Melissa Selby had fair hair Eke her brother's, but it hung in natural curls to the shoulders of her pink gingham dress. Her cheeks were round and rosy from the country air. She had stocky legs and plump arms. Not a fat girl, though, she was healthy from the good food coming from the kitchen of the Star.

70.Even Peter looked healthy this morning. His dark hair was parted on one side, having been neatly combed across his forehead earlier by Selby himself. He wore a plain pair of short white pants and one of Melissa's shirts. On his pudgy feet he wore only a pair of the girl's silk hose rolled down to his ankles.

Also, Melissa had tied a silk ribbon around his neck. It was one of her hair ribbons, and from it was suspended a small silver star, one of a parr of the bobs long ago put into the slaves' ears.

"Look, Papa," she called, running to her father's chair. "Look what I gave Peter."

From the other end of the table, Rachel snapped, "Bring that here, Melissa. Take it off that ribbon right now and bring it to me. Your great-grandfather made those stars."

Melissa obediently took the small star from the ribbon and gave it to her mother.

Lifting Peter in his arms, Selby beckoned Melissa to come to him too. He said, "Wasn't that kind of you, Melly. You're getting to be a real little lady to be so sharing."

Melissa looked up at her father and said, "He's my dolly you brought me from your trip, isn't he, Papa?"

Shaking bis head, Selby said, "No, Melly. I think he's a little more than a dolly."

"Is he a new brother for me?" she asked, looking at the child sitting on her father's lap.

From the other end of the table Rachel's voice shrilled, "Albert Selby, this is going too far!"

Selby looked at Peter toying with the blue ribbon around his neck and slobbering onto his shirt as he studied the crease where the star had been. Selby said, "Melly is only asking questions that she'll be able to answer for herself soon enough, Rachel." He was intent on leaving matters stand tike that for the moment.

Earlier that morning, when Selby had been combing Peter's hair in the big house, preparing him to have breakfast at the family table, Mama Gomorrah was sending Monkey off to the overseer's shack.

71.Chad Tucker's wife, Claudia, had been complaining lately to Mama Gomorrah that she did not have a slave to fetch and carry for her, someone who could be the choreboy in their two-room cabin.

Mama Gomorrah knew that white people like the Tuckers were more severe with black people than the planters who actually owned them. The Negroes themselves constantly looked for an opportunity to make life difficult for those people they called "white trash," and Mama Gomorrah's revenge for the Tuckers was to send Monkey to them as a choreboy. He impressed her as being sly.

Claudia Tucker was sitting alone at the table when Monkey appeared in the doorway of the cabin. Since her marriage to Tucker six years ago, Claudia had let all signs of curl disappear from her brown hair, wearing it now in a greasy imitation of Mrs. Selby's coiffure, pulled back from her forehead and knotted at the nape of her neck. Whereas Chad Tucker looked young for his thirty-one years, Claudia Tucker appeared older than her twenty-seven. She resented living in the shadow of the Selbys. She hated not having money, and when she did have it, she had no place to go and buy things. Her husband just buried it in the ground.

Claudia Tucker was thinking about the one brightness in her life-a new virile buck to share with her husband-when she suddenly saw the yellow-skinned boy looking through the door at her. She asked, "What you gawking at?"

Monkey forced a smile. "That old woman sent me to slop for you."

"Where's your respect, nigger boy? Ain't you been taught to address decent white folk?

Lowering his head, he said, "Yes, ma'am."

"Yes, Miss Tucker, ma'am," she corrected him. "You call me 'Miss Tucker, ma'am' and you call my husband 'Master Tucker, sir,' understand?"

Monkey nodded.

"What they call you?"

"Monkey... Miss Tucker, ma'am."

She grunted. "I ain't having no monkeys around my 72.house. If I let you stay here, you're going to be called . . ." She held her head at an angle and thought. "I'll call you Monk."

"Yes, Miss Tucker, ma'am."

"I suppose we got to give you a place to sleep here, too," Claudia said, straightening the skirt of her dress.

Monk shrugged his shoulders. "I don't know, Miss Tucker, ma'am."

