Ever since I first saw the slave Kudlo on the auction block in Spanish Town, Jamaica, where my father, Lawrence Lionel, was trying to sell him, I knew I wanted to lie under him even though that would be taboo in so many ways: at fourteen and small of body, I was not yet free to give thoughts to lying under anyone; if I did, it was not to be with a man; and, worst of all, it was not to be with an African slave.

The slaves on Jamaica in the late 1700s were to be controlled and kept in their place. There was getting to be too many of them, and the white plantation owners were fearful of uprisings and reprisals. Life for an African slave in the sugarcane fields of the island was a terrible trial. They needed to be kept to their place, although the economy couldn’t exist here without them. Those in power on the island were trying to keep the balance in check by outlawing the importation of new slaves to the island—the slave trade was to be with exchanges of those already on Jamaica. As a slave trader as well as the owner of Sabina, a plantation on the coast between Spanish Town and Old Harbour, my father responded by cross-trading Jamaican Africans with those he had smuggled in from Senegal, hiding the new blood he was providing among the old.

Kudlo was a big, strapping warrior of a man, heavily muscled and his magnificent body and face pocked with blue tattooing. He was both fierce-looking and achingly handsome at the same time—in prime condition. The man stood tall and straight and glowered with superiority and ferocity at any and all who came close to him. He bared his teeth and pounded his chest, making his chains rattle, at the mere audacity of the clerk standing next to my father’s overseer to suggest the opening of a bid. He looked murderously at any and all who opened their mouths to speak, and his gaze landed on me, Terrence, a fourteen-year-old boy. Naked hatred and belligerence was in that look, which slid from one white face to the next. The look when turned to me was one of “I could and would tear you apart with my hands, given the chance.” It sent a chill down my back.

What was startling to me, though, was that it was a shudder of sensuality. The look he gave me also has sexual desire in it. I had long known that I would melted to being dominated and abused by a powerful man. I no longer was innocent to possession and penetration by men. My desires for the intimate, possessing touch by men were what had made me go with a sailor for the second time when I had found myself alone in Old Harbour when there was a misunderstanding who was to come get me after a visit to an old aunt living there. It was what made me a moth to the flame that was the slave Kudlo, standing tall and proud—and challenging—on the Spanish town auction block.

I was afraid of this giant of an ebony captive, yes. But at the same time I ached to be taken by one such as him—to be his captive and to be used and exploited by him as his fellow slaves were by my class of plantation owners. The sailors who had taken my virginity to men had been rough, but the slave looked like he would really make me feel it. I had never lain with a black man before. This one was naked and his manhood, in partial erection, was humbling to any other man on the wharf.

“Come, Terry,” my father said, touching me on the arm. “This is the last of ours to go on he block, and I fear we won’t sell him and we’ll have to take him back to Sabina and put him to the sugarcane. Giles can handle the rest of the bidding and the chaining of the slave to the cart for the trip back.”

“Not sell?” I said. “But he has the most magnificent body of all on the block today. He would be a splendid worker.”

“If he can be molded to the work,” my father said. “Times are touchy. The plantation owners have to look to workers who can be cowed and controlled. That one looks as if he never will break to the wheel. He’ll have to be beaten into submission and even then watched closely.”

“I wonder if he knows that,” I asked, conscious of how hard Kudlo was looking at the white faces surrounding the block.

“Indeed, I think he does, Terry, which is why I probably cannot sell him. That is the pity of the slaves we still smuggle in from Senegal. Some of them were princes there and will not easily become docile field workers here.”

“So, you think this Kudlo was a prince in Senegal?” I asked.

“I don’t doubt it,” my father said. “All of that tattooing on his body and his regale bearing probably denote that.”

All of that blue tattooing was magnificent, I thought, but I dare not say it, anymore than I could draw attention to how low he hung in half erection.

“He no doubt became embroiled in some sort of power struggle with a half-brother and was sold to traders on the Senegal coast,” my father said. “The traders should have known better than to try to ship him here.”

I was glad, I thought, that they had and that he couldn’t be sold and would be at Sabina, where I lived, even though we would be separated by class, race, and location on the plantation. He would be there for me to dream about and to observe and then go back to my room and weave into what I did in my bed.

I crouched down as I reached the verge between sandy beach and tree line above Hellshire Cove. The moon was out full and, unexpectedly, activity was unfolding on the beach. A black-painted three-masted galleon hove too just outside the cove and a longboat was pulled up on the beach, with two others launching from the galleon. Figures, some pulling other, were emerging from the longboat. Torches were raised at the top of the beach at the other end of the cover and three figures, holding the torches, were descending down to the beach.

I had no more time to observe this unexpected activity just then, as strong hands grabbed me from behind and pulled me further into the wood. Kudlo, naked and in erection, leaned up against a tree trunk, grasped the hair of my head in his hands, and forced me to my knees in front of him. He bound my wrists together behind my back with a leather thong, as he knew I liked to be taken as a captive. I took his shaft in my mouth and was engaged in preparing for him to mount me for several minutes and thought no more of the activity on the beach for that time.

