Mussu's Necklace

“Here, I made this for you,” Quoy said, as the two young brown men, Quoy nearly twenty and Mussu a newly initiated eighteen, turned from each other with a sigh as they lay behind the levee of the Sierra Leone rice field. They continued touching each other, preparing to go again to a new-found heaven. Quoy had been stroking Mussu’s bare buttocks, brushing his fingers across a dilated hole to keep it prepared for the needs of the thickness of his cock. He opened the pouch lying next to his discorded wrap and came up with a carved ivory disk necklace, each disk held to the next by a leather string. He put it around Mussu’s neck. “Here, this necklace gives you the power of confidence and assurance that you will always be in control.”

“I don’t know what I could do to deserve anything like this,” Mussu whispered, in awe. No one had given him such a present before.

“I made it myself—for you,” Quoy answered. “See, it has our names carved on ivory disks and animals and plants of our world carved on others. And you know what you can do to deserve it.”

Mussu did know. Trembling, he turned onto his back, spread and bent his legs, and placed his feet on the soft-earth ground at the base of the levee. As he raised his pelvis by pushing off on his feet, Quoy rolled over between Mussu’s spread thighs and entered him for the second time that evening, having opened the young man to him in the first seeding.

The young man grasped the biceps of the older youth—who had not been the one to initiate him in man sex, but who was the one Mussu loved—cried out, and grimaced as Quoy pushed deep into his channel. The younger, small, slim, beautiful, and perfectly formed ebony youth began to pant and moan as Quoy plowed him, his firm buttocks expanding and contracting to the rhythm of the fuck.

Standing off in the foliage, watching the young men fuck from a hidden vantage point, crouched a glowering and angry Ganda, the man who had first mounted and bred the young, beautiful Mussu. The man who also was the father of Quoy.

* * * *

Mussu, shackled at wrists and hobbled at ankles, was pulled, not too gently but also not too roughly, out onto the deck of the small wooden vessel. The pier he found himself on seemed to lead nowhere but to towering oak trees on a heavily foliaged embankment. As nervous and fearful as the beautiful young man who had been in Sierra Leone, in Africa, just a few weeks earlier was, he couldn’t help but be taken with the change in his surroundings. Other than the oaks, cypresses, sycamores, magnolias, and, especially, palmettos and flowering oleanders crowded on the land before him in verdant hue, accosting him as a riot of color even in the waning light, after the weeks of him having been held in a dark cabin at sea across the Middle Passage in the English slaver ship. The foliage was new and exotic to him. The land under the trees and foliage at the edge of the sea wasn’t unfamiliar to him. It was the same marshy land he knew at home. He had no way of knowing that he had landed on Daufuskie Island, one of the South Carolina Colony barrier islands, at its most showy time or that those towering oaks provided the limbers for the construction of fighting vessels such as the ship that would be the USS Constitution.

Farther along the embankment to either side he would have seen what he was familiar with—rice paddy fields—if night wasn’t falling. He had been brought to the low country. Rice was the staple crop in his own land, and his people were proficient in growing and harvesting it. This was a main reason why the English slavers preyed upon his people and snatched many of them to transport to South Carolina and Georgia as slaves—to work in the rice paddies and indigo fields there as they did in their own land.

Although closely supervised in his native Sierra Leone on Africa’s rice-growing Windward Coast as a perfectly formed young man, coveted by women and indiscriminate men alike, there he was free and unfettered. Here, somewhere in the New World that had been whispered about in his village with fear, he most decidedly was not.

Mussu was lucky to be alive. Many who had been transported in the slaver vessel from Africa to the colonial America coast had not survived the ocean journey, which had first landed in the nearby port of Beaufort off the Port Royal Sound. Mussu had been lodged in a dark, windowless cabin, along with three young women. He was fortunate, though, that the cabin was above deck, while most of the Africans taken as slaves—men and women alike—had been virtually stacked in the holds.

