Chapter 6
The problem of Negro servants in the Old South has long been a matter of historic concern. Tales are told often of the wiles and ways with which white masters seduced and traduced colored maidens in the time before the War Between the States. The many mulattos and octoroons are said to be testimony of the white man's perfidy and vile use of the black woman's sad flesh.
Abraham B., a descendent of a slave grandmother, recounted in Chicago in the course of an interview a strange and fascinating tale of early life in the Deep South as known by his kin. It is included in this volume not only for the further light it sheds upon the problem of sex and the servant but also because of its unique revelation of a situation perhaps hitherto unknown to historians. It follows here:
First of all, let me point out that I'm a black man and proud of it. I wouldn't have it any other way. You can take all your white trash and shove them up your ass. If I seem a little down on the economic ladder here on the south side of Chicago, it wasn't always so for my family; and that's exactly what I'm talking about.
Do you know anything about the Emperor Jones, the thing Gene O'Neill the playwright did back in the early '20s? Well, one of my ancestors was an emperor in his own right, I suppose you could say. It happened during the Civil War; or as they say in the old country, the War Between the States. And it happened in, of all places, the sovereign state of Mississippi. That's right. Let me tell you about it.
Have you ever heard of Sutpen's Hundred? I'm buggering you with literary minutiae, but anyway I'm referring to Thomas Sutpen and his hundred acres of land carved out of the wilderness in northwest Mississippi as mentioned in William Faulkner's novel, Absolom, Absolom. Thomas Sutpen was a white man supposedly who came out of nowhere to the frontier land of Mississippi in 1835. Where his wealth came from, nobody knew, but that he left briefly and returned with a hundred slaves to build his mansion was a well-known fact in the mythical Jefferson, Faulkner's literary town near which was located the acreage where Sutpen settled.
Now, to make a long story short, I want to tell you this: it is my firm belief, from all the records I have studied of my family, that Thomas Sutpen and my ancestor were one and the same man. That's right. It may shock you, but I believe it is the truth. I am a scholar of sorts and I have gone back to the old country at great personal risk and have investigated myriad courthouse records there, have studied documents left in my family wills and testaments, handed down from generation to generation; and it is my firm belief that William Faulkner modeled the fictional character of Thomas Sutpen after my ancestor.
First of all, my ancestor's name was Thomas Sutpen; yes, that. Faulkner did not even change the name. Oh it is true that sometimes my ancestor signed his name as Alonzo Sutpen, and sometimes spelled the family name as Sutpin and on a few occasions, even Suttpinn. But his name again and again appears as Thomas Sutpen in innumerable public records.
Why then did William Faulkner, a literary immortal, use my ancestor as a model for his literary creation? I do not know. It would be presumptuous of me to even state that William Faulkner knew of my ancestor. Such, I am sure, is not necessarily true at all. Rather, I suspect, Faulkner had heard the legend but never investigated it fully and never did find out that the hero of the legend was a black man.
How could a man as well-versed in the legends of his area not know that Thomas Sutpen was a black man? Simple enough. Faulkner's own ancestors would long have dropped that fact from their consciousness. After all, how can any white Missis-sipiian accept the fact that one of the greatest defenders of the Southern confederacy was none other than a black man? The very idea is monstrous to white Southern sensibilities.
Yet that is a fact. Thomas Sutpen, my Thomas Sutpen, was an arch defender of the Confederacy and slavery. Oh yes, Thomas Sutpen, the real Thomas Sutpen, my ancestor Thomas Sutpen, was a slaveholder, and a very important slaveholder too. And though Faulkner credits his Sutpen with possessing a hundred black slaves, apparently brought to Mississippi from the West Indies at the time of Sutpen's work on his mansion, my Thomas Sutpen owned several hundred and was one of the largest slave-owners in the entire Old South.
It is not for nothing that Confederate General Nathan Bedord Forrest, also of whom Faulkner had written, was a close acquaintance of my Thomas Sutpen and also visited Sutpen's Hundred, the real Sutpen's Hundred, many times before, during, and after the Civil War, right down to Forrest's death in 1877. In fact, for weeks at a time, Forrest dwelled there at Sutpen's expense.
Let me leave that miscellaneous fact though and dwell upon an incident that Faulkner recounts for his fictional purposes in another way from the actuality upon which he perhaps based it. A major part of Faulkner's novel concerns itself with the marriage of Sutpen's daughter Judith to Charles Bon. a friend of Judith's brother, Henry. Henry and Charles serve together in the war, and Henry even sponsors the love between Judith and Charles until he discovers that Charles is really his half-brother, son of his own father and a black girl from the Indies. He then kills Charles in order to prevent the incestuous relationship from developing and also perhaps because it affronts him that his sister would marry a black man. The incestuous part of the story can be found in a Biblical tale involving Absolom, son of David, and is the source of Faulkner's title.