"That's our bedroom there," she said, nodding to a pair of blue panels hanging over a doorway. Pointing toward the opposite corner, she said, "You sleep there, back of the cookstove."

He nodded.

"But what we talking about sleeping for when there's work for you to do? When Master Tucker comes home tonight, I want this dump looking sparkling for him, you understand?" She appraised the dirt floor, the mended furniture, the leaves of withered cabbage lying on the table, the heaps of dirty dishes and greasy pots. This represented many days' accumulation of filth, and Claudia had been sitting in the kitchen before Monkey arrived wondering where she should start. Now that she had a choreboy, though, the cleaning task was solved.

She began, "Go gather some cookwood and start a fire in the stove. Heaten up some water to wash all them dishes and pots and junk. They go over there on that shelf, and if you break one single goddamned thing, you get switched on that little black ass of yours, understand, brat? Next, you take that slop bucket there . . ."

Claudia continued finding work for Monkey to do as the day progressed. She did not speak to him except for giving him more orders. She did not care about him except how he was going to make life easier for her.

All through the day, Monkey-or Monk as he was called now-obediently answered, "Yes, Miss Tucker, ma'am. . . . No, Miss Tucker, ma'am. . . . Right away, Miss Tucker, ma'am."

Chad Tucker returned to the cabin that evening and assessed Monk with a quick look. He asked Claudia, "Has he given you any sass?"

73.Claudia said, "If he did, I'd clout him on that bald head of his, wouldn't I?"

Tucker grunted his approval and slumped down to the table.

They ate their supper of pork and clabber, talking in low voices as Monk stood against the wall behind the cookstove. Claudia quizzed her husband if he had found a replacement for Cal. Tucker asked her if the logbook with the slaves' names in it was safe here with the boy in the house now. He wanted to know if Monk was going to be an intrusion in their life. She longed for some news of another companion for their bed.

After supper, Chad and Claudia Tucker retired from the table and went into the improvised bedroom. Monk was left behind to pick up the pork rinds that the Tuckers had dropped to the floor during their meal.

This was Monk's first chance to eat today. But as he was crawling under the table, chewing what meat he could find on the fat, he heard a giggle come through the faded blue cotton panels and heard Claudia complain, "But my arm gets tired holding it!"

Stopping, Monk perked his ears to hear more. He was mature for his age, and Claudia's soft voice awakened an adult curiosity in him. All day she had been bossing him, and now he heard her speaking softly for the first time. She whined, "I can't do it, honey. I just can't."

"Go on. Try a little," Tucker coaxed hi a deep-throated voice.

Monk knew about sex. He remembered what the slave traders had done to his mother, although Ta-Ta to him was just another black woman. But he had enjoyed watching the burly white men when they had seduced her. Monk wanted to be burly and strong like the slave traders when he grew older.

Craving to know what Tucker was trying to get Claudia to do, Monk crawled along the dirt floor to peek under the ragged hem on the uneven blue panels.

He was surprised to see such pale whiteness as Claudia's bare thighs. But as he focus,ed more clearly on the bed, he was further surprised to see how fat her 6 74.thighs were, fat and squashed under the bulk of Chad Tucker like bread dough. Tucker was lying on top of his wile-both of them naked-and, also for the first time, Monk saw a man with hairy legs. The muscles in Tucker's body were strong, and they became hard now as he pressed rhythmically on top of his wife. Simultaneously, he was trying to get her to reach her arm around him. She was holding a three-foot-long board in her hand. It was drilled with holes, and Tucker was try-to get her to hit him with it on his hirsute buttocks.

Rearing back his groin, Tucker held his furry buttocks in the air, saying, "You got to use that hornet if you want to feel the sting!"

Claudia whined that the thick paddle was too heavy to hold with one hand. She said that she was feeling enough of him inside her without exciting him to get bigger and thicker. She said he was deep enough inside her. She really wanted a new Negro buck.

But Tucker impatiently repeated, "You won't get any of the sting! We got to get the sting. Try me with the sting, honey, the sting!"

Watching their curious performance with growing fascination, and feeling himself expanding inside his own osnaburg trousers, young Monk passed under the curtains and slowly approached their bed.