His survival conditions, although dire, were nothing like those who were locked up below for the multiple-week sail. He and the beautiful young women were segregated and held in less squalid conditions than the others, as they had been separated off to serve the sailors and later to be sold for something very different than rice planting and harvesting. They also were fed better than those in the hold and permitted to wash themselves off every other day. The offset was that those below were left alone to fester in peace. Mussu and the three women were taken periodically from their shared cabin to an adjoining one for the sailor’s rough, quick in-and quick out sport.

This is what separated eighteen-year-old Mussu from the other category of slaves to be sold at auction at the Chalmers Street slave block in Charleston, to the north, or the River Street slave market just to the south in Savannah, Georgia. Most of the slaves were brought to this area of the coast to be sold to work in the rice, cotton, and indigo fields. Particularly beautiful and well-formed young women and young men, like Mussu, however, were brought here to be sold into the brothels of Charleston, Beaufort, Bluffton, and Savannah. Ebony flesh was exotic to the rich colonists. Mussu was destined for Savannah, and thus had been taken off the English ocean slaving vessel at Beaufort and transferred further south with other slaves destined for one of the ten rice plantations on Daufuskie Island or the other islands or lowlands bordering on the Calibogue Sound. The owner of the island plantation to which he’d been brought also supplied brothel slaves to the surrounding towns.

The small vessel had landed at the pier leading off from Pappys Landing Road, off Mungen Creek, close to the southeast tip of the Daufuskie Island. The landing area was called Bloody Point because this was the shoreline where the Spanish between 1715 and 1717 had encouraged the indigenous native Yemasee people to stage three unsuccessful last-gasp attempts to dislodge the English settlers from the island. This now was the Oak Ridge Plantation, one of ten on the island, where the Mungen family, of Irish descent and prominent in the South Carolina Colony, not only grew rice but also engaged in the slave trade, supplying slaves, through their contacts with the English slavers headquartered on Bance Island in the Sierra Leone River, to the regional and Savannah markets.

The plantation’s black suboverseer, himself a favored slave called a driver, Cudjo, had come on board the small vessel first and performed an initial assessment of the captives. After he looked them over, he took Mussu gently by the arm and led him off the boat and onto the pier. He was a tall, strapping, muscular young buck in his late twenties.

Seeing another face such as his and hearing him speak to him in something approximating his own Sierra Leone Krio dialect, Mussu was somewhat calmed. Still, the man’s size and muscularity were intimidating to Mussu, as was the lust in the big black’s eyes, and, although Cudjo let Mussu move at his own pace, he did not free the young man of the shackles on his wrists or the hobbles on his ankles. Cudjo guided the youth with intimate touch. It was only as he led Mussu away, up Pappys Landing Road, toward the main complex of the plantation buildings, that other plantation workers, supervised by white overseers, started bringing those destined to be field slaves up from the boat’s holds and leading them to pens closer to the island’s shore than where Mussu was being led.

The boat had arrived at the Oak Ridge Plantation pier at dusk, and, although Cudjo didn’t lead Mussu too far, in the direction of the water to the east, into the woods from Pappys Landing Road, it was pitch dark by the time they arrived at a group of high-fenced pens. The stockade walls of the pens were made of eight-feet-high rough-wood planks. There were maybe four pens with walls abutting each other. Cudjo led Mussu into one of these, which was about twelve or eighteen feet to the side, and gestured over toward a lean-to, open-fronted shed at the far end from the gate. A thin mattress, stuffed with what Mussu would learn was boiled Spanish moss and covered with a cotton cloth, lay on the beaten-earth floor of the shed. Next to the bed were two buckets, one filled with water and with a dipper in it. The other was to be used as a necessary. There was a hunk of bread and two small apples on a slab of wood on the mattress. Cudjo unshackled the young man’s wrists and left him there, alone, leaving by the gate and securing it behind him.

Mussu was of mixed emotions to see the black giant gone. He was dark, like Mussu was, and unlike the sailors who had brought him here to this unknown land and used him during the sailing were, and he spoke his language, Krio, enough for him to feel he hadn’t left the world altogether. But the black buck was such a towering, hulking, muscular man that he intimidated Mussu. Also, if the man was roaming free here and with the authority to take Mussu off the vessel and lead him away, he wasn’t like Mussu. He could do as he pleased—at least with Mussu.