But there exists a full measure of truth behind Faulkner's tale save that it is vastly inverted from the narrative account which Faulkner gives. In reality it was Henry who was killed, and it was Charles who did the killing; and it was Henry who made love to Judith, not Charles. Let me tell you the full story.
Henry was a northerner who went South after Sumter and joined the Confederate cause. He was a yankee with a rebel's heart. He believed in caste and class in the tradition of the Old South, and he identified with the slave-holding class of the Deep South. He despised Negroes and considered them an inferior people. Because Charles and my ancestor Thomas Sutpen were as light as he was, he was not aware of their black blood. He assumed they were as he believed he was, and he never spoke of the race issue with them.
Now it so happened that when he visited the Sutpen mansion, its owner was often away to battle beside Forrest or one of Lee's other lieutenants whom Thomas Sutpen assisted materially and intellectually. Therefore Henry was never made to realize that Judith was Charles's sister. He saw her as a slave member of the household and thought no more of it. You see, Judith was much darker than
Charles or Henry, and her mother was dead and she seemed to possess no direct connection to the family. Charles, perhaps sensing Henry's feelings about Negroes, never had mentioned that Judith was his sister. Furthermore Charles perhaps wanted to win Henry over to an affection for the black race, and therefore believed Henry's interest in Judith was worthwhile to that purpose.
But of course Henry's interest was only sexual and he wanted simply to use a beautiful black girl as a receptacle for his lusts. Perhaps he even believed that Judith was his servant during his stays at the Sutpen mansion, and he intended to use her services accordingly. Certainly he used them sufficiently to give her a child. But let me not dwell on that now.
Let me rather reconstruct a scene as it has been told to me many times, a scene in which Henry, arriving at the Sutpen mansion, goes to the room he regularly occupied there; and he calls for Judith, the lovely black girl who regularly serves him whenever he is in the mansion. "Judith," he says to her when she comes to him, "pull off my boots, won't you?" And he situates himself in a deep chair in his bedchamber, kicks high a foot and offers his boot to Judith. And she goes onto her knees and begins to pull away the boot.
He looks at her. She is a lovely wench, he thinks; well worth a tumble in the hay. He sees her big black lovely tits rising high in the low-cut, tight bodice of her crinoline dress. He sees her proud hips, and he thinks how beautiful they would be to hold naked. It would be good to knead her flesh. It would be the best thing in the world. And already he can see her big black lovely pussy and her lovely dark and smooth belly, the chocolately hue of her soft and vibrant young flesh. "You're a very beautiful girl, Judith," he says to her. "Did you know that?"
She blushes, and he enjoys the way her chocolate flesh takes on a crimson color and becomes a kind of dull and mottled vermilion that fascinates him. He-likes the way her breasts swell when she becomes excited at his compliment. And he thinks again how much he would like to fuck her. And that is when he says, knowing the frankness of the darkies and taking a chance on her bent for candor, "Judith, do you like to fuck?" And he tenses from the excitement at his own use of that word.
Judith blushes again. She swallows suddenly. She doesn't know what to say. And yet she has wanted his dick for a long time. In the nights when Charles and Henry were on the front in Virginia, keeping their watch on the Potomac, she has lain in her Mississippi bedchamber and has played with herself regularly, thinking of Henry's dick up her vag. The very thought of it always excites her intensely, and she inserts three and four fingers to her cunny and fucks herself wildly, crying out in her joy, "Oh Henry, Henry, I love to fuck you. I love to fuck you. You are the most wonderful fuck I think I ever will know."
Now he has propositioned her. Yes, he has as much as propositioned her. He has asked her if she-likes to fuck, and that is the same thing as a proposition. And she suddenly sees her chance to get him into her cunt, and she nods to him feverishly when he says that to her, and she says, forcing herself to say the words even as already she knows the wonderful consequences they will have, "Yes, Henry. I like to fuck very much." And, as she removes that boot, which has been her task to pull away, she smiles to him gently, inviting him thereby to possess her body if he would.
And of course he says to her, "Well, Judith, I certainly would like to fuck you. I damned sure would." And he strokes the great prick that has already arisen inside his uniform breeches. He strokes it and thinks of sending it all the way up her cunt.
