“Here, I made this for you,” Quaquo said as the two brown boys, Quaquo nearly seventeen and Serrah a newly initiated fourteen, lay behind the levee of the Sierra Leone rice field, touching each other, preparing to go to a new-found heaven. He opened the pouch lying next to his discorded wrap and came up with a carved ivory disk necklace, each disk held to the next by a leather string. He put around Serrah’s neck. “Here, this necklace gives you the power of confidence and assurance that you will always be in control.”

“I don’t know what I could do to deserve anything like this,” Serrah whispered, in awe. No one had given him such a present before.

“I made it myself—for you,” Quaquo answered. “See it has our names carved on ivory disks and animals and plants of our world carved on others. And you know what you can do to deserve it.”

Serrah did know. He turned onto his back, spread and bent his legs and placed his feet on the soft-earth ground at the base of the levee. As he raised his pelvis by pushing off on his feet, Quaquo rolled over between Serrah’s spread thighs and entered him for the second time that evening, having opened the young boy to him in the first seeding.

The young boy grasped the biceps of the older boy—who had not been the one to initiate him in man sex, but who was the one Serrah loved—cried out, and grimaced as Quaquo pushed deep into his channel. The younger, small, slim, beautiful, and perfectly formed ebony boy began to pant and moan as the older boy plowed him.

Standing off in the foliage, watching the boys fuck from a hidden vantage point, crouched a glowering and angry Ebo Jo, the man who had first mounted and bred the young, beautiful boy, Serrah. The man who also was the father of Quaquo.

Serrah, shackled at wrists and hobbled at ankles, was pulled, not too gently but also not too roughly, out onto the deck of the small wooden vessel. The pier he found himself on seemed to lead nowhere but to towering oak trees on a heavily foliaged embankment. As nervous and fearful as the beautiful young boy who had been in Sierra Leone, in Africa, just a few weeks earlier was, he couldn’t help but be taken with the change in his surroundings. Other than the oaks, cypresses, sycamores, magnolias, and, especially, palmettos and flowering oleanders crowded on the land before him in verdant hue, even in the waning light, after the weeks of being held in a dark cabin at sea across the Middle Passage in the English slaver ship. The foliage was new and exotic to him. The land under the trees and foliage at the edge of the sea wasn’t. It was the same marshy land he knew at home. He had no way of knowing that he had landed on Daufuskie Island, one of the South Carolina Colony barrier islands at its most showy time or that those towering oaks provided the limbers for the construction of fighting vessels such as the ship that would be the USS Constitution.

Farther along the embankment to either side he would have seen what he was familiar with—rice paddy fields—if night wasn’t falling. He had been brought to the low country. Rice was the staple crop in his own land, and his people were proficient in growing and harvesting it. This was a main reason why the English slavers preyed upon his people and snatched many of them to transport to South Carolina and Georgia as slaves—to work in the rice paddies and indigo fields there as they did in their own land.

Although closely supervised in his native Sierra Leone on Africa’s rice-growing Windward Coast as a perfectly formed boy, coveted by women and indiscriminate men alike, there he was free and unfettered. Here, somewhere in the New World that had been whispered about in his village with fear, he most decidedly was not.

Serrah was lucky to be alive. Many who had been transported in the slaver vessel from Africa to the colonial America coast had not survived the ocean journey, which had first landed in the nearby port of Beaufort off the Port Royal Sound. Serrah had been lodged in a dark, windowless cabin, along with three young women. He was fortunate, though, that the cabin was above deck, while most of the Africans taken as slaves—men and women alike—had been virtually stacked in the holds.

His survival conditions, although dire, were nothing like those who were locked up below for the two-week sail. He and the beautiful young women were segregated and held in less squalid conditions than the others, as they had been separated off to serve the sailors and later to be sold for something very different than rice planting and harvesting. They also were fed better than those in the hold and permitted to wash themselves off every other day. The offset was that those below were left alone to fester in piece. Serrah and the three women were taken periodically from their shared cabin to an adjoining one for the men’s sport.

This is what separated fourteen-year-old Serrah from the other category of slaves to be sold at auction at the Chalmers Street slave block in Charleston, to the north, or the River Street slave market just to the south in Savannah, Georgia. Most of the slaves were brought to this area of the coast to be sold to work in the rice, cotton, and indigo fields. Particularly beautiful and well-formed young women and boys, like Serrah, however, were brought here to be sold into the brothels of Charleston, Beaufort, Bluffton, and Savannah. Serrah was destined for Savannah, and thus had been taken off the English ocean slaving vessel at Beaufort and transferred further south with other slaves destined for one of the ten rice plantations on Daufuskie Island or the other islands or lowlands bordering on the Calibogue Sound. The owner of the island plantation to which he’d been brought also supplied brothel slaves to the surrounding towns.

