Chapter 22

"How come you didn't get caught?" Tricia stared at me.

"God, you're lucky!" Merry was nodding, she was a plump girl and a little naïve. She was freeborn and not a slave at all, like a number of the kids at Hathaway High whose parents couldn't afford a private school.

"What do you guys mean?" I asked sitting down for lunch and I'd noticed unhappily that Sarah and Venus hadn't come to school. Neither had Purdy or any of the other guys who'd been at that party.

"They're all getting rehabilitated. Didn't you see the news?" Henna, another freeborn girl wagged her nose at me. She was tall and thin, kind of pretty too and we all figured some white man would snatch her up before too much longer.

"No," I shook my head. "I was kinda busy last night."

"They got arrested at that party," Tricia told me. "Those white people too, the news said they was abolitionists and Purdy was a runaway nigger. They was all runaways."

"They weren't runaways," I frowned at that. "Where'd you hear that?"

"It was on the news last night," Henna said.

"This morning too," Merry agreed, "I watched it while I was eating breakfast."

"They're going to rehabilitation, cept it was just the boys, they didn't show Sarah or Venus," Tricia told me.

"Probably cause they're bedroom negras," Henna nodded. "You don't never see any bedroom negras getting rehabilitated."

"Maybe they didn't get caught," I said, but that didn't make any sense. If they'd gotten away my friends would have been at school and I knew the police had gotten them.

"They got caught," Merry said.

"They probably got them in jail. Probably raping them all night too," Tricia decided.

"Rape?" Merry swallowed hard. "You think they do that for real?"

"Course they do!" Tricia rolled her eyes. "That's why don't see any bedroom negras getting sent to rehabilitation."

"Yeah," Henna almost smiled. "They got their own rehabilitation right there in the police station, my cousin told me."

"Your cousin?" I wrinkled my nose at her.

"Yeah, I got a cousin and she got bought the day she turned sixteen," Henna nodded. "She run away too, like three days later. Ran back home."

"That's pretty stupid," I said. "That's the first place they're gonna look."

"Did they find her?" Merry asked and Henna nodded.

"They took her in the basements she said, raped her for three days, didn't let her sleep or eat or nothing. They just fucked her and beat her some."

"F-Fucked her?" Merry said the word like it was going to bite her.

"Fucked every way a girl can be fucked," Henna told her friend. "She was done after that and she didn't run away no more."

"What happened to her?" Tricia wondered.

"She was a runaway. She wasn't freeborn no more, so she's gonna be a slave for the rest of her life," Henna said. "Her master sold her to somebody down in Georgia I think, or Alabama maybe, I don't remember."

"You think that's what's happening to Sarah and Venus?" Merry asked nobody in particular.

"Oh yeah," Henna finally answered. "They're getting raped right now. I heard they got police who don't do nothin' but that anyway."

"So where were you at yesterday?" Tricia asked me, getting back to her original question and I didn't feel much like eating anymore.

"I was there and then I left," I shrugged. "I told Sarah and Venus to come with me, but they didn't."

"What did you leave for?" Merry asked me.

"Cause they were abolitionists, trying to get us to run away," I said. "The news wasn't lying, those people were bad."

"You're lucky you didn't get caught," Henna told me.

"No foolin!" Tricia grinned at me. "They wouldn't know what to do with you, Dani."

"I wonder how the police found out," Merry said and I felt my stomach lurch and I was already cold, like I was damp all the way down to my soul.

"Shoot, they're the police," Henna said seriously. "They know everything.

"You think they know you were there?" Tricia was looking at me.

"They know," I said. "They come to my house yesterday..."

"They come to your house?" Merry gasped.

" ... They were askin' me questions, but my Master was there and his lawyer too, and I didn't get in any trouble," I explained.

"You didn't get in no trouble?" Tricia stared at me. "Why'd that be? You tell them something good?"

"What?" I blinked at her and I was feeling like I was gonna throw up and now I was suddenly scared people were going to find out I'd turned in my friends.

"You left and then the police showed up?" Tricia stared at me hard.