It was the first time in weeks that Mussu had been alone, though, and had space enough to move around, even if shackled. He sank onto the mattress, dipped water to drink, and then dug hungrily into the bread and the apples, not having eaten anything even that fresh for weeks. He paused to touch the ivory necklace on his neck, amazed that he still had it after these weeks of captivity, abuse, and torment, comforted by the confidence it gave him, even if slight and imaginary. The necklace was composed of a series of oblong ivory disks, held together with leather string knotted into holes in the edges of the disks. Each disk had a design carved into it. Mussu knew that Quoy, a talented artist, had done the carving himself. One disk had Mussu’s name and another one Quoy’s. Other disks bore images of the bush elephant, a monkey, a hippopotamus, and a couple of birds.

As he ate, he thought back to when he had received this necklace, no more than a month and a half ago. The images in his mind went to Quoy, an older young man than he of his village, and how that day, the last he’d seen Quoy, had begun so gloriously and ended so tragically. The two young men had been drawn to each other, and in ways they had to keep secret. They met on occasion in private. The evening Quoy had given Mussu that necklace they had lain together twice and had been discovered by Ganda, Quoy’s father, an elder in the village, who earlier had claimed Mussu for his own, seized his virginity from him, and, despite having two wives, treated the youth, Mussu, as a third wife.

Discovering his own son fucking Mussu on a levee by a rice field, Ganda went into a rage, beating both young men, who dared not defend themselves from a village elder. Ganda then took Mussu by cruel force in front of Quoy to assert his ascendance, and, tying Mussu’s wrists and ankles, slung the young man over his shoulder, and took him down to the river, to his dugout boat. He paddled down the river, to the mouth of the waterway, and to the island, Bance Island, which the English slave traders occupied. He sold Mussu there, getting a good price because of the youth’s beauty.

One of the English captains took Mussu almost immediately into his hut, tied the young man’s wrists to the headboard of his rough-wood bunk, forced Mussu up on his knees, mounted him, penetrated his anal passage, and fucked him. Later the same day, he fucked him again, and then yet again in the night. He enjoyed the young man so much that he sold Mussu’s time and ass to other men in the encampment. And thus, even before he reached the new world, Mussu’s vocation in life had commenced.

The young man was transported within a couple of weeks across the Middle Passage and eventually reached here, this small stockaded pen located he knew not where in the world. His own world, which had not been all that good to him but that, nevertheless, had been his home, had been lost.

He knew what he was meant to be now, though. Ganda had shown him that, as had a couple of the English slave traders, and the sailors on the ship, and now, he assumed, even the intimidating ebony slave driver, Cudjo, would take his pleasure if that was what he wished. Mussu could think of no other reason why he’d been separated from the captive Africans and brought to this stockade. He’s seen the lust in Cudjo’s eyes.

Mussu was cursed with extraordinary beauty, small size, and a perfectly formed body. The curse went further than that. He was aroused and fulfilled by lying with men. He would do this by choice even if not forced to do it. He lay with Quoy by choice.

If he were given the choice he probably would willingly lie with this strapping Cudjo, as well. It was not being given the choice that would make him reluctant.

He couldn’t stop thinking that there must have been some reason he was separated from the others, just as he had been on the ship bearing him across the Middle Passage. He’d seen the look in the ebony suboverseer’s eyes when he’d first spied him on the boat at the island pier and then again here in the stockade before he had left. He knew Cudjo would be back. He knew what Cudjo would come back to get.

And he was right. It was very soon thereafter that Cudjo was back, naked and in magnificent erection, slipping into the pen and taking a stance that told Mussu he had no way of escaping, nowhere to go. The black buck advanced on the African youth until he was standing close to Mussu. The young man stood his ground, looking into the man’s eyes, not wanting to look anywhere else. Not wanted to look down the ebony man’s muscular body. The glance he’d had of man’s gigantic erection had made Mussu shudder from the thought of having all of that inside him.

