Back to Melissa

As much as I've become emotionally involved with the fate of my distant ancestor, I now find I'm almost as interested in Angelica as I am in the fate of Bianca.

I haven't forgotten the sketch of Bianca kneeling naked in front of all those men, although now I am wondering if it was perhaps the sketch was of the house **** Angelica in front of all those men. Either way I find I am as aroused now as I was last night.

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 Angelica riding Mr. Thornton as Bianca can do nothing but watch 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 from the book of Judges describing how the Israelite warriors took for themselves 400 virgins from a conquered city as spoils of war. 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 do not know what tipped off my mother, but I can remember being bent over the table so my face was just inches from the wet stain on the seat of the ladderback chair. My mom 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 1619 came out, Aniya was getting into fights with me and her teachers about what real black people should be doing to change the system.

It's probably my fault that my daughter thinks I'm too white; I'm the one that fought to instill her pride in her heritage. The irony of it all is that Aniya feels closer to her dad than me. Jordan never gave a damn about the hip hop classes or summer camps on African art and culture; 'waste of good money' he'd complain. He tried to push basketball camp as a better alternative. Jordan wanted his girl to get an athletic scholarship like he did. Not that it did him any good after he got kicked off the team for fighting.

Damn, my mind is going everywhere. I reach for the computer and 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 men pretending to be soldiers ... 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 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 must 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 ...