Warning to the reader: This is a long story, and it contains many things, some of which you may not want to read. It contains: Interracial sex, a scene with nonconsensual sex, a gangbang scene, some group sex, incest, a lesbian scene, and finally at the end, a ménage à trois. This is my Valentine's Day contest entry. February is Black Love Month.
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I knew I was different at an early age. My Mom is white, and my Dad is Black, and we live in an all white small town in upstate New York. It is an enlightened town, so most (but certainly not all) people tolerated our presence, and some of the parents of my classmates were friends with my parents.
Nobody cared when we were all little. Small children are friendly to everyone, and most did not notice, or did not care, that my skin was brown. As I got older I got questions born of ignorance, but not of malice. An example was "Do you get sunburns if you don't use sunscreen?" (I do, just in case you are wondering. And the sunburns hurt, too.)
As I got older, around the time of middle school, ugly behavior began to manifest itself. It started small. We girls would exchange valentines; the de facto rule of thumb was to give a valentine to every child in the class, so that nobody felt left out. My Mom used to buy the valentines by the bag, and I would laboriously write the first name of every child in my class on the envelopes, and put the valentines in them, and then distribute them in class on Valentine's Day.
As we got older, but not that old, girls began to get childhood crushes on certain boys. Boys did too, on girls, but that came about a year or two after the girls' crushes. The objects of the crushes typically got fancier valentines. Connected to this somehow, there were some of my fellow classmates, both some girls and some boys, who started to exclude me from their valentine lists.
The first such girl was Mary Beth. In 6th grade she gave a valentine to everyone in the class except for me. I figured it was an oversight, but it made me nervous. In 7th grade Mary Beth again did not give me a valentine, even as I continued to give her one. But in 8th grade it changed, and 5 close girl friends of Mary Beth also did not give me a valentine. I checked with my friends and all of them got one from the little clutch of racist girls.
I felt left out, and shunned. My Mom told me stuff like that happens in one form or another, to most girls and boys when you're growing up, and nobody can be more cruel than teenage girls. My Dad, who always called me by his pet name, had a different take. He told me, "It's the color of your skin. Babydoll, life is not fair. People are trapped by their hatreds and it poisons their souls. Be grateful you are not white in this country."
I found neither explanation comforting, and I did not even understand my Dad's explanation. Looking back, I now understand it only too well. As time went on, if your taste runs to girls with pigment in their skin (ie, girls of color), then I turned into a little beauty. Or so I am told.
As I gradually changed from a child to a young woman, I became curvaceous. I developed breasts of course, and they were larger than most. My body became the personification of an hourglass. My complexion cleared and my eyelashes were long, my lips were full. There was also a price to pay: my menstrual cramps were from Hell.
I spent hours with my hair. I wanted hair like my Mom, not curly and tight like my Dad. In New York City that would have been easy to accomplish: There are tons of beauty salons that could do things for me. In our upstate town, where I was the only black girl, I might as well have been from Mars.
As we got older, people no longer exchanged cheap, packaged Valentine Day cards. Instead girls got valentines from boys. My body matured into its current voluptuous state early, around 10th grade, and every single heterosexual boy in my school seemed to notice. But I was forbidden fruit. No boy ever asked me out.
When Valentine's Day arrived in February, I got two valentines: both of them from my close girl friends. Mary Beth, for example, got over 50. From then on, I viewed the arrival of Valentine's Day with dread.
My Dad was an engineer. He had a PhD and commuted to a larger town to work at a high tech company. My Mom was a nurse practitioner, and she worked in our small town, which is why we lived there. I had younger brothers and sisters, and she needed to be close to them. She did not want to commute. Also, she liked small towns.
My parents helped to supplement my schoolwork. I enjoyed school. I did well. In fact, I was valedictorian. The Mary Beths of the school were livid. In the words of my Dad, "Tough shit." I got into the best colleges, and I got scholarships.
Smart as I was, I could not stop the feel of dread when Valentine's Day rolled around. My Mom would always send me one, and in college it would be the only one I would get. I met other blacks in college, but we had such different backgrounds and values, we did not get along. I had some white girl friends, but once again no boys were interested in me, despite my good looks and what I thought they would think of as a hot body.
I began to feel irrational panic as Valentine's Day came onto the calendar. It was a brutal reminder of my social isolation, and the sexual lack of interest all men seemed to have with me. The panic was serious: I became short of breath and my heart raced. I saw a doctor, and his solution was some anti-anxiety medicine, or tranquilizers.
Valentine's Day became a powerful symbol of the social problems of my life: the isolation, the lack of interest in me from the other sex, my loneliness. Irrationally, perhaps, I fiercely dreaded the day's arrival. I understood now why suicides rise around Christmas time.
My best friend at college was my roommate Sarah. My name is Harriet. And yes, before you ask, I am indeed named after Harriet Tubman, although I have rarely told anyone that. Sarah gave me her wisdom regarding boys. She has considerable wisdom. She is wise beyond her years, and as you will see later in the story, she will do most anything for her friends.