The Tuckers were involved in their predicament and did not notice Monk's nearness to them. But when the hornet was suddenly removed from Qaudia's pudgy hand, she looked to see who had taken it. She turned her head and not only saw Monk standing next to the bed, but also that he had dropped his pants to the floor and was now exhibiting a masculine proportion that surpassed that of her husband, in excitement the size of an extraordinarily developed adult's.

Claudia gasped. "Nigger? What you doing in here with that prick? You're supposed to be out there with that dishpan!"

But when Chad looked at the young intruder, he saw that Monk had not come into the bedroom with any ordinary curiosity. Tucker realized that the boy was already caught up in the mood of the occasion. That, without any invitation, he was already one of them.

75.While they were still looking at him with astonishment, Monk had agilely taken the hornet from Claudia's hand and was now beginning to rub its smoothly planed surface against the hirsute skin of Tucker's naked buttocks.

Chad looked down at his wife and shrugged. Already he was wiggling his bare buttocks against the gentle revolves of the wooden paddle, as if he were teasing it into further action.

Claudia Tucker, in turn, relented and reached for Monk's premature maleness. Grasping it in her hand, she began to squeeze the black skin, gripping the swollen oiliness as she simultaneously resumed pumping her hips again.

As Chad Tucker resumed his rhythmic drives into his wife, his buttocks began to slap against the paddle, which Monk still held against his rising movements. But as Chad's thrusts drove harder and harder into Claudia, Monk began to move the paddle downward. He began to bring the paddle-the hornet-against Tucker's buttocks in harder and harder strokes, causing his skin to become a bright red, the color even showing through the thick mat of curly black hair covering his buttocks.

Soon Monk was using both of his hands to wield the hornet, slamming Tucker's posterior with the paddle as he drove deeper into his wife. He was giving her what he called his "sting."

Both the Tuckers were a stream of perspiration by the time that Chad Tucker started to shout, "Getting it? Getting it?" He arched his wide shoulders as his wife tore at his skin with her crooked fingers. They were reaching their crest of excitement as Monk steadily increased the forces of the slaps from the perforated paddle.

But it was not until Monk sensed that Chad Tucker was at his highest point-was shouting the loudest- that he let go with the hardest slap of all, the slap that he had to use both hands on the paddle to deliver. With the contact of that hard blow against Tucker's red buttocks, Tucker drove deep into his wife, giving a loud shout that shook the small cabin, and Claudia screamed at the top of her lungs, "Stop!"

76.Then, as Chad and Claudia Tucker both collapsed together in a silent heap on their corncob mattress, Monk drew himself closely up to their cohesion of white flesh. Claudia barely had the energy now to turn and look at the sight of Monk's stiff maleness bobbing above her husband's shoulder, near her own face. She moved to brush Monk away from them.

Chad Tucker objected, "Go on. Take him." He turned, eyeing the excitement close to his own face. "He's about ready to pop anyway."

Claudia Tucker reluctantly brushed the hair back from her sweaty forehead, and leaning forward, she opened her mouth to take the flow of white warmth from her new choreboy. And as Monk burst over her lips, Tucker watched the explosion and marveled, "That's a load. That's a real load." Then, looking to his wife's working cheeks, he coached, "Take the pudding, honey. Take the pudding."

Afterward Claudia said briskly to her husband, "If you think he's going to take the place of that Cal buck, you're crazy! I ain't pestering with no kid! I want a man nigger!"

Tucker ignored his wife's complaint, ordering Monk to go back to the kitchen and start washing the supper dishes. He said, "If you steps out of-line, brat, I'll use that hornet on you/"

Monk answered, "Yes, Master Tucker, sir."

4.Niggertown

The slave quarters of the Star were called Niggertown. They had been built by Peregrine Roland at a site one mile from the big house to keep away the musky stench of the Africans.

Niggertown consisted of two long rows of rundown cabins built from the logs cut from the surrounding land. A second and shorter row of houses was set back from the main dwellings. These were the original slave hovels built on the Star and were still in use almost a hundred years later.

The Star was a thickly wooded plantation. A virgin pine forest still surrounded Niggertown, a small community of steep-roofed shacks, a dusty main road, and an abundance of yellow dogs nosing for scraps.

