400 Days of Oppression (3 page)

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.

C
HAPTER
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.”

“That’s really cool that you were that into helping kids.”

“Yeah, but after a year of working at the group home I quit and switched my major to English. I was having nightmares every night. I just couldn’t detach myself from those kids. I’m too sensitive for that kind of work. I was depressed all the time. You’d be amazed what some of these girls had gone through, violence, abuse, rape, I just couldn’t take it. Half the black girls that walked in there were crack babies and half the white ones had Fetal Alcohol Syndrome or mothers that were on meth. They didn’t have a chance in hell. Sometimes I felt like someone should just drop a bomb on the entire ghetto.”

“Fuck did you say?”

Kenyatta’s face twisted up into a snarl as he spat his words out at me in anger. I pulled back, fearing for a second that he was about to physically attack me. He sensed my anxiety and did his best to relax his features and his posture. When he spoke again it was in calm measured tones.

“
I’m
from one of those ghettos and not everyone in there is smoking crack.”

“Yeah, but you’re an exception. The majority of them are.”

Again, I could see that it was taking everything he had not to lose his temper.

“No. The majority of them are not. The majority of the people in the ghetto are hardworking honest folks who were just given less opportunity than most. When you live in an environment where violence, drugs, and gangs are everywhere, coupled with the worst educational system imaginable, it takes an exceptional individual to crawl up out of that mess. I wasn’t an exceptional individual. I just had an exceptional mom who made sure that I never went to any of the neighborhood schools. She faked our address and gave me bus fare so that I could go to schools in predominantly white areas where the quality of education was better. If she hadn’t done that I’d probably be stuck right there in the ghetto with the rest of the kids I grew up with.”

“You can’t blame all the ills of the ghetto on education.”

“You’re a teacher and you don’t believe that education has that great an impact? Do you know that every single kid I know who went to my neighborhood high school instead of a magnet school or a Catholic high school or something is still right back there in the ghetto and most of them have drug habits or criminal records or both? They can trace seventy-five percent of the prison population in Oakland back to three high schools. Eighty percent of the prison population in America never graduated from high school. Rather than blowing the ghetto up or putting it under martial law they need to spend all that money they’re currently spending on more police and bigger prisons and put it into building better schools with better teachers. I mean, no offense, but when I was growing up teachers weren’t kids fresh out of college. The teachers I had were the same ones who taught my parents. Back then teaching was a career not a job. Not something you did for a while until something better came along. I mean, if you don’t believe that education makes a difference why are you even doing it?”