She begins to remove his other boot and she glances idly, and yet not so idly, to his soft and freshly-made bed, the bed upon which she had hoped even at the advent of his coming, to fuck with him. And he gets the message and says, "Judith love, get that boot off damned fast and let's get out of our rags. Let's fuck, sweetheart. That's what I want to do more than anything else." And he waggles his foot at her even while he unbuttons his fly and yanks out his great dick and lets her see it.
She is transfigured by the mere sight of it, and she hurriedly rips away his other boot, stands quickly and begins rapidly pulling away all her fettering garments. She is terribly excited just from the thought of that great dick being in her. And quickly she pulls away all her clothes and stands naked before him.
He looks upon her even as he rids himself of his uniform, and he sees those big proud wonderful chocolate tits before him and looks upon the strange great dark caps that mount them. Her saucers protrude from the surface of her proud tits, and her nipples in turn protrude from her saucers. Her tits are like cones, marvelous and spherical cones. Her tits are lovely and beg to be nibbled.
But that is not all of her. He sees too the soft and yet firm smooth flesh of her perfect belly and sees her mysterious navel and sees the strong sure and wide thighs and perfect calves. And he sees most of all that utterly glorious black bush which is her Venus mount. "What a marvelous thing," he says. "Your pussy is exquisite." And, as he throws off the last of his uniform, he slips to his knees, holds her ass cheeks big and round and warm and tight in his hands and he licks her curly crisp dark tabby hairs. His dick is throbbing from all his excitement.
And she gently holds his head while he licks her pussy, and she looks down at his work upon her, and she feels beautiful inside herself from the pleasure of what he does to her. And she whispers, "Henry sweet, don't eat me out. Let me feel your dick in my hole. That is the important thing, sweetheart. I want to feel your dick in my hole." And she tousles his fine dark hair and pulls it and signals that he should take her to the bed.
He does. He rises and they embrace, and she shoves her belly against his cock and rolls her big hard nipples against his chest and presses her perfect tits forcefully against him as she wraps her arms around his neck and yields her tongue to his tongue in a very deep kiss. While they kiss so, he eases her backward until the backs of her knees touch the edge of the bed; and then he presses her onto it as he falls directly onto her, their bodies never parting as they go onto that bed.
She spreads for him. Already she anticipates that marvelous great cock up her hole. Already she yearns to take it as far into her as she possibly can. She spreads her legs and raises her knees and humps her pelvis and awaits his entry. Oh beautiful and lovely entry.
His cock acts on its own. It needs no help. It seeks out her warm moist waiting cunt lips and it enters her hot wet hole on a straight line even while they maintain their torrid kiss. He digs deeply into her and feels sublime. It is a heady feeling, and he loves it.
She tears her mouth away from his now to exclaim, "Oh Henry, Henry, it's wonderful. Your dick is the most marvelous thing I think I shall ever know. I love your dick in my hole, Henry. I love your dick in my hole." And she kisses him feverishly all over his face and neck and shoulders. She is exceedingly grateful to take his big white cock in her hot dark cunt. It is a beautiful bird, and she is grateful to capture it.
He fucks her on a straight line. She is so perfect and wet and ready and right, that he pulls his dick completely out of her and starts a new run down her hole in order to feel the perfection again and again. She is everything any man could ever want in a screw.
Yet he thinks to himself, "She's a nigger. I'm fucking a nigger. How about that? I'm sending my pork into a chocolate honey. I'm dicking black stuff. I'm fucking a slave."
Now Henry, a victim of Northern propaganda in the Abolitionist press and by word-of-mouth in the time before his rush South to join the Confederacy, has been filled with lurid tales of white Southern exploitation of colored girls; and it excites him to identify with the aristocracy of the South and to humble a black girl in the moment. So he fucks her harshly now with the good knowledge that he is her master.
But that very act triggers something in Judith which she has sometimes fantasized in the times when she has played with herself in the nights. And she suddenly feels even more exhilarant than theretofore. And she cries out loudly, "Oh fuck me, you bastard. Fuck me. Send that sterling big prick of yours as hard into me as you can. Send it all the way up my vag and crush me with its force."
Her words stun Henry and yet tease him exceedingly. She is behaving, he knows, exactly as her primitive heritage demands that she react. She is returning to the jungle, and he is overjoyed at the pleasure of taming a savage beast. It is exactly what he wants, and he is prompted to fuck her with a savagery to match her own savagery. "I'll fuck you, you bitch," he shouts. "I'll fuck you like you've never been fucked in your life. I'll send my dick into your lungs and crush them. I'll reach into your neck and choke you." And he penetrates her with his lance as hard and rapidly and savagely as he can. He drives his force high into her and he bludgeons her with his cock.
