Incidents in the Life of a Girl: The Unattainable Mulatto

By Lamont Tanksley, Sr

Linda is a lesbian mulatto slave who dares the previously unimaginable.
Constantly begged for her submission by a master "who asks for what he could take," Linda desperately leaps further down the rabbit hole of her awakening womanhood. Dare she, by books end, totally turn the tables?
Linda blossoms into womanhood in the hypocritical town of Asheville, North Carolina in the 1850's under her master's lustful eye and her grandmother's loving care. Infatuated by her fair skin and enduring beautiful black features of her maturing body, Dr. Flint begins pressuring her sexually. His jealous wife wishes to see her dead after assuming Linda is pregnant with her husband's child and a physical fight where she is bested by Linda.
One might assume that Shades of Grey has submitted to 12 Years a Slave in this novel about faith, family, and the incidents of a young girl finding herself while seeking freedom. Filled with captivating characters and text, this book is not the tale your mother read.
Revised from Harriet Jacobs' original 1861 autobiography, 'Incidents In The Life of A Slave Girl'; Tanksley creates a substantially differing tale.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lamont Tanksley, Sr
• Release date: Oct 16, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311607195

Lamont Tanksley, Sr

Lamont Tanksley Sr. is a retired military service member. He served overseas and at home during various conflicts as an enlisted and commissioned officer of the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Army from 1987 to 2009.Lamont is a lifelong student of U.S. history, technology, and the behavioral sciences. He is a former instructor of Central Texas College and has degrees in Psychology, Criminal Justice, Marine Computer Systems and Electronic, and Natural Science.He is a native of Detroit, MI now living in Bremerton, WA. He is an employee of the Department of Veterans Affairs Hospital in Seattle, WA, where he works with veterans suffering from PTSD.Lamont has dreamed of writing stories with strong African-American characters since early childhood. His motivation to keep toiling with words has never waned. He put his dreams of writing on hold while serving his country and raising four beautiful children; two of mixed race. He is also a brother to fourteen brothers and sisters and an uncle, cousin, and nephew to countless loved family members.Lamont is the winner of the 2014 Charlotte Press Revisionist (CPR) writer award in fiction. We are happy to help Lamont perform CPR on old characters and unknown stories. We encourage you to read these new versions and old versions of stories told.www.facebook.com/incidentsinthelifeofagirlwww.facebook.com/CharlottePressLLC

Book preview

PREFACE

My name is Harriet Jacobs. I later began to be called Linda, after my mother. This is my story. I am one of the many Mulattos of America.

I am aware that some of my adventures may seem incredible; but they are, nevertheless, strictly true. I have not exaggerated the wrongs inflicted by Slavery or spoken timidly of other incidents in my life. On the contrary, my descriptions fall far short of the facts. I have concealed the names of places and given persons fictitious names. I had no motive for secrecy on my own account, but I deemed it kind and considerate towards others to pursue this course.

I wish I were more competent to the task I have undertaken. But I trust my Readers will excuse my deficiencies in consideration of circumstances. I was born and reared in Slavery.

I have not written my experiences in order to attract attention to myself. On the contrary, it would have been more pleasant to me to have been silent about my own history. But there are stories worth telling.

This is my story.

Northerners know nothing at all about Slavery. They think it is perpetual bondage only. They have no conception of the depth of degradation involved in that word, SLAVERY; if they had, they would never cease their efforts until so horrible a system was overthrown.

A Woman of North Carolina.

Rise up, ye women that are at ease! Hear my voice, ye careless daughters! Give ear unto my speech.

Isaiah 32:9. KJV

Chapter 1

What I am saying is that as long as an heir is underage, he is no different from a slave, although he owns the whole estate.

Galatians 4: 1

I was born a slave; but I never knew it until I was nearing the age of six years. Six years of happy childhood had passed away before the realization of my circumstances became known to me. Looking back, it is odd that I could be ignorant of the fact for so long. Slave children were made to labor as early as three or four. Some were taken into the Master's house to be servants while others were assigned to special children's gangs called trash gangs, which swept yards, cleared drying cornstalks from fields, chopped cotton, carried water to field hands, weeded, picked cotton, fed work animals, and drove cows to pasture. I was probably a bit more privileged than other slaves, but the truth of it, most slaves under the age of seven were kept from the fields to be given the opportunity to grow profitably into slavery. It wasn’t uncommon for slave women to be bred like cattle or for half of her children to die or be killed. Half of all slave babies died in the first year of life--twice the rate for white babies. That’s a strange statistic since so many slave babies are born being both a bit black and white.