Chad Tucker and his wife lived between Niggertown and the big house.

The only other dwelling on the Star was the building called the Shed, which acted as a nursery for the children born to the slaves.

Although the Star had not set out to be a breeding plantation, or thought of itself as one now, it was inevitable that children would be born here, and all infants were taken away from then- mothers two weeks after birth to prevent any maternal affections developing.

Mama Gomorrah was in charge of the Shed, and under her tutelage the children of the Star learned to hoe, weed, and in general be useful until they could be put to work in the fields, the looming houses, the barns, or the pens.

77.78.Work such as looming, carding, and spinning took place in an old barn near the livestock pens. These were set back from the Shed. Mostly female slaves were sent to the barn to learn their vocations on the Star, but both young girls and boys learned about cotton-how to "drop" the plants into the ground and to tend the rows.

Mama Gomorrah always looked for a job that she felt suited a child. She did not know how right she had been in sending Monk to the overseer's cabin.

The Tuckers had now accepted Monk as one of themselves.

In the big house, Peter was easily fitting into the schedule of family life on the Star.

It was Ta-Ta who was failing to find a niche for herself.

But Albert and Rachel Selby had more serious problems now than to worry about Ta-Ta. Roland Selby had run away from home.

Roland had given no hint that he was going to leave the Star. His mother and father had not suspected that he was unhappy at home. One morning two weeks after he had returned from New Orleans with his father, he did not come down to breakfast.

Both Albert and Rachel Selby feared that Roland might have gone out for an early-morning ride and hurt himself in an accident. They knew, too, that Roland liked to go looking at a nearby geological freak of the countryside called Walley Caverns. He often sat on the rocky rim of the chasm to think.

In his worst moment of despair, Albert Selby remembered Ta-Ta's story of being seized by slave traders. But he seriously doubted that redheaded Roland could be sold as a Negro.

It was not until Selby began combing the countryside that he stopped at the cabin of an older settler and finally learned the true reason for Roland's mysterious disappearance from the Star.

The old settler, Hiram Bodean, told Selby that the Witcherley family was also looking for a runaway. He said that the Witcherleys were looking for a girl.

Drawing on his clay pipe, Hiram Bodean creaked 79.back and forth in his cherrywood rocker on the porch of his house and said, "Seems a queer coincidence, don't it? Two runaways in one week. A Witcherley girl and a Selby boy. Both in secret."

Selby knew then that his son had not had an accident, had not been thrown from his horse, or been seized by gypsy traders.

Much worse had happened. Roland Selby had betrayed his family by eloping with a Witcherley girl.

Albert Selby loved his son, but he hoped that he would never see him again.

And Roland did not return to the Star.

This was painful for Selby. But he was glad to be spared what he might do to Roland if they were to meet again.

Rachel Selby crossed her son's name from the family Bible, and when Melissa asked for her brother, the subject was quickly changed. Rachel Selby even went as far as to draw Melissa's attention to Peter rather than let her pursue a conversation about the Selby who had eloped with a Witcherley.

But soon Melissa stopped asking for Roland, contented to play with Peter, who was closer to her own age.

Peter became more popular with Selby, too. As the boy grew older, he was able to go riding with Selby, sitting in front of him on the saddle.

Selby liked to explain to Peter about the plantation. He taught the growing boy about the cotton plants- the blackseed, long-staple cotton that was found on the lower fields of the Star. Selby also explained about the other kind of cotton, the greenseed plants, which had been difficult to clean until recently. Selby told Peter that a Yankee named Eli Whitney had invented a machine that could clean the green cotton-a cotton gin -and that if it proved to work satisfactorily, the Star would grow very rich. Green cotton flourished in the back fields of the Star.

Peter was only a child, but a good student. He listened intently as Selby spoke, and waited until he had finished before asking any questions. Selby knew that he was going to be a levelheaded person.'

80.Peter's body also began to improve. His arms and legs strengthened, and the fresh air had given his olive-colored skin a sheen. His straight black hah* was glossy, and his eyes were a bright cornflower blue.

When Peter was six years old, it was obvious that he was going to be a slim but good-looking boy, and Selby felt proud that he had made the decision to keep the child.