The man pointed to himself and said, “Cudjo,” which the young man took to be the man’s name, and Mussu realized that the man was trying to make some connection with him before he did what he wanted to do. Cudjo gestured to Mussu, but the young man could not bring himself to give him a name. He wouldn’t resist him, but he would not pretend that this was what he wanted—although his body was beginning to deliver signals that this, indeed, was what he wanted. Cudjo reached out and unknotted the strip of cloth binding the young man’s skirt to his waist and let the material drop to the ground. The deep groan that came up from the man’s depths when he saw the youth naked told Mussu all he needed to know concerning what the man’s desire was and where this was going.

The young man was scared, but the man’s body was more muscularly perfect than anyone Mussu had ever seen in Africa. His erection was magnificent—and frightening.

With a sigh, Mussu went back to the mat and lay down on his back. He had done this many times in recent weeks, and it was best gotten over quickly. The sailors, more interested in release than making love, had been quick about it; perhaps Cudjo would be too. As he had done for Quoy and Ganda before him and for the British slavers and sailors afterward, Mussu spread and bent his legs as far as the hobbles on his ankles permitted, placed his feet on the beaten-earth ground, and raised his pelvis.

There really was no use struggling against it. Cudjo stood over the young man for a moment, drinking in the beauty of his sleek ebony body. Then he released the hobble chain at the young man’s ankles and the shackles on his wrists, grasped Mussu’s ankles and spread and raised his legs, came down on his knees between the young man’s thighs, and thrust his thick, throbbing, hard cock into Mussu’s puckered hole. The youth cried out in pain and violation, having not been prepared for the massive invasion, but he’d been here before many times in the last several weeks. The shaft was larger than any the young man had served before, but Cudjo wasn’t any more cruel than the men who had gone before him.

Once violation was realized, the buck held there for Mussu’s channel to stretch and accommodate him, which it did, and Cudjo’s shaft sank lower into the young man, fusing solidly with him. As Cudjo began to move his shaft in and out inside the young man, Mussu panted and moaned, but he took the cock. Cudjo released his grip on Mussu’s ankles, and the young man did as he had come to learn to do. He pressed his knees into Cudjo’s hips, rocked with the plowing of the cock, and docilely lay there, turning his face toward the back wall of the shed. He touched his ivory necklace and turned his thoughts to Quoy as Cudjo took his pleasure. It helped the young man to take the extraordinarily hung man by remembering the touch of Quoy.

Within minutes, though, Mussu was no longer thinking of Quoy. He was thinking of the mastery and size of the muscular man holding him close, fucking him deep. He relaxed, lay back in the mastering arms, opened to the man, and felt the muscles of his channel walls shimmer and undulate over the thick shaft as in moved in and out. This wasn’t going to be a quick in, release, and out. The man was working him slowly, completely.

Cudjo, strong, virile, and healthy, was still on top of and inside Mussu, moving and mastering the young man, when a gunshot was heard in the not-so-far distance. Cudjo leaped up and ran to the stockade gate. The gate was ajar and Mussu saw that the man had left his breeches and rifle just outside the gate. Cudjo struggled into his breeches, grabbed up his rifle, and sprinted off toward where the gunshot had come from. In turn, Mussu jumped up from the pallet, took up his skirt, and slipped out of the gate and into the forest. He headed in the other direction from the one Cudjo had taken. He had no idea where he was going other than away. He struggled through the foliage for some time, likely going mostly in circles, panting and gasping, before his adrenaline wound down, his strength gave out, and he sank to the forest floor. When he had calmed down, he wrapped his skirt around his waist and looked around in all directions, trying to decide what to do now, where to go, how to remain free for as long as possible.

