Switch back to Melissa

The description in Bianca's diary of her wild night with the plantation overseer had me as horny as I was last night. As much as I've become emotionally involved with the fate of my distant ancestor, I have to admit though, that reading about her being blackmailed and fucked by that surly Irishman appealed to me in a shameful way that I would never admit - not even to my lovers. That last picture of Mr. Kyleson plowing Bianca from behind has my juices flowing as freely as last night.

For the most part, the men I've dated are like Bianca's Mr. Thornton - educated, well-dressed and respectful to me and other women. Men that Aniya describes contemptuously as 'white in every way but their skin.' Aniya's father was the exception to this trend. He was at A&M on a basketball scholarship and was pretty full of himself when I met him at a party. I still don't know what Jordan saw in me, but by the end of the night he had me pinned against the basement wall with my skirt hitched up and his cock so deep in me I thought I was going to split in two.

Jordan was my Mr. Kyleson. He was a thug and a bore, and I don't think he had ever read a book in his entire life, but the sex was out of this world. Unlike my other boyfriends, Jordan never asked what I wanted or tried to please me ... and I loved it. He fucked me like a whore, whenever and however he wanted which is why I ended up pregnant after only two months together. Not long after that, he got into a nasty fistfight with the starting point guard on the team and lost his basketball scholarship. I got a few checks from Jordan now and then for Aniya, but I have to admit my mother was right about him all along.

I am shocked when I see that I have been woolgathering for almost forty minutes between reading Bianca's x-rated entries and my own sexual misadventures. For some reason, I wonder what Bianca's mother would think if she knew Mr. Kyleson was banging her daughter. I certainly got an earful from my mom when she found out I was pregnant with Jordan's child.

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? Now you want to read this kind of smut?” 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. Long before Black Lives Matter became a thing, Aniya was getting into fights with me and her teachers about what black people should be doing to challenge the status quo.

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 Black 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.

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 just like Mr. Kyleson ... I pushed back hard on where that thought was leading me.

The search for plantations within my area of interest was more difficult than I thought it would be and was taking forever. What I needed was someone who knew this history ...