"Brat!" Tucker bellowed louder, then hit the child.

Posy stopped his fight. His brown face tightened to cry.

Tucker now slowly reached for the cotton shift, and raising it, he stared between Posy's legs. He muttered, "Well, I'll be damned."

Next Tucker beckoned Monk to come look over bis shoulder at Posy's crotch.

As Monk looked at Posy, Tucker reached his rough hand toward the child's crotch and flicked a small roll of orange skin that hung between Posy's brown legs. His penis was the size of a small screw, and he had no testicles.

Flicking the penis again to watch it spring up and down, Tucker laughed louder. "Hell! You ain't no fancy, nigger. You're nothing but a goddamned freak." Then, lifting the underdeveloped organ, Tucker in spected the skin behind it. He said, "Nope. They ain't cut off your balls. You just ain't got none." He roared with laughter.

Leaning forward, Monk said, "Let me feel."

As Monk examined Posy too, he also began to laugh.

Tucker said, "We should've had this worm for fishing."

Monk ran his finger where there should be testicles.

Watching, Tucker repeated, "A freak. Nothing but a goddamned freak. Hell, I couldn't get a pig's turd for this freak nigger. Come on, Monk. Let's go back and tell Claudie she better improve her eyesight."

Laughing, they turned away from Posy and walked to the door of the Shed.

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Posy stood alone in front of the dead fireplace after they had gone. He was bewildered. He wondered what was so laughable about his ... He looked down to see his penis. What was wrong with it? Why should they laugh at it? What had they expected to find?

That night Posy told Mama Gomorrah about the incident with Chad Tucker. She assured the child that he had nothing to worry about and talked instead about the chicken feathers he had gathered and painted for her. She praised him for being so helpful.

Later, when Posy was asleep on the roosts with the other children, Mama Gomorrah squatted on the floor in front of a small fire. Her whip lay on the floor beside her. The light from the fire lit her brooding face.

Mama Gomorrah was thinking now. She first thought about Posy and the feathers he had gathered for her. They would be useful in making the voodoo pouches that she gave to sick slaves. But she soon forgot about the medicinal pouches and thought about Chad Tucker mistreating Posy that afternoon. Mama Gomorrah was remembering other magic that she knew.

Mama Gomorrah recalled the baston root. The ground of the Star that yielded the deadly baston plant had been salted many years ago, and it no longer grew there. But Mama Gomorrah still possessed a small quantity of its powder. The baston root quickened a man's pulse and then killed him. And Mama Gomorrah sat now in the light of the fire and weighed her reasons for giving it to Chad Tucker. Or should she let him continue harming black people until she stopped him another way?

9.The Louisiana Purchase

The turn of the new century brought two changes of government to the territory known as Louisiana.

Spain ceded her claims on Louisiana to France in 1801, greatly increasing the French holdings in North America: France now had harbors on the eastern coast of Canada and the port of New Orleans in Louisiana. For commerce, this was a profitable development. Shipfuls of furs sailed from the North, while cotton, sugar, and tobacco poured across the Atlantic from the South.

But in military terms the French found themselves in a vulnerable position. France was currently waging a war with Britain and saw that if she lost on European soil, her North American holdings could be taken as booty.

Also, with the European war, France could not very well afford the expense of protecting such widely parted colonies in North America.

However, apart from France, England, and Spain, a fourth power was beginning to emerge on the international battlefield-the United States of America.

The American president now was Thomas Jefferson, a leader whom some people hailed as a Renaissance man, while less charitable men saw him as a greedy parvenu, a dilettante, and a butcher. But in whatever way that Jefferson was described, he had foresight and was a politician who knew the power of a threat.

Jefferson's cabinet had informed him about France's financial dilemma from the burden of long wars, and 156.

considering that fact, Jefferson decided that now was the right time to obtain the port of New Orleans for America, along with a small packet of land that he wanted in east Florida. If France refused to accept his offer, Jefferson would take the land at the moment when Napoleon was least able to defend it.

In 1803 Thomas Jefferson sent an envoy to France to purchase the property. He had given his envoy permission to pay as high as ten million dollars for it, and if France did not accept the offer, the envoy would tell Napoleon that America would join England in war against France.

