Black Master, White Slave

by duBois-Guilbert, Rebecca

  Josiah Cavanaugh was silent, his eyes cold.

  Her stomach tightened, and Pegeen dropped her eyes to the distended front of his trousers. The fabric was stretched so that she fumbled with the buttons, at last opening the flap to reveal an engorged organ of remarkable size. In spite of herself she felt a flutter of… what? Fear? Anticipation? She didn’t know; though she had been bedded by a fair number of white men – her three former owners, and their friends to whom she had been lent – the coupling of a male and a female had never brought her the pleasure it did to the men. White ladies weren’t supposed to enjoy being bedded, but Pegeen thought some of them really did. They talked about it enough between themselves.

  Reaching around him she eased his trousers down and his erection jabbed her in the breasts, making her nipples tighten and tingle in response.

  “I need to take your shoes off,” she said huskily, kneeling in front of him.

  Silently Josiah sat, allowing her to lift one leg and then the other as she eased off his shoes with their ornate pewter buckles, his thin cotton stockings and finally his trousers, dropping them all to the side. Then he reached out and snarled his hands in her fiery mane, bringing her face toward him. It was not a rough act, nor a painful one, but unmistakable in its meaning.

  Obediently Pegeen opened her mouth and took his massive shaft between her lips. Her second master, old Mr. Winterborough, had liked this form of pleasuring more than the way Nature had intended, but old Mr. Winterborough had not been anywhere as large as this man. This man filled her mouth and stretched her lips until she was afraid they might split; still, she knew what was expected of her and began to move her head up and down rapidly in the way that had given old Mr. Winterborough such pleasure.

  The pressure on her head increased, holding her to a leisurely stroke. Now she could feel each throb and curve of him, feel him quiver and strain as she slid slowly up and down his shaft.

  It didn’t last long; Josiah Cavanaugh gave a convulsive shudder, cried out and exploded into Pegeen’s mouth, flooding it so much that small streams of thick translucent liquid ran from the corners. Immediately he released her, and Pegeen, half-way choking, swiped quickly at her dripping chin.

  His breath was rough and ragged, but when he looked down his eyes had lost their hard glitter. “Do you not like that?”

  Pegeen choked down the last of the salty liquid and tried not to throw up. Old Mr. Winterborough had always pulled out at the last moment, wanting to see how far he could spew his seed. The carpet in his bedroom had been a disgrace, but he wouldn’t let anyone touch it.

  This was twice her new master had asked her what she liked! What kind of a man was he who cared what a slave thought?

  She shook her head. “Not much. Not the… liquid.”

  “Take your clothes and go,” Josiah said in a flat voice.

  Pegeen grabbed her dress and cap and fled up the stairs to her room, not caring if she were naked. Would she be punished? Masters liked their girls to be enthusiastic about what they liked. Would she be sold? She hoped not. This was most certainly a strange household, but so far it had been the best home she had ever known.

  She closed the door of her tiny room behind her and tried to slow her breathing. It wasn’t all alarm or apprehension, though; she was conscious of a warmth between her legs, a wetness of desire that had happened rarely in her life and never because of the men who had used her sexually.

  Aroused and not really knowing why, Pegeen laid back on the bed and bemusedly rubbed her thickened nipples. The tingling between her legs increased. She wondered what it would be like to have Josiah Cavanaugh’s bulk entering her, stretching her. Could she take him without pain? He was by far larger than any man who had ever taken her.

  The thought of his hard, dark body covering and claiming her sent a delicious shiver down Pegeen. She reached between her legs, her finger seeking out the fleshy thorn that was so tiny and yet could give so much pleasure. She rubbed lightly at first, remembering the curves and planes of Josiah’s body, then harder as her mind traveled down to his erection, proud and hard and long. Several times she forced herself to slow down and prolong the exquisite sensation, only to be forced by her growing desire to speed up again. Only when she could no longer control her need did she give in and rub quickly, rub hard, rub frantically, propelling herself toward the final burst of pleasure.