* * * *

When his heart had stopped pounding in his ears, Mussu found that he could hear the surf. The need to get to the sea became an imperative for him, and he began stumbling in that direction through the undergrowth. He saw the weak, wavering light before he came into the small clearing, where he saw a hut built of tabby, a composition strange to him but one he would learn of, made of a type of cement composed of lime from burned oyster shells mixed with sand, water, ash, and crushed oyster shells that predominated on the island. The small cottage was perched just inside the foliage line of a short beach leading down to the sea. The light was from a lantern inside the hut as seen through an open door on an otherwise blank wall. He must have been heard thrashing around in the forest, because, as he approached, the frame of an old, large, well-padded chocolate-brown woman filled the doorway to the building.

“Help me,” Mussu croaked in Krio.

To Mussu’s relief, the woman appeared to understand him and answered in a variation of the same dialect. “What is the matter, child? Come inside. You look half dead.”

Less than a half hour later, Cudjo appeared at the woman’s door.

“What was that gunshot I heard?” asked the woman, standing squarely in the door frame, which she filled with her considerable bulk.

“We brought fresh slaves in today, Obah,” he answered. “One of the new field slaves broke away. He was shot. Another one, a young male, has escaped too, though. Have you seen any sign of a small, beautiful African male around here?”

Obah stood solidly in the doorway, looking her son in the eye, taking her time answering him. “A young mail? Is it small men you are after again? Hawa will not want to hear of this.”

“My business is my business, old woman. Have you seen a young man running in the trees or have you not?” he asked, gruffly.

Looking down at the ground and moving to the side of the doorway, Obah merely pointed to the one-room interior of the cabin. Cudjo walked past his mother and to the back of the room to where Mussu was cowering. He lifted Mussu up to his feet, once more worked the knot holding his skirt together. As the skirt puddled to the beaten-earth floor, he picked the young man up; laid him on his back on Obah’s Spanish moss-padded bed; undid and dropped his breeches; and lay on top of Mussu, between his thighs.

Mussu gave the watching old woman a pleading look, but there was no protection to be had from that quarter. Cudjo placed the bulb of his shaft in position, palmed the small of the young slave’s back, pulled Mussu’s passage onto the shaft, and plowed him hard and deep, finishing what he had begun in the stockade.

Resigned, this time Mussu was more responsive and, eventually, lost, clutching the bulge of the black buck’s shoulders in his hands, tightening and releasing his grip to the rhythm of Cudjo’s thrusts. He pressed the black bull’s hips tightly between his knees and rocked with the thrusts, moving his hips, taking the demands of the hard cock deep. His pants became heavier and quicker; he groaned and cried out in Kroi with words Cudjo understood and that egged him on; his little body went into spasms. Cudjo was staying with him as no other man had, filling him and working him as no other man did. Mussu trembled and begged and rocked his hips against the thrusting shaft.

He collapsed under the demanding power of the ebony giant, and lay there, his face turned to watching the old woman watching Cudjo fuck him and fuck him and fuck him, his senses focused on the power and thickness of the shaft working inside him, on the involuntary rocking of his hips to the beat of taking, and on his betraying passage walls, the muscles of which rippled over the plowing cock. He tensed and released, spouting his own cum up Cudjo’s hard belly as the virile giant continued thrusting, thrusting, thrusting to his own prodigious seeding deep in the moaning young man’s passage.

Obah stood by and watched her son breed the newly arrived slave. Having ejaculated, Cudjo held on top of Mussu, holding the young man close captive under him until, within minutes, the black buck went hard again and resumed fucking the young man. Knowing now that there was no rescue from the man’s mother, Mussu turned his face to the tabby wall and picked out the shells in the lime-based plaster with his eyes until the grunting man was finished with him the second time.

But Cudjo wasn’t finished with Mussu. When he rose off the bed, he pulled the ivory necklace off Mussu’s neck, smiled at his mother, and gave the old woman the necklace. Mussu immediately felt the loss of the necklace. He felt all of the strength and sense of self-worth melt from him and despair, hopelessness, and helplessness flowed in. It didn’t help that he had succumbed to the power and magnificence of the man who breeded him so expertly and satisfyingly.