"And they come to your house but you didn't get it any trouble?" Henna was shaking her head like that didn't make any sense.

"What am I gonna be in trouble for?" I forced myself to be stronger than I felt. "I asked my Master if I could go and he said yes. Remember that, Tricia? I wasn't sneakin' out. I wasn't no runaway."

"I didn't say you was," Tricia frowned at me.

"I know what you were saying and I don't care anyway," I said, fighting back some tears. "I told those girls to come with me. I told Purdy to get them out of there cause those white folks were breaking the law. If they'd come with me wouldn't none of them be in jail or nothing."

"But how'd the police find out anyways..." Merry was saying.

"And where were you at?" I stared at Tricia. "You didn't show up at all, huh! What were you doing yesterday? How come you're so lucky?"

"I was busy..." Tricia shrugged, " ... I couldn't get out of the house, my Master was with me."

"Heh!" Henna snorted and now she was looking at Tricia and I'd wanted to get the point off me and it worked, but I was dying inside.

I'd called the police and maybe my best friends were down in some dirty basement getting raped and beat up cause of me. They were just stupid negras and now they were in trouble. Sarah's Master would sell her for sure now, since he had that new Cuban girl anyway. Venus, her Master was her daddy, so I didn't know about her, but he wasn't going to be too happy about having a runaway slave on his hands. Once you were a runaway, you were a slave for life and a troublemaker too, so far as most people cared, most owners that is. One chance was all you got and if you spoiled it, they didn't ever trust a slave again.

If it got found out that I'd been the one to call the police I wasn't ever going to be trusted by another black person, least not at my school where it counted right then, maybe other places too. I know Mercy and Lilah and Tom Henry didn't blame me for doing what I done, but the kids who'd known Sarah and Venus and Purdy? They'd blame me easy. Nobody was gonna care I turned in some abolitionists, they were Northerners and criminals, but friends were friends and I'd betrayed mine.

I spent the rest of my lunch puking in the girl's bathroom and wishing I'd never called the police at all.

"Gone be eatin' in the kitchen tonight," Mercy told me as soon as I came home after school.

She and Lilah were cooking and they must have been baking fresh bread or dinner rolls or something, cause that kitchen smelled good. The whole house smelled good and I was smiling despite Mercy's news, looking over Lilah's shoulder as she cut up some carrots.

"How's that?" I asked, stealing a small carrot and crunching on it.

"Suh called and he got hisself a dinner date tonight, so we's be eatin at six sharp," Mercy explained. "Sit yourself down, gone give you a little food. You's lookin' peaked."

"Dinner date, huh?" I shrugged and then frowned at Mercy as she put a hand on my forehead. "I'm fine, I just got a little sick earlier."

"Little sick?" Mercy looked at me.

"My friends weren't at school today," I said. "Sarah and Venus."

"Them the ones went to that party?" Mercy was fixing me a sandwich and I nodded.

"Yeah. Some of the girls at school said they were being raped probably," I sighed. "You think they do that? The police?"

"They men, ain't they?" Mercy asked. "You doan go worryin' bout them negras, they's built they own boat an now they's rowin' it."

"Yeah." I knew that. It wasn't my fault, not really. "But still, if I hadn't called the police..."

"And then they got caught anyways? Shoot, that be you all missin' and suh gone be hell to live with then." Mercy put a plate down in front of me. "You jest be glad you done the right thing. Eat some now, Lilah made that bread up fresh."

"You made the bread, Lilah?" I smiled at her and it was good bread, fresh and still warm.

"Yes ma'am," Delilah smiled at me.

"It's good," I nodded and I had big bite in my mouth. "How'd you sleep last night anyway?"

"Oh!" she gasped and then giggled, turning red.

"She doan get up til half past eight this mornin'! I's oughta give that girl a lickin'," Mercy complained. "Delilah on my bad side now."

"Walking a little tender too, I bet, huh!" I giggled at the fair skinned negra as she nodded.

"A bit, ma'am." Her eyes were bright and blue. "That Tom Henry, he sure does know how to sex a girl up some."