During this time period of slavery in America, white slave owners and their hired hands have had sex with their black female slaves and the result often has been children being born. Many slave owners do not help these mixed blooded children, even the ones they spawned. I am one of them, or at least from the lineage of them. They labeled these children black and let their black mothers raise them. These white looking children are considered slaves just like their mothers. The one drop blood rule that Southern whites follow say, that if you have one drop of black blood in you then you are black, no matter how much white blood and genetics you have. The disapproval of these jealous white wives, the Mistress to these slaves, typically reinforces the bondage of mixed race children. So by age seven, over forty percent of the boys and half the girls born from slave women are made to enter the work force. At about eleven, boys begin to transfer to adult field jobs and it ain’t much different in the holding off for us, often more despised by the plantation Mistress, slave girls.

White men of the south do not only wish to own other humans, they seek to label and define us as inferior and significantly distinct from them. Mulatto is the term used to refer to we slaves who are born from one white parent and one black parent, or more broadly, a person of any proportion of noticeable European and African ancestry. The word mulatto is derived from the Portuguese word for ‘mule’ and was meant to be an insult. A mule, after all, is the offspring of a horse and a donkey copulating. How happy the southern plantation mistress would be if we mulatto men and women were born as sterile as that beast of burden. As yet another insult, southern whites use the term grandiosely to refer to us. As slaves, it is a minor thing compared to enslavement. The term has fallen into use and is now seen by most as a pejorative term to Northerners . . . particularly those who secretly pass as white. Still it endures and defines us. The Henings Statutes of Virginia 1705 states:

And for clearing all manner of doubts which hereafter may happen to arise upon the construction of this act, or any other act, who shall be accounted a mulatto, Be it enacted and declared, and it is hereby enacted and declared, That the child of an Indigenous and the child, grandchild, or great grandchild, of negro shall be deemed, accounted, held and taken to be a mulatto.

What is in a name? Are we not all children of Adam? Am I not a daughter of Eve? Mulatto, nigger, woman, lesbian . . . I too experience the arms and hands of love, lips of lust, phallic thumb of pleasure, breasts full with desire, a thirst for knowledge, bellies pressed and glued together with sweat, and a passion for freedom.

Lydia, my friend, my confidante, introduced me to the literary character that has been known as the tragic mulatto. I was but three years of age when The Quadroons was written. I have since read many of her stories and have been inspired by her and others to write my own. She portrayed the light skinned woman as facing yet imagined issues as the offspring of a white slaveholder and his black female slave. I supposed that makes me close enough to be termed one. My name is Linda, but I have been called nigger, slave, bitch, Harriet, lesbian, liar, and mulatto. I have strength to bear them all.

Not my mother, nor grandmother, or even I am the abysmal Octoroon or tragic Quadroon that abolitionists write eagerly of. We are not lost children between the two races without knowledge of where we fit in. I am not a character that allows Readers to pity the plight of oppressed and enslaved races, but only through a veil of whiteness. I cannot speak for women of the North. But I personally know there is no confusion in the South as to where we fit in. We are not white. We are not equal. We are chattel. We are Niggers. We are slaves.

This mulatto's life that my friend wrote of was indeed tragic. As the name implies, tragic mulattos live harsh lives and almost always meet a bad end. I suppose I might not be a true mulatto then. I did not know I was a mulatto or a slave at age six. Throughout my life, I have defied the very notion and definition of each. You would not imagine my parentage by looks alone and you can only know my story by reading it. I am an undefined woman of an undefined race. I am my father’s daughter. He was the most proud, dark as sin, right as rainwater, father that a slave girl could ask for. My mother is who from my mulatto roots are derived. She is the child of mixed parentage. She, like so many others who look like us, is directly descended from a white father and a black slave mother.