  The rapturous explosion came quickly and, almost paralyzed for the moment, Pegeen drew an agonized breath before relaxing slowly, deeply, almost as if she were dying. Her soaked fingers oozed with the juices of her pleasure. She withdrew her hand from the jointure of her legs reluctantly.

  “Someday,” came a deep voice, “I shall ask you to do that again for me.”

  Horrified, terrified, Pegeen looked over at the door. There, looking at her with an unreadable expression, stood Josiah Cavanaugh, her new master, clad only in a brocade dressing gown. His desire was rekindled; it was obvious as his erection boldly looked out through the front of the unfastened robe, like a predator emerging to seek his prey.

  Panicking, Pegeen grabbed for her dress. Josiah slammed the door behind him. He was across the room before she could pull the plain cotton garment over her nakedness. His presence in the room dominated it…dominating her. She could not move, no more than a bird could look away from a stalking cat. He slid from his dressing gown and knelt on the floor beside her narrow bed, then lifted one leg over him until she was almost sideways on the narrow bed and his face between her thighs.

  “Massa…”

  “Be quiet, girl.” His voice was harsh and rasping. “Just be quiet.”

  Then there was no need to speak. He lowered his head to the soft wetness of her woman-place and began to lick, softly at first, then harder and harder, trying to lick her dry. Under his lashing tongue Pegeen’s juices flowed more copiously than ever. Then, when she thought she could feel no more exquisite pleasure, he sucked hard at the small thorn of pleasure at the apex of her thighs.

  Pegeen thought she might die of embarrassment; no man had ever done what he was doing to her. Once, in the slave quarters not long after her mother had been sold, she had seen two of the slave girls doing this to each other, but it had never occurred to her that a man might want to do this to a woman.

  As the feeling rose and spread from that spot between her legs, a feeling more arousing and intense than she had ever received from any man or even her own fingers, Pegeen thought she might die of pure pleasure. Waves of feeling spread through her body with the force of a hurricane’s blast until, when she was unable to stand it any longer, an inarticulate cry flew from her lips and her back arched in climax.

  For a moment she was weightless, formless, nothing but pure feeling.

  Then Josiah placed her legs back on the bed, pulling her straight. She felt herself come back into her body, but a totally different person from the woman she had been moments before.

  “There,” Josiah said, kneeling between her spread and boneless legs. His erection hung between them like a separate entity. It twitched with impatience, but Josiah bent over and gave a suck to each of her rigid nipples, making her moan. “Now…”

  Covering her like a shadow over white sand, he lowered himself slowly, giving her time to open and accept the size of him, but it was an unnecessary courtesy. Slick and wet from her own passion, Pegeen’s woman-place opened and stretched and received him with a minimum of resistance. Never having been so full before in the act of coupling, Pegeen moaned with pure lust. Of their own accord her hips thrust against his, ever faster, ever harder, until the moment came.

  She finished first, crying out, her white fists beating against the broad expanse of his black back, trying to drive him ever deeper into her. Then, just as her cry died away, his pleasure came, filling her and spurting out onto the bed beneath them, leaving him spent and gasping.

  Once again Pegeen was floating, a fly in the amber of passion’s aftermath. She realized he was gone only when the door closed sol
idly behind him. It would be two days before he spoke to her again.

  Chapter Three

  From his Charleston-born mother Hippolyte Thibodeaux had inherited a small competence and an exaggerated sense of self-importance. From his Creole father he had inherited a large fortune and an even larger plantation. His love of gaming, wenching and other less respectable occupations was apparently self-generated.

  Both his parents had succumbed to one of the regular bouts of fever that swept the low-lying plantation country, but young Hippolyte had survived. As he grew and began to run through his inheritance with the deadly speed of a cane fire, it was said that not even the Devil wanted Hippolyte Thibodeaux.

  Before long the fortune was gone, soon to be followed by ever larger chunks of the plantation until it, too, was gone, along with a couple of generations of Thibodeaux history. That was when his Louisiana relations had washed their hands of him, even so far as to commit the social solecism of refusing him a bed for the night.