"Oh you sonofabitch," she shouts exultantly, feeling his great dick beat her cunt to death, "you're wonderful. You're the meanest, crudest, greatest fucker that ever will exist. Fuck me harder and harder, ever harder, you sonofabitch. Fuck me until I can't fuck anymore. Kill me with your weapon. Destroy me with your great gun." And she rocks her ass in enormous fever at what he does to her.
So they fuck fiercely and madly. They thrust and lunge, lurch and soar, smash and force their animal ways against the stars. They fuck fiercely and madly and seemingly unendingly. And they cry out their savage ecstasy as they pound their wild loins smashingly against each other. They fuck with an absolute terror, a startling immensity of fanatic purpose.
And finally they start to roll down the line to their comes. Finally they reach that effervescent instant when time itself is dissipated in the craving rush of lust's demands; they reach that nadir point convulsed into apex when the racking thrust of gargantuan animal appetite is upon them; and they desperately try to breathe as they hurtle themselves against all the physical properties of the universe in their mad raging vicious rush for fantastic comes.
Suddenly they erupt. Volcanically they surge into the cataclysmic abyss which opens before them in the maddening moment. They come. They plummet and soar, they hurtle and explode, they erupt and cascade. Their nerves spew out in brutal frenzy. Everything in them archly breaks loose, and their bodies are convulsed in tyrannical surrender. They tremble and shake and clench and distend, spasming insanely in wild convolutions of nerve endings spewing out their tension.
He spills his seed into her. High in her hole, he snaps loose all his white hot sperm. He floods her with his flow. He sends it high into her and smashes it against the top of her cunt, released it to the final place where Creation assumes control. He gives her everything that is in his nuts and deposits it deep in her innermost vault. He splatters her with his come and sends it into her womb.
She screams her joy as she feels his torrent of torrid sperm flood fully her innards. She clutches him wildly and sends her cunt against his cock as if in salient attempt to confiscate that proud treasure and deposit it with his seed high inside her hot flesh.
Then they melt away their fucks. They pass away all that is in them, splay out the last frayed nerves, and collapse into that blessed peace which comes in the arching moment of last release. They rest together, Henry in Judith's hole, spent inside her, depleted and defeated in his glorious victory, victorious in his surrender. And they kiss from the good feeling of it all, and do not see him who has seen all.
For Charles has witnessed everything. Charles would go to the room wherein Henry was, but intruded upon that fuck, and so stood without, peering in embarrassed and yet rivening fascination at what transpired in that chamber, witnessing the monumentality of that searing fuck. And only when it was done, could he break himself away, move from that door where he stood and go down the hall to his own chamber wherein he rushed to grapple with his own loins and to pull his dick wildly as he remembered his sister's beauty in the time he watched her fuck his friend.
And he cried out to himself as he jerked his dong, as he stood with legs tightly together and breeches around his ankles, "Oh Judith, sister, I'm fucking you. I'm committing incest with you, can't you tell? I'm fucking the shit out of you." And he whacked his meat insanely as he tensed and tensed until he shot his load over the chest of drawers before which he stood and cracked full with semen the mirror in which he watched himself.
And afterwards he was terribly ashamed of himself, and he wished it hadn't happened. He wished none of it had happened, and he cursed himself for being so weak. He wiped his dick on a towel and put it away and cursed himself for being so terrible.
Yet he could not prevent himself from going unto his sister in her room that night in the dark and when she was abed. She asked who it was, and he murmured his name, but she immediately mistook him for Henry, and she welcomed him to her bed. He went to her with a huge hard-on. He felt heady and wild and he couldn't retreat from that which he would do, and he went into his sister with the fierceness of the damned. He kissed her titties in the dark, and he slipped his great dick into her cunt. And he was most pleased when she told him that his dick felt better than it had felt when first she fucked him; or thought she had. He felt pleased and proud and turned his cock therefore even more joyously up her hole.
They exploded together and he too, sent his wash high into her cunt. He too released his seed deep into her vault. He too placed his sperm where it would do the most good.
So it happened that twins were born to Judith within the year, and the twins were not identical but were of two eggs. And it was then that Charles killed Henry, and it happened in this way.
They went to the North in the stolen uniforms of Union troops, their purpose to do destruction behind the enemy lines, to visit Boston or someplace in Massachusetts which was Henry's home and there to wreck havoc upon the enemy. And while they were there, they met Henry's mother or the woman who said she was Henry's mother. But the woman who said she was Henry's mother had a friend, an old crone, a dissipated tart who, in alcoholic oblivion, took Charles aside and probed him drunkenly of his past. She would know of Mississippi and of his home and of his father, of everything about him. And her questions never ended until one night she told him she had gone to bed with his father.