I have my mother’s long fine hair. It’s almost as straight as any white women’s and just as black, long, and luxurious as a Cherokee Indian’s. It is still thick like my darker African sisters and as a child I braided it in the same fashion as they do. Braided hairstyles are fun and easy to do. It links me too my richly skin toned sisters and says, I am still one of you. Today my thick strands of hair are course straight locks that descend down past what men have called my voluptuous breasts and limbs to my round buttocks. Let them stare if they must. My complexion is not naturally as fair as the southern belles who visit my Mistress, but it is close. It has retained only a small hint of its mocha roots, making me, in general, lighter in color from all but the fairest skinned Brazilian women I have seen with the traders from that far off land. And my slim nose and high rosy cheeks have a writing made of the prettiest brown, freckles they say, that tease the rest of my face for not having such fine negro color. I envy them through long lashes and eyes of a deep bronze color, gold flecked, with pupils that are opaque. Some have begun to, and others always have called me beautiful. But I don’t see it.

At the beginning of the 18th century, it was common for small groups of slaves to live and work by themselves on properties remote from their Masters' homes. My father was a carpenter. He was considered so intelligent and skillful in his trade that, when buildings out of the common line were to be erected, he was sent for from long distances to be head workman.

There is a period in a boy's life, roughly speaking between the ages of ten and sixteen, when his interests and energy turn in the direction of making things. It may be called the creative period. My father entered his at age eight. The ability of the average boy in bondage is far beyond the general estimate of the slave master, who assumes intelligent supervision is needed at all times. My father found a toss out pocket knife as his natural tool. To many it was a dull instrument, maybe a weapon. Yet this one boy out of a thousand realized its possibilities. He worked on the trash gang and began to fashion toys out of discarded and found pieces of wood. Eventually he began repairing and building furniture in his family’s shack. An ability to design new things and to adapt general rules to personal requirements eventually was developed. By the age of sixteen my father was one of the finest carpenters in the county.

Besides his work, there was something in his manner and voice that caused everyone to admire him. Like my mother, I admired his dark noble face. Mother seemed to scarcely notice the incredibly dark shade of his skin; she noticed only the man's vivid eyes and his strong principled face. I was infatuated by his pigment. I was completely envious of it. Under the heat of the glaring southern summer sun, it grew so dark that people could not observe him properly if he sat in a darkened room or made his way along the streets at night. He often startled Willy and me in the evenings, looking down on us with white balls that would appear from nowhere and were his eyes. They were always only partially covered with their dark lids and could blind us fully of his presence when closed or clinched. I wondered how a woman so fair skinned and a man so imperceptibly dark could both be my parents. Grandmother Charlotte pointed out that she was from white parentage, Grandpa Thomas was a beautiful second generation African, and she had birthed my handsomely sable father. I love my race regardless of the prejudice against her, the unenviable position she holds, and the things she is falsely said to be guilty of. And I love my father. I am my daddy’s girl from top to bottom and will not stomach any mention that I am not. Color be damned!

On condition of paying his Mistress two hundred dollars a year and supporting himself, father was allowed to work at his trade and manage his own affairs. We were even allowed to live on a remote portion of the Master’s land away from the big house and the Mistress’s jealous eyes. In addition to the two hundred dollars a year, we farmed the land we stayed on to care for ourselves. My father felt he was slaving for us, his family, rather than for the Master.

The heir is subject to guardians and trustees until the time set by his father.

Galatians 4: 2

Like every robust healthy slave with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other he yearns for freedom for his heirs though every day of his own life has been as a slave. My father’s strongest wish was to purchase his children. Though he several times offered his hard earnings for that purpose, he never succeeded. Slave owners knew they could profit economically by promoting the families their slaves were struggling to create. Marriage, they reasoned, would make slaves content and therefore docile. What is more, stable unions lead to reliable reproduction cycles. This idea of a self-renewing slave labor force was exploited on a grand scale on the plantations, increasing in intensity as the years went by. Whatever advantages slave unions held for an owner, for the enslaved man, woman, or child, the family was an incomparable source of solace and strength and a primary means of survival. A good wife or a strong husband is worth more than you can imagine.

