One minute fourteen-year-old milk-chocolate mulatto slave boy, Sweet, was standing on the lower slat of the fence around the horse ring at Riverside Plantation and watching the itinerate white horse trainer, Jack Fields, putting Black Lightning through his paces. In the next minute, it seemed, the small-for-his-age, but strikingly handsome boy was bent over bales of straw in the Cooper River, South Carolina, plantation upriver from Charleston, horse barn, and Fields was behind him, hovering over him, on top of him, one hand gripping the boy’s neck to hold his head down, and the other pulling the boy’s arm painfully up to his shoulder blades, and was fucking the slave boy to beat the band. Sweet wasn’t struggling against the assault because he’d been raised to expect this.

Sweet was a new slave to Riverside, having been sold there cheaply for as handsome a specimen as he was because on his home plantation up the coast from Charleston on Bull Island, owned by Matthew Insley, Sweet was growing to look too much like Insley for the comfort of the man’s wife. That and Mrs. Insley’s brother, who lived on the Bull Island plantation, was fucking Sweet. This was too much going on in the family—too much fraternization with the slaves and too many blacks looking too much like Insley’s by-blows for it to continue.

So, as comely as the lad was, good for house slave work, he had to be sold south. Insley had suggested selling him in Charleston to a male brothel, where he would have fetched good money, but the Insleys lived in Charleston in the hot season, and Mrs. Insley would have none of that. The boy’s features were just too revealing. Matthew Insley was an exceptionally handsome man. Sweet was an exceptionally handsome boy. Charleston, where Matthew Insley often went on business, was too close for Mrs. Insley, if she could have her way.

Of course, Mrs. Insley couldn’t have her way in everything. She couldn’t keep her husband from covering their female slaves or her brother from covering their male slaves.

The master of Riverside, Winston Truxell, came into the barn, hearing what was going on there before seeing it, in time to see Jack Fields mounted on the slave boy and giving him the cock. Truxell hadn’t decided what to do with Sweet yet—to bring him into the house, to leave him here in the stables, or to send him out to the plantation’s rice fields. Seeing the boy writhing under Fields was helping him decide. It raised in him the lust to cover the boy himself.

“Look lively there, Jack Fields. Are you taking sport while I’m paying you to train Black Lightning to trot?”

“Black Lightning trots just fine, Mr. Truxell,” Fields answered, not letting up on Sweet because he was at a delicate stage of the fuck and also because he knew how the master of Riverside swung. “I’m just finishing up here with a bit of pleasure.”

“Make it pleasure for the both of us, then,” Truxell answered. “I like watching best when I can see the muscles work, when the flesh is there to see. Strip yourself and the boy. Let me watch you breed him then.”

Fields laughed, pulled out Sweet’s channel, got them both stripped, and resumed the fuck. He put the boy on his back, grabbed his ankles, wishboned his legs, thrust up inside him, and began the dance of the fuck again. Resigned, Sweet lay back on the bale of straw, his head and arms dangling off the far side, and endured. Knowing now of his new master’s interest and being more interested himself in working in the house than the fields, Sweet turned his face and eyes toward his master, showing a submissive demeanor.

Truxell unbuttoned his breeches, pulled out his hardening shaft, and masturbated to the sight of the itinerate horse trainer taking his sport with the recently acquired slave boy. Truxell had marked on the good looks of the boy already. Now he was put into heat by seeing the boy fully in the mild-chocolate flesh being used—and willingly so.

After Fields tensed and released, tensed and released, and pulled away, letting Sweet’s legs fall to where he was dangling at four points off the bale of straw, open and vulnerable, panting and whimpering, Truxell walked over, moved one hand between the boy’s thighs while still working his own shaft with his other hand. He fingered the boy’s hole, smiling at hearing the gasp when he penetrated with the fingers, until he was ready to come, upon which he turned his own erection to the boy and released on Sweet’s belly.

Moses, Truxell’s older slave carriage driver was standing by, as was his job to do. When Truxell had come and stuffed his shaft back into his breeches and was buttoning up, he turned to Moses and said, “I’ve decided this boy will do in the house. Clean him up and send him to Betty in the kitchen. Tell her to have Samuel train him to serve table.”