Yes, satisfyingly. Mussu no longer could deny what he was, what he wanted from another man. He was Cudjo’s now to do whatever he wanted with Mussu.

Cudjo picked the now-docile, completely defeated Mussu up in his arms and walked out of his mother’s cabin. He didn’t take the young man back to the stockade, though. He walked along the beachline to another cabin, almost identical to his mother’s. This cabin also had a primitive bed in it, wider than the one in Obah’s cabin. It also had leg irons attached to the wall by a chain, which he attached to one of Mussu’s ankles. In the coming days, Mussu would find that he could reach any place in the cabin, but the chain would not allow him to leave the hut.

Cudjo then lay Mussu on his back on the bed and moved his hands over the small, young man’s body, taking time for the first time to explore every curve and crevice of the young man, until Mussu groaned with a need of his own in spite of himself. Cudjo lay, naked, between the young slave’s thighs, covered him again, and, young, virile, strong of stamina, moved on and inside him once more. Mussu was fully the man’s now, resigned to having the big buck inside him whenever it pleased Cudjo to do so. In the ensuing days, enough that Mussu lost count of them, Cudjo covered him again and again, every day. The black buck was a young, fit, virile man and Mussu was a beauty. Within days, the young man became resigned to his fate. He could not deny that he was a desirable young man, if it was a man that he would have to lay with. He started receiving Cudjo as a wife would her husband. Obah came to Cudjo’s hut each day and cooked for them, clucking her lips at the young man in the man’s bed and fingering her new necklace.

Mussu’s surrender did not mean that he forgot Quoy or what they had had together that Cudjo did not give him. Cudjo gave him affection and a big cock; he didn’t give the young man any taste of freedom. Obah gave Mussu nothing but food and, occasionally, clean coverings on the bed.

Quoy had given Mussu choice and a necklace providing him confidence—until it was taken away from him.

* * * *

But Mussu was not Cudjo’s wife. Cudjo already had a wife, Hawa, who had been sent over to the mainland for several weeks by the master of Oak Ridge Plantation because she was an expert in the processing of indigo and was hired out to ply her trade. She was returning to Daufuskie Island and would legitimately expect to occupy her own bed with Cudjo. Hawa had come to Cudjo the same way Mussu had—chosen by Cudjo off an incoming supply vessel of slaves, separated off from the rest, shackled to his bed, and fucked with an overpowering shaft, until she willingly took the role of his wife, gave loyalty and obedience, and could be permitted limited freedom—as determined, after she was trained to indigo production, by her white masters, not Cudjo. She now, however, time of familiarity and adjustment to reality having past, had the authority of a jealous wife. Realizing this, Cudjo turned Mussu over to the white plantation overseers, begging them to sell him away because Cudjo did not think he could resist the young man when Hawa returned to him, and that inevitably would cause bad blood among the plantation slaves, who had greater respect for Hawa than they had for Cudjo.

Thus, Mussu was sold to Jethro Stephens, the owner of the Wexford Plantation on the adjacent Hilton Head Island. Stephens was not in the need of a field worker. He was interested in acquiring a carriage driver and bed warmer. The beauty and, now, submissiveness and sexual experience of Mussu was such that he met the rice planter’s requirements perfectly.

The beauty of Mussu was so striking that he caught the eye as well of Stephens’s brutal overseer, Richard Baker, who had exotic tastes of his own and who controlled his supposed master by threat of exposing Stephens’s sexual preferences to Savannah society. Stephens was a refined and experienced man for his time. From the very first night in his bed he was training Mussu in the more refined art of pleasing a man than Cudjo had known to teach Mussu before. Mussu was trained to be a male courtesan, not just a compliant whore. Mussu would live to appreciate this.