The small vessel had landed at the pier leading off from Pappys Landing Road, off Mungen Creek, close to the southeast tip of the Daufuskie Island. The landing area was called Bloody Point because this was the shoreline where the Spanish between 1715 and 1717 had encouraged the indigenous native Yemasee people to stage three unsuccessful last-gasp attempts to dislodge the English settlers from the island. This now was the Oak Ridge Plantation, one of ten on the island, where the Mungen family, of Irish descent and prominent in the South Carolina Colony, not only grew rice but engaged in the slave trade, supplying slaves, through their contacts with the English slavers headquartered on Bance Island in the Sierra Leone River, to the regional and Savannah markets.

The plantation’s black suboverseer, himself a favored slave called a driver, Samuel, had come on board the small vessel first and performed an initial assessment of the captives. After he looked them over, he took Serrah gently by the arm and led him off the boat and onto the pier. He was a tall, strapping, muscular young buck in his late twenties.

Seeing another face such as his and hearing him speak to him in something approximating his own Sierra Leone Krio dialect, Serrah was somewhat calmed. Still, the man’s size and muscularity were intimidating to Serrah, as was the lust in the big black’s eyes, and, although Samuel let Serrah move at his own pace, he did not free the boy of the shackles on his wrists or the hobbles on his ankles. Samuel guided the young boy with intimate touch. It was only as he led Serrah away, up Pappys Landing Road, toward the main complex of the plantation buildings, that other plantation workers, supervised by white overseers, started bringing those destined to be field slaves up from the boat’s holds and leading them to pens closer to the island’s shore than where Serrah was being led.

The boat had arrived at the Oak Ridge Plantation pier at dusk, and, although Samuel didn’t lead Serrah too far, in the direction of the water to the east, into the woods from Pappys Landing Road, it was pitch dark by the time they arrived at a group of high-fenced pens. The stockade walls of the pens were made of eight-feet-high rough-wood planks. There were maybe four pens with walls abutting each other. Samuel led Serrah into one of these, which was about twelve or fourteen feet to the side, and gestured over toward a lean-to, open-fronted shed at the far end from the gate. A thin mattress, stuffed with what Serrah would learn was Spanish moss and covered with a cotton cloth, lay on the beaten-earth floor of the shed. Next to the bed were two buckets, one filled with water and with a dipper in it. The other was to be used as a necessary. There was a hunk of bread and two small apples on a slab of wood on the mattress. Samuel unshackled the boy’s wrists and left him there, alone, leaving by the gate and securing it behind him.

Serrah was of mixed emotions to see the black giant gone. He was dark, like Serrah was, and unlike the sailors who had brought him here to this unknown land and used him during the sailing, and he spoke his language, Krio, enough for him to feel he hadn’t left the world altogether. But the black buck was such a towering, muscular man that he intimidated Serrah. Also, if the man was roaming free here and with the authority to take Serrah off the vessel and lead him away, he wasn’t like Serrah. He could do as he pleased—at least with Serrah.

It was the first time in weeks that Serrah had been alone, though, and had space enough to move around, even if shackled. He sank onto the mattress, dipped water to drink, and then dug hungrily into the bread and the apples, not having eaten anything even that fresh for weeks. He paused to touch the ivory necklace on his neck, amazed that he still had it after these weeks of captivity, abuse, and torment, comforted by the confidence it gave him, even it slight and imaginary. The necklace was composed of a series of oblong ivory disks, held together with leather string knotted into holes in the edges of the disks. Each disk had a design carved into it. Serrah knew that Quaquo, a talented artist, had done the carving himself. One disk had Serrah’s name and another one Quaquo’s. Other disks bore images of the bush elephant, a monkey, a hippopotamus, and a couple of birds.

As he ate, he thought back to when he had received this necklace, no more than a month and a half ago. The images in his mind went to Quaquo, the older boy of his village, and how that day, the last he’d seen Quaquo, had begun so gloriously and ended so tragically. The two young men had been drawn to each other, and in ways they had to keep secret. They met on occasion in private. The evening Quaquo had given Serrah that necklace they had lain together and been discovered by Ebo Jo, Quaquo’s father, an elder in the village, who had claimed the boy for his own, seized his virginity from him, and who, despite having two wives, treated the boy, Serrah as a third wife.

Discovering his own son fucking Serrah on a levee by a rice field, Ebo Jo went into a rage, beating both boys, taking Serrah by force in front of Quaquo to assert his ascendance, and then tying Serrah’s wrists and ankles, slinging the boy over his shoulder, and taking him down to the river, to his dugout boat. He paddled down the river, to the mouth of the waterway, and to the island, Bance Island, which the English slave traders occupied. He sold Serrah there, getting a good price because of the boy’s beauty.

One of the English captains took Serrah almost immediately into his hut, tied the boy’s wrists to the headboard of his rough-wood bunk, forced Serrah up on his knees, mounted him, penetrated his anal passage, and fucked him. He enjoyed the boy so much that he sold his time and ass to other men in the encampment. And thus, even before he reached the new world, commenced Serrah vocation in life.