“Yes, massa,” Moses said, but Truxell had already turned his back on the tableau and was going back to the big house.

That night it was Truxell who was kneeling between the boy’s thighs in his fourposter bed at the big house. It was Truxell who was holding the boy’s legs raised and spread, with his hands gripping the young mulatto’s ankles. Sweet, defeated by the whip laying beside him in the bed, his back and buttocks covered in welts, was arching his back; jutting his pelvis up by demand; panting and moaning, his hands clutching at the headboard overhead to keep himself steady; as he took a cock that was thicker, longer, and more cruel than that of either Jack Field’s or Mrs. Insley’s brother.

But Sweet was enjoying a bit of smile for himself. He was in the house, not the fields. Being taken or not was not in the options. He would be taken in the fields as hard as he was taken in the house—just not as comfortably.

Sweet came into the kitchen house, saying, “Who’s come, Betty? There’s a fancy carriage out in the—” but then he stopped because it was evident who at least was one of those who were visiting the plantation, because he was there at the kitchen table, big, jet black, and overpowering in stature and Africanness. There were slaves who had been here for generations, many of whom, like Sweet and Betty, the plantation’s chief cook, had become more white than black by the breeding habits of their masters. And there were some, like this hulking monster of a man, who seemed to have come straight out of the African wild. This one bore the patterned stippling on his face of native arts being applied only in Africa. The man turned, took Sweet in with a piercing gaze, and gave him a white-toothed smile.

“This here is Dark Tom, bringing his man from the city to see Massa Winston,” Betty said. By the food that was in front of the man, Betty was impressed with him and going all out with hospitality. There was no mistress at Riverside Plantation, so Betty, a handsome, buxom woman in her forties, who was at least a quarter white herself, had usurped much of that role for herself, encountering no opposition—not even from Winston Truxell, who cared most about having good food on his table when he wanted it and his house slaves in order. Between them, Betty and Samuel, the house manager, kept a tight rein on the house servants.

Betty would have given the big black visitor more than just food service if he’d shown the interest. When he didn’t, she was able to hold her pride because she had every studly buck on slave row at her beck and call. It was evident she would be happy to add this big black bull of a visitor to the list of men who had lain between her thighs and given her the poke, though.

“What city?” Sweet asked, innocently. He’d been brought down from the north and had little idea where he was now.

“Why, Charleston, of course,” Betty said.

Then the monster of a man, black as coal but muscular and handsome in self-assured way, spoke, his voice deep and reverberating between the white-washed stone walls of the kitchen building. “I’se driver for Massa Chance Drake,” he said, with a show of pride. “He done be the owner to the finest gamblin’ house and gentlemen’s club in Charleston, he do, and he be here to squeeze what Massa Truxell owes him for gamblin’ and other pleasure outa your massa. And I do see where Massa Truxell must get a lot of his pleasure right here on his own plantation.” The latter remark was added with a leer in Sweet’s direction. Neither Betty, who hadn’t been looking and therefore assumed the remark was for her, nor Sweet got the inference then, but Sweet certainly did a bit later.

“That’s a mighty fine carriage, sir,” Sweet said. “And the horses. Moses and me put the horses in the barn for now, not knowing how long before the carriage be needed. And he told me to come here to say that had been done. But he didn’t tell me a man would be here to tell.”

“A man who is man enough for you, boy,” Dark Tom was quick to note. Before Sweet could answer that, though, Dark Tom said. “How old you?”

“I be fourteen,” Sweet answer.

“But you not from this plantation, be you?”

“No, sir, not originally. I just been bought to here from up north, from Bull Island.”

“From Matthew Insley, maybe?”

“Yes,” Sweet answered, confused.

“I see the resemblance. It look good on you,” Dark Tom said. “Massa Insley, he gamble at Drakes—thas the name of Massa Chance’s club—but he don’t use the gentlemen’s club. He don’t do it that way.” Then he laughed. “Which would be why you is here, I guess.”