  Nights in southern Louisiana are usually mild, but sleeping on the streets did not agree with either Hippolyte’s pride or his constitution. His luck with the dice flickered enough to enable him to get to Charleston, where his mother’s relatives, after hearing a carefully edited if not quite completely fictional tale of his sorrowful circumstances, welcomed him with open arms.

  For a while.

  After his excesses banished him from their company, they consoled themselves that he need not starve because he still had his mother’s inheritance, which had been cannily tied up in a trust. He could not touch the respectable amount of capital, but the interest was paid to him promptly – when he could be found – on the first of each month. Sometimes it lasted him a full day; usually it did not survive the first pair of dice or deck of cards he passed.

  The situation did not make Hippolyte either happy or satisfied; everyone was against him; there was a plot to keep him from enjoying the benefits of his birthright; everyone who had more than he was an enemy. This attitude gained him few friends among those whom he regarded as equals and Charleston society, like that in Louisiana, closed ranks against him.

  That arbitrary and unfair – to his mind – exclusion accounted for the reason he sat in one of the lowest taverns along the docks, nursing a drink of vile whisky, wondering how he was going to pay for it and the ones that had preceded it, all the while cursing those who had condemned him to this fate.

  “And what’s a swell little man like you doing down here?”

  Hippolyte looked up blearily to the alarming sight of a couple of rough dock workers; these were white men, but hardly a step above slaves in status and education. Compared to their rough hands and rags for clothes, he guessed he did look like a swell, even though his suit was crusted with dirt and he had badly needed a bath for several days.

  “Drowning my sorrows, gentlemen,” he said expansively, gesturing to the slatternly barmaid who waited tables. “Join me in a drink?”

  They were the magic words; the two men, malodorous of fish and sweat even in that stinking tavern, sat beside him. It seemed that the barmaid hesitated a moment; she had already asked for his reckoning, but apparently his choice of companions decided her. It would take a braver person than she to deny these men a promised drink. Inwardly Hippolyte shrugged; if he didn’t get beaten up by these toughs for not providing them drinks he was probably going to get beaten up by the tavern owner for not being able to pay his bill. It made little difference if his new friends joined in.

  How low the scion of the house of Thibodeaux had been forced! He, who had once dined with governors and dignitaries, now reduced to drinking rotgut swill in a stinking riverfront tavern. The thought was bitter gall.

  The drinks appeared and the dock workers gulped down half of theirs in a single swallow before signaling the slattern for more. It was more than Hippolyte had offered, but as he had just had an idea of how to get away without paying for any of it himself he didn’t care.

  “And what kind of sorrows does a fine gentleman like you have?” asked the older of the two, his face a record of many fights.

  “Sorrow for this great country of ours, my friends. What is the world coming to when a darkie can buy a white woman just like he was a human being?”

  The two rough faces darkened and became even more dangerous looking.

  “You’ll be joshing us…”

  Hippolyte shook his head. “Nope. Saw it myself down at Brubaker’s Auctions. Pretty little thing… Irish, she looked like. Skin like milk and a shock of bright red hair. Clean her up and she could have passed for a lady.”

  In spite of his deteriorated physical condition Hippolyte felt a stirring in his loins as his manhood rose to sluggish life. Lately, drink had been more important to him than the pleasures of a woman, but for a woman such as that…! For days he had been imagining her writhing beneath him, telling him what a real man he was, what a wonderful lover, how he pleasured her better than any man had ever done so before.

  What a powerful image! In New Orleans he had carnally known some of the daughters of the best families – not that any one of them would even pretend to know him now – and even after that he had given his custom only to the highest rank of whores. Now that the world conspired against him, though, the few times he felt the urge he had to resort to the lowest kind of darkie streetwalker. Sometimes, he even paid them; most times he didn’t.

  The idea of that white woman, that beautiful, red-haired white woman pleasuring him had taken hold of him in a way nothing had in many months. By God, it was his time! Everyone was out to get him, to drag him down, to keep him down. Cards, dice, polite society had all been turned against him, but a slave – even a white slave – couldn’t turn against him.