He could not believe it, yet she could describe everything of his home even better than he could, and she was able to mention certain landmarks of which he hadn't spoken at all and some of which long had been destroyed. "Yes," she said, in alcoholic oblivion that night "not only did I fuck your old man. But I had a kid from him as well. And of course the kid was Henry."
Then she said she had returned to the North because she "couldn't stand the damned South," and besides she had been a whore in New Orleans when she met Charles' father and had been there only because she was adventurous and didn't feel like whoring all the time in the North. So she went North again and that was where she had Henry. And she deposited Henry with the woman Henry had learned to call his mother; and though the two women were close friends, and the crone had seen Henry grow to be a man, the crone and his supposed mother never had told him the truth.
So Charles took the knowledge into his heart, and there he brooded. He thought upon it, and he brooded. His own brother had fucked his own sister, he suddenly knew. And he too had fucked his own sister. Together they had fucked their own sister. And it was wrong to fuck one's own sister.
That was why he killed Henry. Charles lived in agony at his knowledge of having violated Judith, and when he knew she was with child, he was sore remorseful. This remorse was heightened when Judith, thinking the expected child was Henry's, wrote to Charles and begged him to convince Henry to marry her. But Henry laughed when told that Judith would have him wed her, and he said, "What? Me marry a darkie? Me marry a slave? You must be crazy? You must be insane."
Charles could not bring himself to tell Henry that Judith was his sister; nor, when he learned that Henry was his brother, could he tell him that either. So he continued to brood until that day when he received a letter that Judith had birthed two little girls, twins by two separate eggs. And then he was sure that he was guilty for the fertilization of at least one of those eggs, and when he told Henry of the births and Henry laughed triumphantly and believed that he, Henry, had caused them both, Charles knew that he must destroy his brother.
So it was when they were upon another secret mission, bound anew for enemy territory, that Charles betrayed Henry to the yankees. And he didn't care whether he, himself, escaped or not; though he did escape after he saw Henry hanged. He escaped and was glad that his brother was hanged.
But the death plagued him even as did the remembrance of his night with his sister, and for years after the war he was damned by his memories. Then, shortly after Nathan Bedford Forrest's death, which had a profound effect of Thomas Sutpen, the elder Sutpen, superstitiously fearing his own departure from the world, admonished Charles once again as he had so often after the war for not marrying and providing an heir to succeed him in his own death even as Charles would succeed Thomas Sutpen at Sutpen's demise. And it was then that Sutpen suggested that Charles wed one of Judith's two teen-aged daughters.
Charles was shocked. He argued with his father and cursed his father for such a suggestion. But his father only laughed and said, "What the hell are you talking about? Your mother was my half-sister." And it was then that Thomas Sutpen revealed that he had bought his own half-sister as a slave for his plantation. "I'm not sorry," he said. "I wanted to keep the blood pure. It was part of my grand design." And he laughed fiendishly.
That was when Charles killed his father. In a story that William Faulkner wrote, called "Wash", it is a man by the name of Wash Jones, a meager man on Sutpen's estate, who kills his employer when Sutpen gives Wash's teen-aged daughter a child and then does not marry her because it is a girl child and not a boy child who would inherit his Hundred. In reality, as I know reality to be, Thomas Sutpen, my colored ancestor, was killed by his own son, Charles, when the father made the suggestion which I have just mentioned.
Charles, plagued by years of guilt, could not stand it anymore. And his father's crude suggestion triggered the mechanism that released all the aggression that for years he had bottled up within himself. His anger at himself suddenly exploded in his anger at his father. And he murdered his father in his raging torment.
Well, what am I saying? And what is this all about? I am simply saying that here was a case of the exploitation of a servant; at least Henry believed Judith was a servant, and he exploited her as a servant. It is an example of the exploitation of a servant in the Old South. Yet it is not the story of a slaveholder's abuse of a servant. It is the story of a northerner's abuse. And the girl was not a servant at all, but simply had adopted the role of servant to be with the young man whom she loved, a young man who himself simply had adopted the role of a slaveholder as he thought a slaveholder's role to be. Nor was it the exploitation of a black woman by a white man, though Henry surely thought he was a white man, even as there must be Mississippians today who believe the prototype for Faulkern's Sutpen was a white man also.
Life is full of so many ironies, so many devious paths and turns. And any one problem, even that of sex and servants, is fraught with myriad confluences of divergent impressions.