Under the outsized headline were a series of links -
Equipment for Sale
Gallery
Literature
Videos
Fellow Travelers
I spent the rest of that morning working my way through the links. Well, okay, not in order. I started with "videos."
The first two I looked at were obviously homemade and even more powerful for the lack of professional production values. Oh, don't get me wrong. The picture was clear. Hell, you get high definition from the cheapest cellphone these days. But it was handheld and jerky. The sound quality was terrible and, in some ways, even that made the whole thing more believable.
The story was obvious in the first one.
It was a woman, and this was a woman with no white overseer in her gene pool, being drug forward by two black men as a white man looking like something out of a civil war movie the way he was dressed in white with a broad-brimmed Panama hat to complete the image, walking beside her. He was talking to her, but only the occasional words were clear enough to understand. "Lesson." "Obey." "Dare." "Run."
The black men dragging her moved oddly and it took a minute for me to catch a glimpse and understand that their ankles were shackled and a solid bar about two feet long connected them, rather than a flexible chain. The men were barefoot and dressed only in loose pants that ended mid-calf while the woman was dressed in a shapeless sack of a dress.
They were outside, in a field, and the round bales and a single line of poles, maybe electric or telephone, I'm not sure, in the background were the first hint that this wasn't a movie set in the antebellum south.
The scene ran for a full minute by the little time bar across the bottom, before the camera stopped backing and a couple of trees showed up at the edge of the screen. The little entourage got closer and the sound got clearer.
Yes, Gentle Reader, my dick was hard. But my mind was working too. And after four decades as an analyst and researcher, well, I notice things.
Her voice sounded natural. She was, I thought, a true daughter of the South, and a South that existed before the Civil War at that. When she was pleading, "Please, suh, Ah knows Ah did wrong. Ah won't nevuh do dat agin'. Ah promises. Please, suh. PLEASE, Massuh," the accent felt natural to me. I pictured a fat Black woman with a gold front tooth putting fried chicken on the table.
The man in white, on the other hand, was clearly a transplant. Oh, he had the contractions, he could throw around "y'all" with the best of them. But it was like listening to a foreigner speak English. No matter how perfectly he had mastered the foreign language of the South, there were still hints of the Illinois or Michigan where he had grown up.
He talked of running and lessons while she bawled and pleaded.
"Strip her," he finally said and the two men stood her up and started to pull the sack dress off of her. When she struggled they simply ripped it off of her.
Naked, she was obviously pregnant. She wasn't at term, don't get me wrong. You didn't expect her panic to convert to contractions. But there was a clear baby bump with the protruding belly button I always associate with pregnant women. Very distinct stretch marks, at this point the camera operator had moved closer and was showing off her body, showed this would not be her first baby, and I chuckled as that word, pickaninny learned from ProudDominant (MWM 54) flashed through my mind. Her back was crisscrossed with welts. Clearly, this was not to be her first punishment.
And there, right where she sat, a big letter "M" had been branded into her. It was that letter, I couldn't help thinking, "'M' for Morgan," and picturing it on Daisy's ass, that got to me and I had to pause the video and masturbate furiously.
"String her up," the unnamed man in white said and the two black men drug the girl a little way, the hand-held camera was jittering and it was hard to tell distances, and then, under a tree, and my weird attic of a mind came up with the line "Under the spreading Chestnut tree," from a long-ago class in American Literature. I watched, mesmerized, as they lifted heavy ropes, the word "hemp" seemed appropriate, and pulled slip knots tight around her wrists before pulling on the ends of the ropes. The camera swung in that too-rapid, jerky way of an unprofessional cinematographer, and focused briefly on a big wooden pulley attached by a heavy iron staple to one of the big limbs of the tree. It looked like something that belonged in a museum.
As I watched her arms were pulled up until she stood, arms slightly more than shoulder-width apart, straight up over her head. Another tug and she started swaying slightly, her feet no longer touching the ground. She was crying and tears and snot ran down her chin, dripped onto her breasts, and then onto the roundness of her baby bump.
"Now Eliza," the man in white said and I felt a little rush at the obvious reference to
Uncle Tom's Cabin
, "you have a decision to make."
He released a whip from his belt, something straight out of an Indiana Jones movie, uncoiled it, and began brushing, almost caressing her body with the knob on the handle end of the whip.
"One quick hit," he said, lightly brushing her baby bump just below her belly button, "right here," and he slowly coiled the whip as he walked around her, the camera following, "or a real lesson here," and he drug the soft leather ends of the whip slowly up the back of her thigh to her ass.
"No, God, please no, Massah, not mah baby," she wailed.
"Are you sure?" he asked, his voice gentle, almost conversational, "just a quick strike and it can all be over," he finished, the knob on the end of his whip tracing the shape of her belly, lightly touching her belly button.
She squirmed away from him.
"No, God, please suh, no, not that," she wailed, "Not mah baby," and her voice was bubbly with tears and snot.
"Well, then," he said, stepping back and letting the whip extend with an expert flick of his wrist.
"Oh, God," she moaned and I saw her bladder let go.
I watched the whole thing, the tears and screaming, right until the screen went black and the credits rolled. The final credit was -
Produced by: 1619. The Natural Way
.
I was hard again after watching that, but I continued my exploration through another couple of over-produced videos before I got to another
1619. The Natural Way
production.
This one had the same combination of shaky, hand-held cinematography along with the high definition of modern electronics. The opening scene involved following two men, one tall and thick, one tall and slender, as they crossed the parking lot. They were both dressed in what I think of as "agriculture chic," with denim jeans, shiny cowboy boots, and gingham cowboy shirts with pointed shoulder yokes. I made a small bet with myself that when they turned around their shirt pockets would have pearl snaps including snaps on the pointy pocket flaps. I could overhear their conversation, and I supposed it was part of the script although it was well done.
"You're 18 now, son," the thicker, "it's time you came to the auction. Now that you're legal, I want you to start help running things."
We followed them to the gate where the bigger man, I assumed the dad, swiped a silver card and a small personnel door to the left of the stockade door swung open. It was so well fit that I had not noticed it.
As the camera passed through the door it was like passing through a time warp. It felt more like 1619 than 2023. The streets were dirt, the buildings were wood, and there were no signs of electric lights or even, for that matter, sidewalks. A few buildings boasted boardwalks in front of them but most just opened onto the street.
A horse and buggy clop clopped by, leaving a thin cloud of dust in their wake.
The pair we were following walked down the street, carefully avoiding the occasional pile of horseshit until we got to the end of the street. An old, unpainted, weatherbeaten wooden building blocked the end of the street and the camera caught glimpses of the stockade fence behind the building. Across the top of the double-door entrance to the building at the end of the street, a painted sign proclaimed -
1619 Auction House