Sir, be kind to our daughter, my father begged Laurence Evans. She just a girl. She don’t know no better. His broad arms wrapped steadfastly around my mother. Each stood and reacted as was to be expected of good niggers: exhibiting the natural, perfect, varied attitudes, the bent head, the curved neck, never meet the eye, and count to five before answering to a white man lest you sound to disrespectful, sassy, or educated.

In front of them stood the brother of my father’s Mistress. He had returned from two years up North where he failed miserably to set up a profitable business. The shape of his head, the pale yellow of his hair and beard, the immeasurable meaning of his black eyes, the richness and breadth of his manners did not speak the lowness of his character. He was a weak man, weak of body and mind his entire life. But, he was white.

She went too dam far this time!

Inside the house behind them, my grandmother sat cradling the sister I have never known. The sister my parents never told me about. My older sibling sat with her feet calmly tucked under her and leaned against our loving grandmother who held her in her arms as she stared out the window not really seeing her son, daughter-in-law, or the angry white man. There was an oddly queer, slightly old-fashioned thoughtfulness in her big eyes that stared up at the grey sky as she rocked the large girl and prayed aloud.

Dear God, Father above in Heaven have mercy. Not again sweet Jesus.

Is he gonna take me gran-ma? Sara asked.

For several days it had rained continuously. The narrow streets were chilly and sloppy and full of dreary, thick cold mud. Mud deep and everywhere.

Of course there were several long and tiresome tasks still to be done—there always are on a farm or when one is a slave—and Sara was sent out again and again, until her shabby clothes were soaked through and through. The absurd old arrangement of flowers and feathers on her pitiful hat were more draggled and absurd than ever and her downtrodden shoes were so wet that they could not hold any more water. Her almost thread bare dress clung to the curves of her body making it all too easy to see the sinewy muscles of her adolescent frame and the woman she had become beneath the passed down garment.

Laurence stood out of the rain just inside the barn, not hiding he thought. He was admiring the dark areolas of Sara’s all too visible breasts. To his right was the area where father tethered the pigs in a simple shelter. In the hastily erected sty lay a sow suckling her piglets. It had been a week since farrowing and Sara’s chores included feeding the wild boar that father found wounded and pregnant in the nearby woods. If they could keep knowledge of the pigs secret . . .

The sodden piece of cloth dress hung to Sara’s frame causing the pigmented erectile tips of her mammary glands to stand erect. She stood in the shadow of the entrance where the ivy made a deep green archway and wrung out the skirt of her light blue dress daintily, in her high-bred way. Not many other girls were more fair to look upon—slender, rather tall, long cheeked, with very much dark hair, a bright color of skin, and something of wondrous long curves.

Laurence stepped out of the shadows behind Sara, placing an arm over her mouth and used the other to pin her right arm against her body as his greedy hand firmly clasped her left breast and drug her away from the entry. It was the wrong decision… Wrong because he was not strong enough to hold this warm, squirming, sensuous body in his arms and press it firmly against the wall without her breaking free. Wrong because Sara’s hysteria rose to an almost unbearable level and she could not contain her instinct to strike back. Wrong because her pride refused to let her stop after he went down.

It was not the first time he held her nimble body willingly or unwillingly.

Well, we’ll have to see what we can do about that, he said when she turned around, huffing, shaking her hair out of her face, and raising her fists for the fight to come. His voice was soft, challenging, mocking, a sensual and serious threat. And then, like a fool, like a dam man, he charged her.

Presently a small train of three white-topped west-bound wagons approached. The men in them had already started celebrating and drinking. Laurence’s swollen closed black eye opened a little in an effort to make out the individuals. Laurence limped back a step and smiled as he blurrily watched the wagons and heard the revelry from within.

My mother stepped between the two men as my father balled his fist. Placing her small hand, fingers spread wide across my father’s broad chest, she shook her head no. Why should they all suffer any further? This would be a small sacrifice for the family. One of many, but just another. Her head raised and her voice lowered, she turned to Laurence and asked, Won’t you men be more pleased with a woman? My father almost faltered.