  He would have her.

  Whatever it took.

  She was too good to waste on an uppity darkie bastard who thought himself as good as white folks. The idea of his black skin touching her, taking pleasure with her – taking what Hippolyte was denied! – made his stomach clench with anger.

  “Well, if that ain’t sump’un,” said the older man.

  “What kind of darkie owns slaves?” asked the other. “Seems downright against the laws of Nature.”

  “It is,” Hippolyte replied, amazed that things were finally falling together the way he wanted. “He owns land, too, lots of it, and the Devil only knows what else. Rich as Croesus, some say.”

  A rumble of discontent crept around the table.

  “It’s unnatural,” the rough man muttered and his companion added, “Thought there were laws agin that kind of thing.”

  “There are,” Hippolyte said, delighted that his discontent had fallen on such fertile ground. “But what do laws matter when you have lots of land and lots of money? Laws don’t matter unless you’re poor.”

  “A darkie owning land and a white woman?” the older man asked in disgust. “And the law won’t do a thing about it?”

  “Haven’t so far,” Hippolyte said, wondering just how far his new-found luck might carry him. Ever a gambler, he decided to risk it all on a single throw. “So it looks like it’s up to us to teach him a lesson.”

  By now there were more around their table, hard men with hard faces who owned no more than the clothes on their backs. None had ever owned a horse, let alone a slave, and the idea that a black man owned slaves – especially a white, female slave – stirred their anger.

  By the time he had finished whipping them up into a froth of fury and hatred, Hippolyte’s bar bill was forgotten.

  Chapter Four

  The two days before Josiah acknowledged Pegeen’s presence again had been long ones for her. She had been given some light housekeeping tasks – being sure that the flowers in all the vases downstairs were always fresh, polishing the great silver tea set in the dining room, dusting the downstairs rooms – chores that were so easy it was almost as if she weren’t working at all. Sometimes Josiah was in the house and sometimes he went out, but when they passed in the hallways
Pegeen felt invisible.

  Once she would have regarded such a position as Heaven on earth, the best a slave could ever aspire to, but somehow Pegeen was dissatisfied. Always before she had been glad when the masters had not bothered her, yet now she found herself yearning for Josiah Cavanaugh’s summons. Her body remembered the heat of his touch, the indecent thrill of his tongue against that most private part of her, the incredible fullness of him inside of her. At night she resorted to her fingers in an attempt to ease the ache her thoughts aroused and found them sorely lacking.

  On the second evening, after supper had been served and Pegeen had helped Old Ellen with the dishes, Josiah sent for her.

  He was in his bedroom, already in the enormous bed that was heavier and more ornate than any Pegeen had ever seen. His skin appeared even darker against the snowy sheets. He did not, Pegeen noticed, wear a nightshirt.

  “Take off your dress,” he stated in a neutral voice. “Come to bed and tuck in the mosquito netting.”

  Pegeen complied, hoping her eagerness did not show. She was careful to dust off her feet before tucking in the netting and spreading out on the soft, cloud-like mattress. Surely Heaven itself couldn’t be this comfortable. Even the sheets felt as smooth and fine as if stolen from some celestial region.

  Josiah leaned over and pulled off her cap, allowing her hair to spill in a red blaze over the pillow. Lowering his head, he took a nipple in his mouth and by gentle use of teeth and lips teased it to thick and demanding life. Then he sucked like a baby, pulling moans of pleasure from a delighted Pegeen. When she writhed under his attentions, he switched nipples, giving the second the same treatment as the first.

  Pegeen gasped, cried out and bucked in a totally unexpected orgasm. He chuckled and slid his hand between her legs. His fingers took the place his tongue had before, touching and twisting and rubbing until Pegeen, now not a slave, not even herself, just a mass of pleasure and feeling, exploded into a second climax.

  Then his fingers slid through her wetness into the warm and secret heart of her, penetrating her, stretching the yielding softness of her as they slid in and out until she screamed in pure release and fell back, gasping.