Doesn’t do it that way? Sweet was confused, but he didn’t ask more than that. Dark Tom was continuing. “You best stay from Massa Chance while we here, though, unless thas somethin’ you want. He do it that way. Is that somethin’—?”

Betty interrupted. “That’s not likely to be possible,” she said, a little perturbed that Dark Tom’s interest had gone from her to Sweet when the boy had come into the kitchen house. “Your Massa Chance is here for dinner and the night, I’m told. And I’m told Sweet here is needed in the big house to help serve the meal.”

“Well, then, mayhap I need to get my licks in first then,” Dark Tom said. “You want to see that fancy carriage up more close, boy?” he said to Sweet.

“That would be nice,” the boy answered, “long as you is going to be here till tomorrow.”

They did spend some time admiring the carriage, with Sweet running his hands over the fittings of the carriage and Dark Tom doing a bit of that hand thing on Sweet. Sweet was used to men fondling him, so, although he noticed it and felt himself tremble at the touch, he had no notion to pull away from it or to tell Dark Tom to stop.

Slaves being who they were and doing what they were told to do, Dark Tom didn’t feel embarrassed to ask Sweet, “You are such a fine looking boy, does you go under men? You happy enough with men poking you?”

Sweet had been going under men since Mistress Insley’s brother, so he felt no need or reason to lie. If he knew the reason Dark Tom was asking, he didn’t let on. But he could hardly not have noticed Dark Tom’s interest in him, and the man was so big and commanding looking and self-assured—and intriguingly coal black—that Sweet didn’t need any seduction, if that was what Dark Tom had in mind. He looked down at the pouching at the man’s crotch and almost swooned with anticipation.

“Just white massas, or do you take it from darkies as well?” Dark Tom asked.

Sweet hadn’t just been taken in Massa Winston’s bedroom since coming to Riverside. Samuel, the master’s man in the house, in charge of all there including the keep of Winston Truxell, there being no women of the family in residence, had his bed in a room off Winston’s chamber. That had become Sweet’s bed as well. So, yes, Sweet lay with more than the white masters, and he admitted a much to Dark Tom.

“I’se just a boy,” Sweet answered. “A big man, no matter what the color, just takes what he wants.” He was being honest, but he also was signaling to Dark Tom, a man much larger than him, that he could have what he wanted.

“Thas good to know,” Dark Tom said, with a big smile on his face. “I hear this is a rice plantation,” Dark Tom then said. “I’ve never seed rice fields. You have rice fields here?”

“Yes, down by the river. Do you want to see them?”

They never made it as far as the fields, but they made it to an embankment overlooking the fields and the river beyond, where Dark Tom pulled Sweet to the ground; brought the boy’s slight body under his overpowering, muscular one; pulled Sweet’s and his own breeches off without much of any resistance from Sweet; mounted the boy; and gave him the longest, thickest cock Sweet had ever had. Sweet didn’t resist this much either, although the embrace and stretch of the big black African bull was far beyond what the boy had had to endure before. Endure it he did, the crows disturbed and reeling overhead being the only creatures who seemed either to hear or to care about the cries of anguished pain-pleasure Sweet experienced as the monster of a jet-black man worked the boy with his cock, filling, stretching, breeding, and seeding him.

When Dark Tom was finished, he was obviously pleased, and said, “That were a good one. You be worthy of the Drake stables. If you want to move up to the city, best you give Massa Chance a pretty eye at sup.”

Sweet didn’t know whatever Dark Tom might have been talking about, but it didn’t matter. Sweet was a beautiful boy. He hardly could help giving a man a pretty eye, even if he had wanted to. His disposition went too solidly with the name he propitiously had been given.

“Is there no shirt to be worn with this?” Sweet asked. He was with Samuel in the butler’s pantry in the big house at Riverside, prepared to serve table for Winston Truxell’s dinner for the visitor from Charleston, Chance Drake. Sweet was in tight-fitting, brown-suede breeches and with black leather slippers on his feet. The waist of the breeches dipped low, showing off the boy’s narrow hips, the seat of the breeches accentuating the pert roundness of his cheeks and the hollows under his hip bones.