"Boys want one of two things," Sarah began. "Love, or sex. Of course, the two are not mutually exclusive. Some girls they worship, and others they view as disposable quick lays. Most of us girls are some combination. Often it starts just with the sex, and then it grows into a relationship, until the boy feels trapped, and dumps us so that he can sleep around. Boys are programmed like that. They are reprehensible, but those are the cards we have been dealt."
"In your case," she went on, "You are forbidden fruit for white boys. They know they cannot bring you home to meet their parents. So they would only want you for the sex. They may want that a lot: some guys are really into forbidden fruit; it's perverse, and perverse can often be sexy. Fucking a black girl is more forbidden to them than things like ass fucking or public fucking, and the like, and plenty of them like that, let me tell you."
"But no boys at all come after me. Not even for gratuitous sex," I said.
"I know, Harriet. I'm getting to that. They are scared of you. You're too fucking smart. You're the best student in all of your classes, and don't deny it. Even as a disposable sex object, boys do not want to be humiliated by a girl. It's castrating. Plus, they probably think smart girls like you are too smart to be used as sex objects just to be discarded later."
"Jesus, Sarah, you have really thought this out. It's a lot of food for thought. One more question, though: Why do the Black boys avoid me, too?" I asked.
"I don't know, exactly. My guess is that they're from urban backgrounds, and frankly Harriet, you're more like me than you are like them. They're just not attracted to you. It's a cultural divide." Sarah was done, and her body language reflected it.
I'm actually not that black. Long ago some slave owner impregnated his slave. I don't know if it was consensual or if it was rape. Could it ever be mutually consensual with a slave, anyway? Their child was again a slave, a woman I'm told, and she was definitely raped by a white man. Her child was still considered black, even if she was only one quarter black. Being black is like a contamination: If you have some black blood, you're black.
When it gets down to me, I don't know exactly, but I am around 1/32 black. Still, looking at me, I look like a black woman. I could never pass for white in a society such as ours where skin color is so important. Culturally however, Sarah was right: I was white. In terms of physical appearance, there was no question: I was black. It was obvious to everyone. People like me are called oreos: black on the outside, and white on the inside.
I stared at Sarah. She spoke the truth. The truth hurts, but as the saying goes, the truth will set you free. I said, "Sarah, I've never had sex. I've never even kissed a boy. I'm 19 and I know nothing at all about sex. I feel like such a loser."
Sarah then told me one way to solve my problem. Sarah was not just my best friend; she was a wise friend. Valentine's Day was approaching once again, and as it began to rear its ugly head, my panic began to rise from my stomach to my throat, ruining my sleep, attacking my soul.
Intellectually I knew my panic was bullshit. Valentine's Day is an artificial construct and is meaningless. But I also knew it was symbolic of my being unloved, undesired, shunned and unwanted. And the panic I felt as the day approached might be bullshit, but as far as my body was concerned, it was real.
Sarah's advice was, in essence, 'become a slut.' Make it obvious I was up for sex, with anyone, anytime. If the smell of available sex was strong enough, men would sniff me out, come for the pleasure, and then perhaps stay for the woman. It was an obvious solution, and yet it was one that had never occurred to me.
"But how would I do that, assuming I even wanted to?" I asked.
Sarah replied, "Get dressed. Susan and I are taking you shopping." Susan was a good friend of both of ours, and she always dressed to kill. She was of Italian ancestry and she was from the south shore of Long Island. She told me that's simply how every girl there dresses, and she saw no reason to wear jeans and sweatshirts just because she was in college upstate. Susan also had boys flocking to her like bears to honey.
Susan was a computer science major, and if they had an award for best-dressed CS student, Susan would have won it, hands down. But of course they don't. CS majors are geeks. Susan did not fit in at all, and everyone, including me, was grateful that she didn't fit in.
The girls ganged up on me. They bought me all new outfits, pressured me into getting my legs waxed and also my privates (I got a 'Brazilian wax'), and pressured me both to get and to wear a new perfume 'that works like Viagra for college men; they can't resist it.' It was what you might call a complete makeover.
Often they had to gang up on me. Especially they had their work cut out for them at the lingerie boutiques. They forced me to lose my conservative style 'fit for a nun' and to become more risqué. 'When a boy gets your clothes off -- and soon a boy will get your clothes off -- why not look sexy for him? Why look dowdy?' I could not argue with their logic. My only defense was that boys do not seem to want to get my clothes off, and sexy new lingerie is expensive. But they were trying to help me to change that.
When we got back to college, Sarah explained our shopping trip was only step one. Now she had to get indiscreet.
"Tell me what you know about sex," she said.
I knew everything, and I told her so. She asked detailed, embarrassing questions, and it turned out I knew much less than I had thought.