"Shush now an talk propah." Mercy slapped the girl's knuckles with a spoon.

"Just cause you ain't getting any, Mercy, don't mean the rest of us can't," I grinned at the old woman and she rolled her eyes at me.

"You's best be good too, girl. Ain't nothin' you gettin' I ain't already got no how," Mercy shook her spoon at me.

What?" I stared at her. "You and Mr. Reiser? No way!" I laughed, knowing she hadn't meant that at all, just that she'd had her fair share of sex as a young woman, I was sure.

"Is you bout finished with them carrots, girl?" Mercy ignored me and I finished my sandwich while I watched them cook.

So, my Master had a dinner date. I figured it was with Miss Ingersoll, since she didn't seem like the sort of person to let anything she was interested in develop in its own sweet time. Maybe that was her debt, Mr. Reiser changing the wager from her being his bedroom negra to being his dinner guest. I could see that happening, but I wished I understood the woman a little better. She wasn't like anyone else I'd ever met and me being a boy beneath my skirt hadn't bothered her in the least. If she meant what she'd said about not coming between me and my Master, and us being friends, that would just about make her the best wife I might imagine for Mr. Reiser.

That made me nervous though, the way imagining something too good will. I'm sure there were things about her I wouldn't care for, but I didn't know right off what they might be. I didn't have a whole lot of experience with white women anyway, except the nuns who used to teach me at my old school. They didn't hardly count at all, for the obvious reasons. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a little worried about Mr. Reiser's plan to find a wife though. I sure didn't want to end up living over the garage with the other slaves, or even in some apartment by myself, being his pet negra like I was in a gilded cage or something. I liked the house and I liked Mercy and Lilah, and now I even liked Tom Henry. I didn't want to leave.

"Hey, Tom Henry," I smiled, standing in the clothes I'd worn to school.

"Hey, Miss Danielle." Tom Henry was up on a ladder behind the house, fixing a gutter that had come loose during a spring storm.

"Did that Lilah fix you up last night?" I asked, twisting my hips in my short blue skirt, pushing my tits out a little through my yellow blouse just for him.

"Ahhhh..." He smiled and looked away, like there was something particularly interesting in the sky.

"Oh, don't you play coy with me, Tom Henry!" I giggled. "How was it?"

"Delilah was nice," he finally admitted, "and that little girl, she knows how."

"Knows how to ... What, Tom Henry?" I bit my bottom lip. "What'd she do to you last night?"

"Nah, I ain't gonna kiss and tell," he laughed. "Now you know better than that, ma'am."

"Is that right?" I gave him a teasing look. "You know how to keep a secret?"

"I reckon I do," he nodded and he was going back to work on that gutter.

"After dinner I'm gonna tell you my secret, Tom Henry," I promised him and I could feel my girl cock swelling already.

"That a fact?" he said without looking at me. "What's a bedroom negra need a secret for?"

"You'll see," I giggled. "I'm just giving you fair warning right now. I don't want you running off again."

"I ain't gonna be running." He glanced at me, giving me a real look so I could feel it. "No, ma'am, I ain't."

I grinned at that and wiggled my fingers at him as I turned around, but I knew he could be running later. He probably wasn't going to be expecting what I planned on showing him, but the boy had to find out sooner or later and if I did it right, if I got him all warmed up and ready for it, he wouldn't be going anywhere.

I did my homework in front of the television, not that I had a lot of it anyway. Unlike the private school I'd attended, the segregated Hathaway High had somewhat lower standards for its black students. Even so, however, the curriculum was standardized and so I was looking at the same text books I would have been anyplace else, it was just that I wasn't really expected to have to learn from it. The teachers would pass me whether I did the homework or not and so the responsibility was squarely on my shoulders.

It was a good system, actually, because as I mentioned before most of the students were at the school because they wanted to be, or their owners did anyway. A lot of those slaves were getting ready for college so they could work for their Masters and be productive, if they failed the slaves would be punished and probably sold and who knows where they could end up then. I was just there to be social as much as anything else, Mr. Reiser wanting me to learn about people more than anything else.

