First, back to Melissa

The description in Bianca's diary of her measured and skillful seduction of the young lawyer had me more than a little confused. I've become emotionally involved with the fate of my distant ancestor. I must admit that I, perhaps naïvely, imagined that Bianca was as innocent and sweet as her picture. The sketch in the journal of Mr. Thornton and Bianca together in bed is about as vanilla as you can get, but the thoughts running through Bianca's mind at the time were far from that. The sentences near the end where Bianca wonders if it is her mother's experience as a sexual object are particularly disturbing.

Can a mother's sexual deviance be passed on to her daughter? For most of my life, I've dated the Mr. Thornton's of the world and avoided dangerous men like Manton or Kyleson. Aniya's father was the exception to this pattern. He was at A&M on a basketball scholarship and was pretty full of himself when I met him at a party. When my roommate introduced me to the handsome dark-skinned athlete, I knew at once he wasn't right for me. He was so full of himself that even talking to him was painful. If not for his ability to on the basketball court, there is no way he'd have been admitted to any college, not to mention A&M. Jordan, however, wasn't deterred by my snubs and for some reason I began to like the attention I was getting from the muscular B-ball star.

When he showed up at my dorm the next evening, I agreed to a walk in the park with him. To make a long story short, we ended up going at it like dogs in heat on an old blanket in the grass under the trees. By today's standards, it was clearly date ****. I told Jordan to stop when his hands started exploring uncharted territory, but he had my dress pushed up around my hips and my legs spread wide before I even realized I was in trouble. Just like Bianca, even as I begged him to stop, I knew I didn't want him to. I was so turned on by the brutal way he was fucking me that I would have let him do anything he wanted and begged for more.

Jordan had discovered the secret slut under my outward goodie-two-shoes demeanor. I don't think he had ever read a book in his entire life, but he could certainly read me. He knew what I wanted, even more so than I did. He liked to call me his 'light-skinned ho' and 'mocha bitch'. I hated it, but couldn't stop going back for more. The sex was wild; blow jobs in empty classrooms ... all sorts of positions I'd never even knew existed ... he even took my anal virginity. He hated rubbers, and for some reason I couldn't make him wear one. It's no wonder I ended up pregnant after only two wild months together. Are these the kinds of lustful genes I've passed down to my baby girl?

Not long after I showed Jordan the positive pregnancy test, he got into a nasty fight with one of the assistant coaches and got kicked off the team. We got married anyways, he said he wanted to 'do the right thing' and he stuck around for a few years because of Aniya. Just long enough for me to finish school and get my accounting degree, but if anything, that just made things worse. After the third time I caught him cheating we called it quits.

I get a few checks from Jordan now and then for Aniya but nothing I can count on. Aniya loves him though. He treats her like a princess and Aniya thinks he's the best. She gets a good amount of her looks and fire from him. Thankfully, my girl gets her smarts from me, but she has a chip on her shoulder even bigger than her dad's. Her motto might as well be: "Fuck the man!"

My daughter is fiercely proud of her black ancestry, she'd want this journal published just so the entire world would read about the evils of the plantation system and how the white masters abused their black chattel. She wouldn't be happy with my more cautious approach.

Just like her father, Aniya thinks I'm too white. The way I dress and speak, my corporate job, even the college educated men I date are too 'white' for her. There's real irony in that, because I'm the one who skimped and saved to make sure she had Black Pride. 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 always pushed basketball camp as a better alternative.

Damn, my mind is going everywhere. In an effort to keep my treacherous thoughts from drifting, I turn my attention to solving this mystery. I learn from a webpage posted by a Virginia reenactment company that carriages in those times would typically travel at around six miles an hour. From a similar site, this one put up by a South Carolina artillery company, I find a map of 19th century Charlston area.

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.

As I worked, I wondered at how desperately these otherwise rational men clung to the myth of the 'Noble South.' The webpage for Furguson's Artillery corps included a recruitment poster with 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. My late mother would have had a few choice words for me if she was still around to see what I was up to.

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.

“Isn't it bad enough you had to shame me with your whoring? Now you want to read this kind of smut?” The thing is; that is exactly what I want. I want to crawl back in bad and read every last smutty entry in Bianca's diary.