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As much as I've become emotionally involved with the fate of my distant ancestor, I find myself dreading to continue reading. I should have known, just from that picture of Bianca on her knees in front of all those buyers that her fate was going to like that of so many other light-skinned slaves. It was awful, and yet I knew that I would not be able to keep from going back.

I realize with a start that I am still in my kitchen. I am shocked when I see that I have been lost in reading and rereading the neatly x-rated entries for almost forty minutes. The last picture of Bianca with her cousin between her legs in particular has my juices flowing as freely as last night.

Maybe I am coming down with something. My cheeks are flushed, my palms are sweating but most of all the tingling in my loins has me squirming shamefully on the seat. The shame I feel brings me sharply back to a childhood memory. I was sitting at a table much like this when my mother realized that I was in a very similar aroused state. It was one of my earliest sexual experiences, and I had only a very limited sense of what I was feeling. Ironically, it was reading the Bible that had started my wayward mind wandering into dangerous territory.

My mother made my younger sister and I read from the 'Good Book' every night after we finished our schoolwork. That particular night I found a passage in Genesis where Lot offers his two virgin daughters to the mob demanding he surrender his visitors to them. My father had either died or run off before I had any memories of him, and in my own mind the idea of a father offering his daughters like that to a mob was both horrifying and exciting at the same time. I didn't know that as a fourteen-year-old nerd, but as I read and reread the passage, I squeezed my thighs over and over again trying to ease the itch that just kept growing.

I don't know what tipped off my mother, but she figured out what I was doing even before I did. She pulled me from my chair by my braids and bent me over the table, so my face was just inches from the wet stain on the seat of the ladderback chair. She called me a sinful Jezabel as she used her heaviest wooden spoon to tan my backside. Anything even remotely to do with sex set my mother off, but that I got sexually excited by reading the bible made the sin even worse. To this day I still associate the smell of my own arousal with the sting of a hard spanking.

It is, I realize with a wry smile, a good thing my mother wasn't alive to receive this journal. Historical treasure or not, one look at the sketches of naked women and Bianca's diary would have been dropped into her apartment building's incinerator and gone forever. It is all too easy to picture her wiping her hands on her apron and letting me know exactly what she thought.

“Lord knows, the world don't need no more of that trash; we get enough smut on the TV and internet.” Mom's solution to anything uncomfortable or shameful was to keep it from ever seeing the light of day. Aniya, on the other hand, would want to see this published for the entire world to read. My daughter is fiercely proud of her black ancestry. Even before the 1619 Project came out, Aniya was getting into fights with me and her teachers about what real black people should be doing to change the system.

Aniya doesn't think much of the men I date. She still wants me to get back together with her father. That's not going to happen. Other than the hot sex we had, Jordan and I had no business being together. I was a 'good girl' from a church-going family, much more interested in my studies than boys. Jordan was only at college because of basketball. He was good enough to get a scholarship, but wasn't getting much playing time and by all accounts he was the classic 'bad boy' that my mother warned me about.

Maybe if I had a little more experience with boys, it wouldn't have been so easy for Jordan to get me alone in his room. With what I know now, it is clear that 'date ****' was the right term for what happened when our kissing started getting out of hand. As a naïve eighteen-year-old book-worm though, I thought that it was my fault - that I should have been able to stop him from pushing up my skirt or at the very least not liked it so much when he got my legs spread and **** himself into me. It hurt, but the pain was nothing compared to the feeling of wickedness and pleasure that came once the initial discomfort started to ease. When he showed up at my dorm the next day, I let him take me out on another date and ended up in his room again.

I push away the old memories I reach for the computer. After a bit of effort, I find a map of 19th century Charlston area. The map is from the Civil War era. It was put up by Ferguson's Artillery Company, a reenactment enthusiast eager to bring back glory to the Confederacy. The webpage includes a recruitment poster and an invitation for anyone to come check out their activities. I could only imagine what their reaction to a someone like me showing up to one of their training camps might be. A woman, a black woman, alone with all those testosterone-driven white men pretending to be soldiers. The only role a black **** would have in a camp like that is to serve the needs of every single man in the barracks ... I pushed back hard on where that thought was leading me.

From a similar site, this one from a Virginia Infantry company, I learn that carriages would typically travel at around six miles an hour and with a little high-school math I was able to work out a reasonable search area for where Havenhall might have been based on Bianca's description of her trip from Charleston. For the next hour I was able to keep my overactive imagination in check by printing out the map and using Aniya's old school compass to trace out a donut between 12 and 24 miles from the center of Charleston. It took much longer to search for any reference to plantations within the area.

Again and again, I would stop my research to run my fingers along the worn leather of the journal. I didn't dare open it again or I might lose myself in the account, but already I knew that this first-hand account was special. There might have been other literate slaves who kept accounts of their lives, but I doubt many of them were this open with the sexual nature of the way things really worked on a plantation. In spite of the other museum deeming that these accounts were not suitable for research, I knew there must be someone that would want to see it.

What I needed was someone who knew this history ... specifically the history of the slaves bred and trained specifically to be used as sex objects by the wealthy plantation owners.