I love the way my white penis looks against black flesh, the way its blue veins contrast with the smooth bumps of tight dark brown skin.

1998: THE HELLFIRE CLUB: a notorious New York S&M bar. I’m a regular…took Jennifer Blowdryer and Dave Diktor here…an exciting and painful place…blaring disco music…the slap slap slap of the patrons keeps the beat.

I like S&M more for the novelty, the weirdness, the adventure, than actually giving or receiving pain. I mean, I enjoy rubbing alcohol on my balls as much as the next guy, but I don’t like them in a vise. Fuck, if it’s an adventure…and it gets me laid…it’s what I do.

Tonight, I meet this incredibly beautiful Negress. Half a foot taller than me, slim, with Grace Jones hair, skin the color of Africa, and a face that would harden a eunuch.

She wears, when I meet her, something between a bikini and a harness. Bright red leather, cross belts, the good parts barely covered in leather and metal ringlets.

FLASHBACK A FEW SECONDS: I’m watching a very ordinary-looking white woman getting fisted by a somewhat less than ordinary-looking white guy. The woman is saddled in a sling…her legs wrapped around chains hung from the ceiling. The man stands between her legs with his right hand wrist-deep in her twat.

A crowd grows around the couple, as it often does at The Hellfire Club. Voyeurs outnumber performers by at least twenty to one. I stand in the middle of the watching crowd, trying to look over the shoulder of the tall hippie in front of me.

Then I see her…the Negress…Actually I don’t see her at first, I feel her. There’s pressure…a squeezing on my crotch.

“I want this,” demands the velvet voice next to me…Then, I see her.

“It’s yours,” I say.

“I’m Tanisha,” she says.

“I’m yours,” I say.

We walk to the exit. At coat check, Tanisha hands over a ticket and retrieves a bright red raincoat. Even in New York in the 80s, you can’t walk around outside in just leather straps.

We don’t have to go far.

Tanisha lives in a Hell’s Kitchen apartment…a dangerous neighborhood. If you’re as horny as I am, danger means nothing.

We walk up the creaky stairs to the third floor…a classic tenement…bathtub in the kitchen…tiny room for a toilet, no sink in the toilet room. It’s the bedroom, though, that interests me.

The bed is an old metal cot with a thin mattress. Attached to all four corners of the bed, where the legs meet the spring frame, are leather handcuffs. Padded, black, each with a pair of shiny buckles.

Yes! Lie me down on that mattress. Strap me down. Use me! Abuse me! Just do me! Press your naked blackness against my hairy whititude.

That’s not what happens.

Tanisha takes off her brief body belts. Then, she lies naked, face down on the bed.

“Cuff me,” she whispers, “and don’t be gentle.”

She’s so beautiful, I’ll miss seeing her face as I lay myself down…but that ass. Wow! It’ll be my blue-veined hardness against that double black mound. That’ll more than make up for lack of face.

I struggle with the buckles, opening and closing the cuffs until she’s in tightly. Then I peel off my clothes and nestle in to seek that brown hole within the blackness.

“Not so fast,” she says. “Abuse me. Talk to me. Call me a slut. Slap me around. Use me. I’m your slave.”

My hardness begins to wilt at the word SLAVE. I can’t treat a colored girl like a slave. That would be…I dunno…WRONG.

OK, I concentrate on the task at hand. Rub my hands along her risen mounds. Reach around and grab handfuls of nipples. I bring one hand to my mouth and wet my middle finger. I slide it between her delicious glutea, seeking to soften that inviting hole.

“Talk to me!” she says over her shoulder. “Call me a slut, a whore! Tell me how bad I am. Abuse me. Don’t soften me…go in dry! Hit me! Spank me! I’m your slave!”

I feel myself slowly drooping.

“I…I can’t,” I say.

”What the fuck?” she yells. “I don’t have to put up with your white guilt shit. This is the 20th century, not the Civil fuckin’ War!”

“But I just feel so bad…” I stammer.

