been possible. There was no way human beings could have done things like that to each other. But, I knew Kenyatta wasn’t embellishing. I knew everything he was saying was true and I doubted he’d be able to approximate any of the horrors he was describing or whether I’d be able to endure it if he could.

“Diseases such as smallpox and yellow fever spread like wildfire, and slaves that fell ill were often thrown overboard to prevent wholesale epidemics.

“Some captains would have their crew periodically clean the “tween decks” with hot vinegar. Most did not. Slavers used iron muzzles and whippings to control the slaves who greatly outnumbered them on the overcrowded ships. Women were raped and sexually abused by the officers and the crew, who were permitted to indulge their passions at will and were sometimes guilty of such cruelties as would turn the stomach of a seasoned prostitute. Often, after suffering violent sexual abuses, women would leap overboard and drown themselves.

“But the constant deficit of fresh air was by far the most torturous of all the horrors aboard these ships. To bring in fresh oxygen, most slave ships had five or six air-ports on each side about five inches in length and four in width. Some had what they called wind-sails. But whenever the sea was rough and the rain heavy, the crew would shut these and every other opening in the ship and the slaves’ living space soon became intolerably hot and, what little oxygen there was, almost unbreathable.

“Slaves often fainted from the oppressive heat and the deprivation of oxygen and were carried above deck where many of them died and were tossed overboard. A healthy slave was sometimes dragged up onto the deck shackled to a corpse; sometimes of the three attached to the same chain, one was dying and another dead. Suffocating slaves struggled to extricate themselves, destroying one another in their fury and desperation for oxygen and room. Men strangled those next to them, and women clawed each other to ribbons.”

By the time he was done reading I knew I had to do it. Still, I had no idea how he hoped to recreate such atrocities or how I was going to handle it, but if I loved him I knew I had to try. That’s when he told me about his idea for the box.

“The Box” was a pine coffin that Kenyatta purchased from the local mortuary. It was four feet wide, three feet deep, and six feet long. Kenyatta bought several lengths of chain and a few thick metal loops that he screwed into the wooden floor trusses in the basement ceiling. He then connected the chains to it and, after screwing several other eyelets into the coffin, suspended the entire thing three feet off the floor. He kept the chains long and loose so that the slightest vibration caused the entire thing to sway. Then he hooked up a motor to it that pulled the pulley’s up and down, rocking the box steadily like the motion of calm waves gently rocking a boat.

“This will make it feel like you’re at sea. I can’t exactly hire a bunch of naked Africans to pack you in here with, so this coffin will simulate that same claustrophobic feeling they must have had being packed in tight with hundreds of other slaves. I’m gonna put heaters all around the room and a humidifier to make it as hot down here as it was between decks with no windows or ventilation. It’s gonna be miserable as hell. But just remember that no matter how horrible and uncomfortable it gets in there, no matter how fucked up and cruel I might seem for putting you through this, remember that it’s nothing compared to what my ancestors endured. They had no safe word.”

“Okay. I’ll do it.”

“You’re gonna have to quit your job. Take a leave of absence or something. Just tell them it’s for personal reasons. They won’t ask questions. Then come right back here and we’ll start this shit. I love you, baby. I really do. But I’m warning you that once this begins I’m fully committed. I’ll become your oppressor and I won’t show you any pity. No mercy. Not for four hundred days. And this box is just the beginning. My ancestor’s journey through the Middle Passage was just the first part of a fucked up odyssey that lead right up to today. I’m talking about four hundred days experiencing all the hardships my people have endured for the last four hundred years. You sure you can do this?”

“I’m sure.”

“I’m not gonna take it easy on you. You have your safe word if you decide you can’t take it anymore, but if you do go through with it. If you last all four hundred days...”

He pulled out a small ring box and lifted the lid slowly, staring at my face, waiting to see my reaction. It was an engagement ring. A princess-cut diamond, at least two carats, with a platinum band and two smaller diamonds inset on either side. It was beautiful.

“You make it through this shit and I’ll know that you really understand what it’s like, what my people have gone through, what I go through every day. I’ll know you’re more than just some freaky redneck bitch with a low self-esteem who got tired of the white trash she’s been dealing with all of her life. That you didn’t just get bored and decide to try something a little kinky and go slumming with the jiggaboos. I’ll know you really do love me and understand me. Then we can be together as man and wife. Then every time some sista looks at you wrong and starts in with that bullshit of you not ever being able to really understand a black man or black people, you’ll know different because you can say that you’ve been through everything we have.”

Somehow it all made sense when he put it like that. He had that way of stating things so they sounded perfectly reasonable no matter how fucked they really were, rationalizing his bullshit so well he could persuade you into doing just about anything. The way he put it, made it sound like climbing into that box was the most noble thing I could do. Like it would be insensitive if I didn’t. I almost felt like if I wasn’t willing to subject myself to all of this then that would somehow make me a racist or at the very least a coward. Besides, we’d already taken our S&M play to extremes I never would have imagined before I met him. He had taught me to enjoy things that would have repulsed me just months ago. How much worse could this be? I felt like I could endure anything. And then there was the ring. I’d dreamed about marrying Kenyatta many, many times, even before we’d started dating, but it was always just a childish fantasy that I’d put out of my mind almost as fast as it entered. I’m not the kind of girl that men marry, especially not men like Kenyatta who can have any woman they want. Just mentioning the possibility that he and I could someday be together forever, just the fact that he would even consider it made it impossible for me to say no.

“I’ll do it.”

That was two weeks ago to the day.

Perspiration ran in a constant deluge from my brow down my face. I blinked tiny droplets of sweat out of my eyes. Salty rivulets made their way to the corners of my mouth and I licked them from my lips, trying to quench my thirst. It would be hours before I could drink again. Kenyatta worked eight hours every day and sometimes nine or ten. Then he would go to the gym for another two hours. That meant I was sometimes locked in my box for twelve hours at a time. Most days he came home on his lunch break to feed me or else he dropped by on his way to the gym. But some days he left me in there without food or water or a bathroom until he came home for the night.

The heat was the worst thing at first. I was constantly sweating. My skin stuck to the damp wood and between that and the chains, every movement abraded more skin. The heat and humidity made it so hard to breathe I inevitably began to panic and claw at my box, trying to free myself, which made it sway violently and began a new problem. Seasickness. I tried to lie still, but the way he had the box hung from the center rather than the ends, the slightest shift in position sent the box tilting and reeling. Between the heat and the claustrophobia, it was too much. I could feel the gorge rising in my stomach, the bile scalding the back of my throat. Many days, as I lay interred in my coffin breathing my own funk and swaying back and forth, I was overcome with nausea and regurgitated, leaving me no choice but to lie in my own vomit for hours until Kenyatta returned. The liquefied chunks of squash and horse beans would slowly curdle in the heat, filling the boiling air with its repugnant stench until I vomited again and again, the nausea magnified by the smell of my own waste. I didn’t want to go through that again. I tried to suck the scalding bile rising in my throat back down into my stomach and lie steady to quiet the swaying of the box. It worked for a while at least.