Napoleon sent the American envoy back to Washington with the news that he would not only sell New Orleans and the section of east Florida that Jefferson wanted, but he was also willing to sell the entirety of the Louisiana Territory. Napoleon was asking fifteen million dollars, only fifty percent more than Jefferson had been willing to pay for one-fifth the amount of land.

Jefferson pushed a bill quickly through Congress to raise money for Napoleon, and in 1803 paid four cents an acre in the transaction that was to be known as the Louisiana Purchase.

This rich acquisition stretched west from the Mississippi River, from Canada down to the boot of Florida. Immediately Jefferson dispatched explorers to traverse and chart this latest addition to the United States of America.

The pioneers already established in the southeastern regions of the Louisiana Territory continued life as they had, first under Spain, then France, and now the territorial rule of the American states to the north.

There was no visible effect on the Southern commerce, excepting that a Napoleonic embargo was lifted from the port of New Orleans, and cotton was now allowed to be exported once again to England, replenishing the Manchester mills after a two-year hiatus.

The Star had not suffered during the embargo, being only in the first stages of growing and shipping green cotton. EH Whitney's cotton gin was just beginning to change the prosperity of southeastern America.

It was not until 1808 that Washington politics began 157.

to affect life in the South. A bill was passed in 1808 that forbade the further importing of slaves into the Louisiana Territory. The African staves already in America- and their issue-would have to suffice as a labor force for the growing cotton economy. This was grave news for the South.

But the Southern planters were a resilient people. They saw how they could breed slaves from the Negroes they already owned.

Although averting a present clash, the 1808 bill saw the Abolition movement gathering momentum, and the first seeds of a bitter struggle were sown between the North and the South. But as statehood had not yet come to the South, there were more important problems at the moment to contend with on the plantations themselves.

10.Trouble Island

In the last eight years Albert Selby had experienced little trouble with his people. There had been sickness and minor accidents on the Star, but whatever ailments Mama Gomorrah could not treat in Niggertown with her potions and voodoo pouches, Selby sent for Dr. Whithers-the veterinarian in Troy-to ride up to the Star and cure.

But Chad Tucker would not allow Doc Whithers to look at his wife when she became ill.

Claudia Tucker had been stricken with a disease at the end of last year. As Selby saw very little of the Tuckers, he did not know how Mrs. Tucker was recovering.

Selby was aware, though, that something must be done about Tucker himself. Tucker was coming less and less to the big house to make his reports. The cotton gin in Troy sent Selby their reports, and so he knew that Tucker was not cheating him on the green-cotton crops.

Also, Selby had the consolation these days that his slaves had stopped running away from the Star. Rachel had asked him for an exact count of the slaves. Before Selby had had time to comply with her wishes, she made it clear that she only wanted to know the number of potent black men there were living on the Star. Selby immediately dismissed her request. He did not want to indulge her phobia of black men raping her. And the Star passed into yet another year without taking a precise census of its people.

Albeit Selby continued to count only his blessings.

158.

159.

Selby felt that he was a lucky man. Contrary to what he had feared eight years ago, Peter's hasty purchase of three slaves at the New Orleans auction sale had not brought trouble to the Star. Nearly a decade had passed now, and the people of Niggertown had absorbed the three new Negroes as they did the saplings sent to them every spring from the Shed.

But the three new Negroes-named Ido, Gosh, and Nero-had always been more glamorous to the other slaves than the young boys and girls raised by Mama Gomorrah. The three new slaves came from a faraway plantation on an island in the West Indies.

Two of those West Indian Negroes-Ido and Gosh- could not speak the English patois of Niggertown. They talked a guttural dialect of the Fanti tribe, an African tongue that no slave on the Star understood. Their verbal contact with the people on the Star came through Nero, the black man whom Peter had bought specifically to be his groom.

Nero spoke English, but he was a quiet person, almost sullen. He talked very little about the slaves' past, and even less about his own. And Nero seldom ever spoke about the island where they had lived in the West Indies. His only name for it was Trouble Island.

