Jerome stood just inside the doorway at the shadowed end of the room. He should have just turned and gone down the stairs and out to the carriage to tell Thomas that Master John wasn't ready to go yet. That's all Thomas, Master John's carriage driver, had told him to do. But the shock of what he'd found when he'd entered the house on Decatur Street and been waved to the second door down the hall on the second floor held him plastered to his shadowy vigil spot long enough to engage his curiosity.
He was old enough to understand this between a man and a woman—he'd been fucking cook's daughter, Macey, long enough in the smoke house himself that she was waddling around supporting her belly with both her hands and with a big smile on her face. And he did the field hand Lottie regularly out in the cotton field too. She was too old to bear, he thought, but she knew what to do with a young man's cock. She'd been riding his since he became a grown man, old enough to go to the fields. These things Jerome already understood in his nineteenth year on this earth. But this. This was not something he had considered possible.
When Jerome had quietly pushed open the door and stolen in, he was suspecting something like this was going on. Everyone knew what went on in the Decatur Street house. But he didn't expect this. He didn't expect this at all.
A small black man of not more than Jerome's age was lying on his side on the bed—naked. He was up on one elbow and his back was turned to Jerome. Young Master John, also naked except for the billowing white cotton shirt with the flounces on it, open so that Jerome could see his hard-bodied chest, had the fingers of one hand buried in the black, wooly hair of the black man's head, holding the head to his groin. The black man was moving his mouth down and up on Master John's cock. The white man's other hand was reaching down and gripping the black man's cock and was stroking it.
Jerome hadn't ever seen anything like this at all. He should have turned and run out, but this was something entirely new to him, and Jerome was the curious type, especially where it came to sexual activity. And not knowing any better, the old master not having pushed the Riverbend plantation slaves to attend church, Jerome had no internal prejudices set on things such as this. Slave row at Riverbend was an earthy place. As soon as he had become aware of his sexual nature, Lottie was showing him how it could give him pleasures that transported him from the hardships of plantation life. She didn't tell him that it was only something that men and women did.
Still, it had not occurred to him that there were other couplings possible such as this one.
Before Jerome could get the notion to leave and go tell Thomas that their new master, John, didn't appear to need the carriage any time soon, the tableau on the bed was changing. Master John was standing on the floor on the other side of the bed and had turned the black man on his side and lifted the man's left leg to rest his ankle on John's shoulder. The black man's plump buttocks were plastered to the white man's pelvis, and the white man was fucking the black man's ass with long deep strokes. Master John was still fisting and stroking the black man's cock, and the black man was moaning and writhing against the deep stroking inside him. He had his left arm raised and a black hand palmed on the white chest, whether to try to push the white man away or to establish a connection to the man fucking him, Jerome couldn't tell. His other hand was stretched out across the bed and he was clutching the bed cloth in a fist. It seemed to Jerome that he was bunching and releasing the material in the same rhythm that Master John was stroking him with his cock. Whether or not that was so, Jerome saw it as so—and it aroused him.
The black man's face was turned toward Jerome, set in an expression of almost pleading. Jerome wondered if the man could see him there in the shadows. Possibly so. There was little danger that Master John could see him, though. White slaveholders rarely saw their slaves even in broad daylight; they looked right through them as if they weren't even there. The black man's eyes were opened wide, glittering, and his mouth was slack. He was moaning and groaning.
Master John turned him again, to his back, his buttocks at the edge of the bed. The white man grabbed the black man's ankles with his fist and brutally jerked them wide. He was leaning over the black man's chest, growling and grunting. His hips were pistoning fast and hard. The black man was clutching at the bed cloth with both of his fists and writhing under the white man and babbling incoherently and crying out at each deep, rapid thrust.
Master John tensed, abruptly stopping the thrusts. His body jerked and his head turned up toward the ceiling. Jerome saw in his face the same ecstasy he saw in Macey's when he released his seed in her. One, two, three more pumps and Master John let out a long sigh and collapsed on top of the black man, who just lay there, moaning.
Jerome realized that he had wet himself with his own sticky manseed. He hoped that Thomas wouldn't notice that when he returned to the carriage. Master John's ejaculation, though, broke the spell, and Jerome realized that he had been away from Thomas too long. He withdrew quietly and then clattered out onto the street.
"I do believe Massa John be ready soon," he said breathlessly to Thomas when he arrived back at the carriage. "But he ain't ready now."
"Why you be so long in findin' that out?" Thomas asked suspiciously. "You find some pussy to poke for yerself while you in there?"
"No, no. They's not want to tell me where he was. Took me a time to get them to check on him. You know I can't 'ford the pussy they got in there."
"You such a handsome stud, I figure they give it to you for free just so they can watch. Nice big cock like yours and fine body."
Jerome blushed—if a black man can blush. Thomas had been talking to him like this for some months. It was only now that Jerome could come to the point of considering what Thomas might be meaning about that. True that often when he was sluicing himself down, having come for the fields, Thomas was there to jabber with him while he was naked. Jerome would need to give that some thought now. Now that he knew that men did it with men too.
Fifteen minutes later, Thomas gave Jerome the evil eye. "Thought you said the massa was about done."
"That's what they tell me in the house," Jerome answered defensively.
"Best I go check, I guess," Thomas said, moving to get down from the driving box.
"No, I'll go," Jerome answered.
He went quietly back upstairs. Although patrons and servants of the house were moving about, no one saw him or challenged him. There were advantages to being invisible to the whites, Jerome thought as he approached the second door down the hall.
The black man was on all fours in the center of the bed and Master John was crouched over his pelvis, fucking him in long, fast strokes. He was cupping the black man's throat from behind and arching his back up. The black man had a wild-eyed look in his eyes and his tongue was lolling out of his mouth. That's how Jerome liked to fuck Macey. Lottie liked that position too, but she preferred Jerome fucking her in the ass when he took her this way. He never realized that it could look so arousing. Master John was leaning well forward on the black man's buttocks so that Jerome could clearly see the thick white cock burying itself in the black asshole and then sliding out and then in again. He focused his attention on that action and felt chills running up his spine. He envisioned himself as poking a white man like that—maybe even Master John, although that gave him a start and a jolt of fear—and maybe even being poked like that.
He was surprised at the thought—but he was even more surprised that he didn't shrink from the thought.
He did, however, step out of the room and down the stairs and out to the carriage.
"I reckon Massa John won't be ready for a time yet," he told Thomas.
Thomas didn't bother to ask why. It wasn't the lot of a slave in the plantation world to ask why, just to stand by, invisible, until some white person told them what, where, and when.
* * * *
The various strata of the Riverbend plantation community had been living carefully and on the edge of concern for several months now, since even before young Master John came to take up residence. The Rembeaus, the family that had owned and lived at Riverbend for generations, were almost all gone now. Master John was the last of the lot, and he was just a cousin to Master Edward, the patriarch of the family last in residence here. But Master Edward's family had, to a member, been taken by the fever while visiting a plantation farther down the Mississippi, and Master John had inherited.
The big concern was what Master John was going to do with Riverbend. There were rumors that he would break up the place—sell the land and sell the slaves too. Neither the slaves nor the next strata up, the overseers, liked this thought one little bit. For the slaves, it inevitably meant a breakup of a community that had lived here for some hundred and fifty years, including, probably, family units. To the overseers it meant new, quite possibly less-desirable, employment needing to be found.