The boy was transported within a couple of weeks across the Middle Passage and eventually reached here, this small stockaded pen located he knew not where in the world. His own world, which had not been all that good to him but that, nevertheless, had been his home, had been lost.

He knew what he was meant to be now, though. Ebo Jo had shown him that, as had a couple of the English slave traders, and the sailors on the ship, and now, he assumed, even the slave driver Samuel would take his pleasure. He was cursed with extraordinary beauty, small size, and a perfectly formed body. There must have been some reason he was separated from the others, just as he had been on the ship bearing him across the Middle Passage. He’d seen the look in the ebony suboverseer’s eyes when he’d first spied him on the boat at the island pier and then again here in the stockade before he had left. He knew Samuel would be back.

And he was right. It was very soon thereafter that Samuel was back, naked and in magnificent erection, slipping into the pen and taking a stance that told Serrah he had no way of escaping, nowhere to go. The black buck advanced on the African boy until he was standing close to Serrah. The boy stood his ground, looking into the man’s eyes, not wanting to look anywhere else. The man pointed to himself and said, “Samuel,” which the boy took to be the man’s name, and Serrah realized that the man was trying to make some connection with him before he did what he wanted to do. Samuel gestured to Serrah, but the boy could not bring himself to give him a name. He wouldn’t resist him, but he would not pretend that this was what he wanted. Samuel reached out and unknotted the strip of cloth binding the boy’s skirt to his waist and let the material drop to the ground. The deep groan that came up from the man’s depths when he saw the boy naked told Serrah all he needed to know concerning where this was going.

The boy was scared, but the man’s body was more muscularly perfect than anyone Serrah had ever seen in Africa. His erection was magnificent—and frightening.

With a sigh, Serrah went back to the mat and lay down on his back. He had done this many times in recent weeks, and it was best gotten over quickly. As he had done for Quaquo and Ebo Jo before him and for the British slavers and sailors afterward, Serrah spread and bent his legs as far as the hobbles on his ankles permitted, placed his feet on the beaten-earth ground, and raised his pelvis.

There really was no use struggling against it. Samuel stood over the boy for a moment, drinking in the beauty of his sleek ebony body. Then he released the hobble chain at the boy’s ankles and the shackles on his wrists, grasped Serrah’s ankles and spread and raised his legs, came down on his knees between the boy’s thighs, and thrust his thick, throbbing, hard cock into Serrah’s puckered hole. The boy cried out in pain and violation, but he’d been here before many times in the last several weeks. The shaft was larger than any the boy had served before, but Samuel wasn’t any more cruel than the men who had gone before him.

Once violation was realized, the buck held there for Serrah’s channel to stretch and accommodate him, which it did, and Samuel’s shaft sank lower into the boy, fusing solidly with him. As Samuel began to move inside the boy, Serrah panted and moaned, but he took the cock. Samuel released his grip on Serrah’s ankles, and the boy did as he had come to learn to do. He pressed his knees into Samuel’s hips, rocked with the plowing of the cock, and docilely lay there, turning his face toward the back wall of the shed. He touched his ivory necklace and turned his thoughts to Quaquo as Samuel took his pleasure. It helped the boy to take the extraordinarily hung man by remembering the touch of Quaquo.

Samuel, strong, virile, and healthy, was still on top of and inside Serrah, moving and mastering the boy, when a gunshot was heard in the not-so-far distance. Samuel leaped up and ran to the stockade gate. The gate was ajar and Serrah saw that the man had left his breeches and rifle just outside the gate. Samuel struggled into his breeches, grabbed up his rifle, and sprinted off toward where the gunshot had come from. In turn, Serrah jumped up from the pallet, took up his skirt, and slipped out of the gate and into the forest. He headed in the other direction from the one Samuel had taken. He had no idea where he was going other than away. He struggled through the foliage for some time, likely going mostly in circles, panting and gasping, before his adrenaline wound down, his strength gave out, and he sank to the forest floor. When he had calmed down, he wrapped his skirt around his waist and looked around in all directions, trying to decide what to do now, where to go, how to remain free for as long as possible.

When his heart had stopped pounding in his ears, Serrah found that he could hear the surf. The need to get to the sea became an imperative for him, and he began stumbling in that direction through the undergrowth. He saw the weak, wavering light before he came into the small clearing, where he saw a hut built of tabby, a composition strange to him but one he would learn of, made of the type of cement composed of lime from burned oyster shells mixed with sand, water, ash and crushed oyster shells that predominated on the island. The small cottage was perched just inside the foliage line of a short beach leading down to the sea. The light was from a lantern inside the hut as seen through an open door on an otherwise blank wall. He must have been heard thrashing around in the forest, because, as he approached, the frame of an old, large, well-padded chocolate-brown woman filled the doorway to the building.