On their first encounter, the planter bathed Mussu in a brass tub at the foot of his four-poster bed, stroking the young man off in the tub while he sponged him off. Then he bent Mussu over the foot of the bed, the young man’s arms stretched out sacrificially over the silk coverlet, while Jethro encircled the young man’s stomach with one arm and explored the young man’s small body with his other hand, culminating in greased fingers exploring up the young man’s passage, as Mussu lay there and groaned. The old man went down on his knees behind Mussu and pressed his face between the young man’s pert buttocks cheeks, working with his tongue while Mussu moaned. The man’s fingers opened up Mussu’s channel further, dilating the hole nicely, and then the old man mounted him from the back, wrapped a hand around the young man’s throat, pulled Mussu’s chest back into his, and fucked the young man slowly and fully.

As Stephens was coming, Richard Baker entered the room, naked, bound Mussu, arms stretched out, to the bed posts, and whipped him, while Stephens watched and sobbed for the young man. When this had made Baker hard and throbbing, he fucked the young man from behind more roughly than Stephens had, cutting him down before he came, turning the young man on his back at the foot of the bed, grabbing him by the ankles and spread-eagling Mussu’s legs, and finishing him from on top while clutching the young man’s throat with a fist and controlling his breathing. Baker left when satisfied and Stephens took over again, putting Mussu back into the soothing water of the tub, applying salve when the young man came out of the water, and taking the young man to bed with him, cuddling him through the night. He, of course, took his pleasure again on the young man.

Mussu endured, knowing there was no choice and having lost all confidence in his self-worth—but all the time learning what would make men of varied appetites sex slaves to him.

This loving master/cruel master arrangement went on for three months, during which Mussu, knowing how badly both the master and overseer wanted him, slowly gained confidence of his own and a sense of control. He took advantage on a couple of occasions of being given more freedom than the field slaves had and, indeed, than the Wexford Plantation house slaves as well had.

One freeing event was the death of Obah, Cudjo’s mother, on Daufuskie Island. Without being given leave, when Mussu heard of her death and impending funeral, he took one of the Wexford Plantation canoes and paddled it over to Daufuskie. He appeared at the funeral, much to the consternation of Cudjo, who didn’t dare acknowledge him because of the presence of Hawa. When he got the opportunity to be near the casket, Mussu grabbed his ivory necklace off the dead woman, which they were going to bury her holding in her hand, and ran for the shore. Only Cudjo saw for sure what he’d done, but he was unable to do anything about it.

But then Mussu, now feeling fully confident with the necklace in his possession again, stopped at the fringe of trees above the beach and turned and watched Cudjo. The funeral cortege left the small slaves’ church and went to the graveyard. That was close enough to where Mussu had stopped that he could hear the singing and see the knot of people around the grave. He could easily pick out Cudjo, because the big buck stood head and shoulders above all the rest. Mussu knew that Cudjo was watching him. He saw the need in Cudjo’s eyes, and, now having lain with several men, none whom was built as Cudjo was, Mussu felt the need and want for Cudjo as well.

When the funeral dispersed, Mussu remained standing, testing out his new-found powers. They were rewarded, as Cudjo appeared after a while, walking toward him. They fucked right there under the trees on the verge of the sand down to the Calibogue Sound, looking out toward the Wexford Plantation on Hilton Head.

Mussu took charge, using the refined techniques of putting Cudjo into high heat that he was learning from Master Stephens and almost indifferent cruelty he was learning from the overseer, Richard Baker. Mussu made Cudjo lie on his back and the young man, his necklace jiggling against his chest and singing confidence and power to him, rode the man’s cock, in total control and denying Cudjo an ejaculation until Mussu was pleased to let him have one and then, after a period of recovery another, with Cudjo nearly sobbing in tears in awe and ache at the expertise of the beautiful, small Mussu.

“I must be with you again,” Cudjo said when the sex was finished. “I can come across the water to you when it is possible.”

“No,” Mussu said. “I will come to you when I want—and you will pay me for it until I own you and use your cock at my pleasure.”

Cudjo agreed and thus began Mussu’s life as a paid male prostitute.