Whars da nigger you said we gon hang Larry? one of the men yelled as the first wagon came to a stop. My father was too respectable and obedient a slave to have been assumed the cause of Laurence’s injuries. He was beaten pretty bad, but had given terribly few details of how it happened when his big uncle asked about how he obtained a split lip, sore ribs, a limp, and the massive black eye.

Laurence’s eyes darted about nervously at the angry men in the wagon. A noose dangled from the sides of two of the wagons and every man held a firearm or a drink, some both.

My father stood calmly, his frame extended to its full six feet and poised for violence. No slave lives forever.

Is it come to this Laurence? my father said. He had always wanted to hit a white man. It was late and there was nothing to hold really hold him back before snapping Laurence’s neck. I think he began to think it might be a good idea.

Mother stood between the two men. There wasn’t much time before a decision had to be made. The men perched on the edge of their wagon seats wondering what was being said. And they couldn’t help but leering. Mother’s soaked rain coat opened a bit in the wind, exposing her short skirt and long legs. Even racist white men were prepared to appreciate a sight like that.

My mother stepped right into his chest and looked hard at Laurence. I will take her place sir. Then she smiled, offering a seductive pout for good measure.

Is we hanging one of these here Niggahs? yelled another of the men from the furthest wagon.

Staring my father in the eyes, the coward yanked my mother to his side and said, Naw, we got something better than that to do. Ya’ll eva’ taste wunna these high yella ginger cake nigga gals?

Though well educated, Larry spent his entire life acquiescing to the look, talk, and manner of any of the stronger men about.

When my father’s foot flinched, my mother gave him an intense stare that would stop a lion in its tracks.

Whatever advantages slave unions held for an owner, for the enslaved man, woman, or child, the family was an incomparable source of solace and strength and a primary means of survival. A good husband or a strong wife is worth more than you can imagine.

What is family? To some it is a feeling, to some a bond, to others a relationship, and to some the entire purpose and meaning of life is in that word family. For my father, it was the very thing that kept his heart pumping. The word itself evoked a mystical vibration in his soul. You are the product of your parents, who in turn, are the creation of their respective parents. My father saw his father take the whip to protect his wife--my father’s beloved mother and my grandmother. I learned this from my grandmother at the age of fifteen. The values and actions that you reveal to the world outside identify you as a part of your family. Be it your day-to-day interactions, picking cotton, the way you walk, the way you portray yourself; all are simple indications of practices and customs you have embedded from your family members and ancestors. My father, his father, my family, was willing to go through great hardships to rescue the younger generation from slavery. It is never too late to realize and appreciate and learn what others have done or are doing for you. Gradually, you acquire the undiscovered truths about your family through the help of your oldest living relatives. All this was divulged to me by none other than grandmother.

Child, you have no idea what your folks did, or would do, to see you free! she said in hushed whispers to me when I began to lose faith in our plan. Have faith, she urged. Faith, silence, and secrecy became a sordid necessity grappled with over the course of my young life in slavery. I tell you Reader, no child should arrive at the place of shame, lies, hypocrisy, and danger I found myself when I knocked on the door to womanhood.

In complexion my mother was a light shade of brownish yellow like a noticeable number of other slave women and children who were termed mulattoes. My father was almost the exact opposite. They lived together in a comfortable home. Though we were all slaves, I was so fondly shielded that I never dreamed I was a piece of merchandise trusted to them for safe keeping and liable to be demanded of them at any moment for any reason.

I was, for a long time, shielded from my sister’s story. I was denied the knowledge and grief of knowing my father’s swallowed pride or my mother sacrifice to protect her daughter three days before Sara walked into Laurence Evans’ bedroom, dropped her clothes to the floor, and watched his excited surprise before she threw an unlit oil lamp at his face. It missed, but it was close enough when it shattered on the wall to the left of him and doused him. She casually tossed another at the door she closed behind her. Holding him, she shoved a large kitchen knife into his testicles as the two of them locked arms and rolled in a wicked embrace, knocking over the candle he used for reading, and setting the entire room ablaze.

The only memory of Sara that was not destroyed was a private note left on my mother’s hairbrush that read:

Our God is a consuming fire.

I had one brother, William, who was two years younger than myself—a bright, affectionate child. I had also a great treasure in my