But I didn't mind the book learning so much. I wasn't stupid or anything and some of it was interesting. I liked history okay and that was what I was working on, writing a report about how President George Wallace had taken Cuba back in 1968 and then in 1981 President Stennis had made it the 17th Confederate State. The North had tried to blockade the island, since they had a base there and were friends with Fidel Castro, but we had a better navy and the North backed down quick and surrendered Guantanamo Bay without even a fight.

Castro put up a fight though and it took five years to wipe all the communists out. After that about two million Cubans became slaves right away, about a million more were deported to someplace in Africa, and the other four or five millions just lived like always did mostly, except they couldn't own land or anything. Most of the sugar cane and tobacco fields became plantations where the slaves worked and Havana became a city like Orleans with a lot of casinos and whore houses and all that stuff. The free Cubans were happy anyway since they'd voted for statehood and I guess it must have really sucked being communist all those years. About half a million men volunteered to become the First Cuban Army and got sent to help our German allies fight in Russia against the Chinese, since there wasn't any Russians left by then.

After Cuba became a state all the other places became territories, one after another. Haiti and the Dominican Republic, The Bahamas and Jamaica, even Puerto Rico which is where the last real battle between the North and South was fought. Nobody called it a war though, it was just a police action, whatever that means, and we were freeing Puerto Rico from the Northern Aggressors, but not the Puerto Ricans. A lot of them got put on boats, big barges that were hauled up to Norfolk, and the refugees were sent across the border into the North. Those were mostly the old men and women and undesirables like drug addicts and criminals. Most of the rest of them were supposed to be sterilized, like half of the Puerto Ricans, and they didn't like that idea.

Admiral Sanford Morgan, who was the military governor of Puerto Rico, had to put down a revolt that lasted almost three months and they called it "The Rape of San Juan" because that's pretty much what happened. The city got burned down and most of the people living there were killed. It was pretty crazy and even though Admiral Morgan was successful, he ended up court martialed and hanged, along with about a dozen other officers. It wasn't a glorious page in the Confederacy's history, but the government didn't try and cover it up neither and I was proud of that. Still, as I wrote my report, I decided it was the Puerto Ricans' fault anyway. I mean, yeah, Morgan screwed up and didn't control his men like he should have, but if those stupid Puerto Ricans hadn't revolted everything would have been fine. They pretty much deserved what they got, I thought.

Nowadays there weren't but a million left and they all worked growing coffee mostly, at least the men did. A lot of the women had been taken out of Puerto Rico and replaced with black women. They were paired up, here and there, like a nigger in Alabama would be mated with a Puerto Rican girl; a negra would find herself getting bred with a slave in Puerto Rico. After their baby was born into slavery, the parents would be sterilized and that way there wouldn't be any real Puerto Ricans left. There would just be slaves with Hispanic blood and since there were a lot more blacks than Puerto Ricans, eventually that bloodline would become so thin it would be like it never even existed.

Stupid Puerto Ricans.

I never did see anything on the television about my friends from school, but there was a bit on CNN, the Confederate News Network out of Atlanta, about the three abolitionists caught in Memphis. I saw Brent, Lance, and Mickey lined up against a cinderblock wall. They looked pretty beat up, kind of bruised around the face and looking awfully unhappy. Mickey especially. She could barely stand up straight and her pussy looked pretty raw and swollen. None of them were wearing any clothes, of course, and I guessed the blonde girl from Harvard had been raped a few times herself.

They'd all confessed and been sentenced for their crimes. Now, the news people said, the three Northern Agitators were just waiting on their appeal. That was normal. A death sentence required an automatic appeal and that would take a few days probably, but I didn't doubt the outcome. Those three were guilty as sin and getting eactly what they deserved. The North had enough problems and they should have stayed up in Boston and helped their own country out, not come down to mine and tried to make trouble with their lies and fake promises. I hoped they were sorry now and wondered what was going to happen to Brent's fish.