When Peter had originally purchased the three West Indian Negroes, he had had very little use for a groom. Peter had been not more than a schoolboy at the time. His horsemanship had been elementary, and Nero made only sporadic visits to the stables of the big house to groom for Peter in his boyhood.

As badly as Peter had wanted to buy those three West Indian slaves, he had stayed strangely away from them in the last eight years. It was as if he were afraid of them when he got them back to the Star.

Nero did not take advantage of his situation. He had been bought as a groom, and he soon found work for himself in the stable of the big house. He curried Selby's mare as well as handling the new chestnut mare that eventually replaced Peter's pony. Nero gradually became a handyman there, too, repairing the stalls, forking the hay, reshingling the roof, keeping the wagon and two seldom-used buggies in good repair.

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Although he looked like a fancy, Nero did not assume superiority over the other black people on the Star. He had slightly flared nostrils and a broad forehead, capped by a growth of tight black hair. He was by far the most handsome negro male on the Star. But he was also the most humble.

Nero turned forty years old in 1808, an age incongruous to his body. He had a physique of a twenty-five-year-old athlete. His stomach was flat and hard, his thighs and calves well-proportioned. When Nero worked in only his white breeches, they bulged with his masculinity, and the muscles glided under the smooth tobacco-colored skin of his broad shoulders and tapering back.

As Peter grew older, he eventually came to work alongside Nero in the stables. Peter talked as little as Nero himself. Their only moments of camaraderie were when they joked about wenching.

Peter had now passed through his childhood and teenage years on the Star. He had accepted life here at face value. He had been influenced by Albert Selby to think that asking questions meant to poke at beehives with a stick-a man got stung by his own curiosity.

Peter grew to be as secretive as the Selby family. Peter had become a Southerner. And a common trait of the Southerners was to lock up their private lives from the meddlesome outside world.

Soon Peter looked as natural working in the stables as Nero. His arms finally matched his big hands, and his legs had no trouble controlling his feet. Peter was tall, broad of shoulder, and hard-muscled. The sun had enriched his olive complexion to a burnished gold and given a silky luster to his straight black hair. His eyes were still the brilliant cornflower blue that they had been in his childhood, but now at the threshold of his twenties, Peter had a strong lantern jaw and a chiseled character to his lean face, a look that was more aristocratic than brutish.

Peter had grown into manhood on the Star, but in many ways he lived the life of a privileged slave. As Southern slaves often felt inside them that they were not meant to call a white man "master," Peter likewise often 161.

felt that he had no link with the man whom he addressed as "Father."

That spring in Louisiana was one long continuation of wet, gray days. The rain drizzled from morning to night, and the roads became deep beds of mire.

The whole landscape of the Star was as oppressing as the dark sky. The branches of the trees hung heavy with beaded raindrops, and the grass was matted into soggy green and yellow layers.

These dull, wet days did little to improve Claudia Tucker's disposition. She lay for hours and hours on her damp corncob mattress, listening to the steady drumming of the ram against the leaning roof of the bedroom. She despondently thought that she would never recover from her illness.

Claudia's sickness was a mystery to both her and her husband. It had begun with headaches, followed by palpitations of the heart, and then her skin had become clammy with cold sweats. She had first thought that she was pregnant, but as she continued to have her violent periods of menstruation-and when no baby appeared after nine months-she labeled her poor condition as "woman's ague."

The worst part of Claudia's malady was that she did not have an appetite for sex. Without it, her life became suddenly empty. She could not read, and so she was unable to pass her time with books. And she never had the patience or skill for needlework or quilt-making.

Like a dying man is said to see life pass by his eyes, Claudia Tucker lay in her sickbed and saw a succession of her previous sexual encounters.

They had begun when Claudia was eleven years old and had been molested by a coach driver. She still remembered his foul breath and dirty foreskin. To this day she still had an aversion to uncircumcised males and what she called "head cheese."