When he put me under him, I was as the verge of the top of the beach again, on my knees and elbows, facing the beach, and once again I could see what was going on as the big, black slave mounted me from on top and, as I exclaimed, “Yes. Take me roughly,” thrust inside me, put a hand over my mouth so that I could not raise an alarm in the pain-pleasure of him filling and stretching me, and began the rhythm of the fuck. It was a glorious effort to sheath him each time, which both of us enjoyed immensely, but he had been covering me for several weeks, so my passage was trained to open to his requirements.

Kudlo had surprised my father and the overseer, Giles, in that he didn’t struggle against his plight as a field worker but rather used his guile and bearing to create his own niche on the plantation. The other slaves worshipped him as a king and the strongest among them and immediately paid homage to him, and Kudlo early showed that he could cooperate with Giles and meld the other slaves to the plantation’s needs and wants as long as Giles gave Kudlo space and only enough hard work to keep his body hard.

My father and Giles might be taken in by the big black, but I wasn’t. I knew that Kudlo used his freedom on the plantation and his discernment of what I wanted from him to put me under him. He undoubtedly saw this as revenge against the whites and was biding his time to help raise an insurrection just as the whites feared, but I was too besotted with him and having his thick shaft inside me to raise any alarms at this point. What he wanted from me for now was what I wanted from him also.

When the big black was hovering over me, buried deep inside me, and I had opened to him and he had set up the rhythm of his fuck, I was able to look down onto the beach again. The three figures that had come down onto the beach from the land, carrying torches, proved to be the overseer, Giles, and two of the plantation’s underseers. They had received a line of figures—newly and illicitly delivered slaves—tied together by a long chain. One of the underseers was leading them, stumbling, as if bent over and unsure of footing from having been in cramped conditions for long.

I did not see where the sailors from that first longboat had gone, but a second and third one were coming up onto the beach and having a rough time in the waters of the cove. The sound of men calling out guidance and curses at the difficulty of the work slid in underneath the keening of the seagulls overhead and the pounding of the surf. The second longboat made the beach and was dispensing dark figures into the hands of Giles and the remaining underseer.

That third longboat was packed with silent, dark figures. The boat foundered in the surf, and there was a scramble to pull its lethargic occupants, who didn’t seem to be making much of an effort to save themselves, to safety. Backdropped by the heavy breathing of Kudlo, who was working up to a coming, I could hear the ominous rattling of chains. The crew from the second boat leaped out of their now-beached longboat and went to the aid of the other craft. From the sounds of wailing from the floundering figures in the surf and the curses of the crew members, I could tell that not all of the captured slaves were being saved.

I still could not see what had happened to the crew of the first longboat. But, for the moment, I did not care. Kudlo and I were both about to explode. My wrists were still tied behind my back and he was on top of me, but holding me close from above, a strong hand under my belly, lacing my balls in his fingers and stroking my cock hard as his thrusts increased in speed and intensity. His other hand was still muffling my mouth and I cried out my release into his hand. I had barely ended my flow, when Kudlo’s started—four long, strong breeding spurts as I held steady but trembling and took the loads deep inside me, moaning at his breeding of me.

As soon as he stopped ejaculating, he rose from me, freed my wrists, and had melted into the trees. It was then that I learned where the first of the longboat crews from the galleon had been while the others were struggling to reach the beach. They had been in the trees around us, watching Kudlo fuck me.

I was struggling to rise from where Kudlo had covered and fucked me when I cried out in fear and surprise as a strong hand gripped my shoulder from behind.

“That darkie fucked you good, son. I believe you will be coming with us,” a growly voice rang out.

A multitude of heavily callused hands backed by lustful grins, many of them nearly toothless and with suggestively winking eyes, pulled me up out of one longboat while the last delivery of a moaning ebony human cargo was handed down to another longboat along the side of the great, black-wood ship. I looked up to the heavens at the sails already being unfurled for flight as the coxswain, with the help of two other burly and shirtless sailors, manhandled me across the deck. Those we passed whistled and leered and made rude sucking sounds with their mouths.

I had been captured naked and was being delivered—where to, I knew not—in the same state.

I was bustled through an arched door in the superstructure at the stern of the ship and down a corridor. The coxswain rapped on a sturdy door at the end of the passage and listened for the summons from within. When it was given, I was propelled into a commodious cabin with large windows at the stern of the ship. The cabin was paneled in polished, dark wood. Oriental carpets covered the floor. Lighted sconces, covered with glass chimneys, were placed at intervals along the walls, revealing leather-backed and –seated arm chairs, heavy tables covered with maps and navigational tools, and, against one wall, a large four-poster bed.