The other event of that three months that added to Mussu’s eventual mastery of his trade was that, to avoid the growing rumors that Jethro Stephens had taken a black catamite in his bed, Stephens found a wife for Mussu. Her name was Bess, and she was a matriarch of slaves on the nearby Port Royal Plantation. She was so established with the Singleton family there that they wanted to award her with another husband of her choosing. She was forty if she was a day and had ridden three husbands into the grave with her sexual demands. She wanted someone far younger than her who she could train up from innocence, and she wanted him to be a beautiful young man.

She was given Mussu, a young man then of nineteen. They didn’t live together or move from their respective plantations, but they were joined in a ceremony and proclaimed as husband and wife. Bess came to Wexford Plantation for one night every two weeks and Mussu went to Port Royal Plantation for one night every two weeks. The time was enough for Bess to teach Mussu everything he would need to know to please a paying woman client in later years. Mussu appreciated the education and was already foreseeing the usefulness of it, if the actual act with a woman didn’t impress him much.

What did impress him was that while he was visiting Bess at Port Royal Plantation, he met and took a shine to a young and handsome black buck, Mingo, who worked the rice fields, was twenty, and was one year from having been brought across the Middle Passage from Sierra Leone. Their relationship began as sharing stories of life in Sierra Leone, with much there having changed since Mussu was in Africa, and speaking nearly the same dialect. It moved into the sexual. Mussu was still an extraordinary beauty and the difference in age only meant that he knew how to drive the young Mingo wild.

Mingo had been in the South Carolina Colony for a short enough period to pine for home. In theory, Mussu did as well, but his life had been become so comfortable and satisfying on Wexford Plantation that his lamenting for the old world, and even for his long-lost Quoy, had become shallow and perfunctory.

Thus, when Mingo told Mussu of the Quakers who were offering slaves on Hilton Head stolen freedom and a voyage back to Sierra Leone and Mingo was keen to go and wanted the young man he had come to love to go too, Mussu vacillated. Perhaps it was his relationship with Jethro or Richard Baker or Cudjo, or even Bess. Perhaps it was that Mussu had come to see his life in the New World as much more comfortable and, even in slavery, freeing than his life in Sierra Leone had been. Perhaps as long as he now kept the ivory necklace around his neck, he felt invincible. Whatever it was that held sway, when Mingo escaped from the plantation and, presumably, returned to Sierra Leone, Mussu didn’t go with him.

For years afterward, Mussu, touching the ivory necklace and contemplating, and at least superficially lamenting, an opportunity lost, dreamed of what life could have been in Sierra Leone with Mingo—and perhaps even being able to locate the Quoy of his youth. But he was a realist. Life was good where he lived later in life. And very quickly that wasn’t on Wexford Plantation.

Within three months, Jethro Stephens was dead, thrown by his horse into a marsh, where, unconscious, he drowned. In the ensuing confusion, Richard Baker disappeared, some claiming he did something to shy Stephens’s horse or perhaps he was put underground by the plantation’s slaves because of his cruelty. Stephens’s relatives descended on the plantation to “make things right.” They had known about Jethro’s proclivities all along as well as where they centered and were played out. It thus would be no surprise for that time and those circumstances that Jethro’s heirs sold Mussu to a brothel in Bluffton, on the mainland overlooking Hilton Head, a small but refined town where planters sent their families for the hot and muggy season and where they went themselves to play. The young man was such a draw there that before he reached his twentieth year, he was sold once more to Mrs. Fenton’s brothel in Savannah, where his beauty and refined technique, with both men and women, made him a highly sought courtesan.

At twenty-one he was bought again by a fabulously wealthy planter to continue life in Savannah as the planter’s private bed warmer. Even later he opened a brothel of his own, Stephens, which was the surname he had taken on Hilton Head. Stephens became the most exclusive gentlemen’s club in Savannah, and, for years, the clients were met at the door by a big, black bull of a man slave who Mussu now owned himself. The doorman’s name was Cudjo.

Mussu’s distinctive characteristic and what people remembered him for long after his youth and beauty had passed was the ivory disks necklace he always wore and that the rising legend of was that it gave the wearer power and confidence, as it certainly had given Mussu.