She remembered how, at thirteen, she had spent a night in a barn with two barrel-chested soldiers and had her first experience of fellatio. She remembered how the soldiers had used her all night. She remembered that one soldier screwed her and the other soldier kept poking 162.

his fingers into her ears as he held her head to his crotch. She wondered if that experience had been responsible for her liking only masculine men-men who were domineering. And had awakened domination in herself, too?

Claudia had lain next with a boy her same age, and she remembered trying to teach him how to make a woman reach an orgasm, too, and taunting him for not being able.

An uncle had been her following lover, and he had taught her the one item that the soldiers had overlooked: her uncle had been the first man to put his mouth between her legs and probe the lips of her vagina with his darting tongue.

It was then that Claudia met Chad Tucker, and from then on all her sexual images included his large penis with its purple, turniplike head.

The black men whom she had shared with her husband possessed no faces now in her memories, nor did they excite her passions.

Claudia's sickness had somehow stifled all her sexual desires. She even tried to finger her clitoris, attempting to excite herself sexually in her sickbed as a test of her present capabilities. But she did not even respond to herself.

Chad Tucker still slept alongside her at night. She listened patiently as he dutifully reported what wenches he had lain with on the Star. She even let him squirt his excitement onto her naked thigh as he lay telling the story. But Claudia did not feel as if she were missing anything by not partaking in sex these days.

Monk still slept in the cabin, but she did not want him to join her and Chad on the corncob mattress. Monk held no interest for her now at all, except as someone who could cook her meals and wait on her when she wanted attention.

After exhausting all her sexual memories, Claudia found herself thinking about God. She suspected that no white person could go to hell, and she began to wonder what heaven would look like.

Pondering God and heaven, Claudia saw an image in her mind of the Star's big house. It sat in a field of ripe 163.

cotton. But the only problem with that idea was that she pictured God as looking like Albert Selby-long white hair and a henna goatee-and Claudia hated Albert Selby.

One day Claudia asked her husband to buy her a picture of God when he went to Troy. She wanted it to be in a gold frame. The Tuckers still had the money buried from selling the slaves, and Claudia told her husband to dig it up and spare no expense on the picture.

Chad Tucker had not been able to find a picture of God in the small village of Troy. He had been able to find only an itinerant artist's impression of the Greek god Poseidon. It depicted a noble man-who was half fish-hovering over the waves. He held a three-pronged spear.

Although the picture was framed in gold, Claudia Tucker was not at all pleased with it. She did not want to spend these rainy days lying on a damp mattress and staring at a fish-man standing in water and holding a pitchfork. The more she looked at it, the more she thought about the money that her husband had wasted.

But thinking about wasted money, Claudia soon progressed from being obsessed by God and heaven. She thought about the money itself. The money that Tucker had made from selling the slaves from the Star, and about more money that they could make. She insisted that he dig it all up again and bring it to her.

Putting the money in a flour sack, Claudia kept it in bed with her. And as the spring rains continued to pour outside, she sat with a worsted quilt wrapped around her shoulders and counted the money.

She began to think about making more money. She now wanted to be a very rich woman.

Claudia knew that it was too risky for her husband to steal any slaves from the Star at the moment. Peter was becoming too familiar with the black people in Niggertown. So Claudia spent these wet days wondering how she and her husband could get more money from some other ruse.

There were many simple people in the South. Claudia knew that they could take advantage of those back- 164.

woods simpletons. She also knew that her husband possessed a very clever tongue when it came to convincing people to do-and to buy-something. Claudia felt that, between the two of them, they should be able to come up with some way of making more money.

One afternoon Claudia struck upon her answer. She remembered a poor dirt farmer called Tommy Joe Crandall and his wife. The Crandalls had wanted to buy a slave from Tucker, but even if Tucker could steal one from the Star now, the Crandalls could not buy it. They were too poor to buy a whole Negro. But Claudia thought of something they could afford. She knew that the Crandalls had a small savings, and she suddenly realized how she could add it to her flour sack of other money.

Becoming so excited by her brilliant idea, Claudia Tucker hopped out of bed, and clutching the worsted quilt around her, she padded out of the lean-to in her bare feet.

There was still a small fire in the stove, and Claudia immediately set about making the first cup of coffee that she had brewed for herself in months.