“Your bad feeling is your racism,” she yells back. “Pure and simple. If I was a white girl, you’d spank me in a second. Oh yeah, that red handprint on a white ass…But Mr. Namby Pamby liberal can’t top a black girl without shriveling up to pig-in-a-blanket. You can’t call me a slut and a whore because all you see is a black girl! A former slave, someone you should take pity on…Fuck you! I’m not A BLACK GIRL! I’m ME, Tanisha!”

“But…I just can’t,” I say.

She looks between my legs.

“I can damn well see you can’t,” she half-says/half-spits. “Unhook me, get dressed and then get the fuck out of here. Go fight oppression someplace and feel sorry for The Poor Colored Folk. I don’t want to put up with your racist baggage. You disgust me.”

FAST-FORWARD: Senegal, West Africa May 2012…Goree Island. It’s right off the coast. You go by ferry. Tourists pay about $10 for the boat. Senegalese pay half that. I’m with my pal and host Osman.

Goree is an artist colony and home to a Senegalese history museum. There’s a beach. Several fishing crews work out of the place. There’s an old fort that used to belong to the Portuguese. But that’s not why Goree is famous.

Goree Island is home to the Maison des Esclaves, the House of Slaves,a slave holding pen during the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Slaves were brought here from all over Africa and kept in very tight quarters…men and women separate…ready for shipping.

“YOU’RE OLD, MYKEL…” says Ousman.

I wince at the introductory phrase.

“YOU ARE OLD ENOUGH TO REMEMBER AN AMERICAN BOOK,” he continues. ROOTS, IT WAS CALLED.

DURING THE 1980S, BLACK AMERICANS CAME TO THIS PLACE EVERY DAY. THEY ENTERED AND CRIED. THEY SAID THEY COULD FEEL THE PAIN OF HISTORY. MY FATHER TOLD ME ABOUT IT.

We approach the maison, a nondescript colonial building, near the beach. I walk in with Ousman. I’m nearly in tears. Not for the emotion, but from the need to take a fierce piss. I had two Cokes on the boat, and I need to let them out.

I buy us both an admission ticket. Inside, mostly white people with big cameras take picturesof the bare adobe walls.

Just inside the entrance…to the left…is a sign that says HOMMES. Yes! Just what I need.

The sign is over an archway. I walk through. On the other side is nothing. Just an empty brick room with very small windows. Am I supposed to piss in the corner? All the tourists can see what I’m doing.

“Sont il les toilettes?” I whisper to Ousman, pointing to the sign.

He looks…and laughs.

“Les toilettes sont à l’étage,” he says, pointing to a curved staircase. At the head of the stairs is a door with a sign TOILETTES over it.

Sheepishly, I head upstairs and relieve myself. Then I leave the bathroom and look out the window on the second floor. I gaze over the ocean that confronted the chained cargo shipped out those hundreds of years ago. I think about the packed conditions, the chains, the family separations into hommes and femmes, the crying children, and the rebellious ones forced into a tiny Cellule des Recalcitrants as punishment.

I think about the actual ocean voyages. The sickness, poor food, the unknown future. And I feel nothing. Zero. No emotion. No tears. No heavy heart or lungs.

That racial baggage that Tanisha complained about when I went limp twenty years ago…it’s gone. Maybe 200 years ago this was a chamber of horrors. Now it’s a piece of history and a tourist trap. It has nothing to do with me.

I expect (hope) I’d feel the same way at Auschwitz…a place I’ve never been, and one I want to avoid. It’s a museum of the past. It has nothing to do with my own life. It’s a bunch of buildings. Some ovens. Pffft. It has as much to do with me as this HOUSE OF SLAVES. The rationale is that if we remember the past we somehow prevent its repetition.

Bullshit.

Remembering the past CREATES repetition. Remembering the past is the basis of revenge. The Hatfields and the McCoys. They remember the past…Remembering the past lets Israel torture Palestinians with impunity and keeps colored people victims in the American mind.

At this moment in the Senegalese slave museum…I can feel my baggage lost. I can feel the ability to call ANYONE a slut if that’s what they want. I’m ready for Tanisha now, the little whore! I can feel myself harden at the thought.

—MYKEL BOARD

No related posts.