12/17/2003

From Mandingo 2: Strom's Story(A Romance of the Old New South):
"Young Strom Thurmond was a tall, thin man who, at 22, had a shiny diploma in horticulture from Clemson, and he was in the prime of his thrusting sexual desires, unsure where to put his constantly hard cock. It was 1924, when propriety kept the pearly gates of white bliss slammed shut like the door of the death chamber in the state prison. Oh, the young white debutante girls at the Edgefield County cotillion kept their pure, hymen-covered twats hidden from prying fingers, tongues, and penises until marriage or at least the promise of one with a large ring. Where was a young man to turn for testicular release? Strom's best buddies, Jed and Jesse, had already been squirting their man juice between the caramel-colored thighs of the servants who worked for their parents. Between them, they had fathered three mulattoes, two quadroons, and one cute little pickaninny octaroon.

"Strom was unable to stand it, every night in his room, the flicker of the new-fangled electrical lamp creating shadows, dark shadows, curvy shadows on his wall. Every night he would hold his engorged meat in his hand and masturbate furiously to the image, dreaming of Carrie Butler, the 16 year-old negress who worked for his parents. Ah, the handkerchiefs hidden under the mattress, sticky with Strom's budding love. Why, all the white men took a fine negress as their fuck toys. It was practically one's right as a young man in South Carolina. Better to take out your animal lusts on the plump, curvaceous ass of the house niggers than on the delicate sensibilities of the white women.

"Strom knew that Carrie was a lusty wench, the way she stared at him while she scrubbed the floors and cleaned the chamber pots. Young, strapping Strom knew that Carrie's stare meant so much more than "Don't step there - I just mopped that spot." That stare meant hunger, thunder, and lightning. It bore a message of sex: I am here for the taking. When I bend over to pick your soiled underwear off the floor, I want you to take me from behind. When I am kneading bread for hours on end, I'm imagining it's your manhood between my palms. My sweat is not the dripping of labor; it is the heat from within me, within my black African heart, drumming for white cock invading my wet cunt.

"Such stare-invitations are not to be taken lightly, even in 1924, even as young Strom was on his way to becoming a farmer and teacher. One night, a humid night when the smell of crushed, wet magnolia was the perfume of pussy, when the crickets in the cotton fields sounded like they might pierce the sky, they gave into their lusts. "Pleasure me, you ebony wench," Strom announced to the young Carrie, shaking with obvious clitoral glee. Strom made barn animal noises as he rammed himself against Carrie's prone figure. Screaming "Call me Tom Jefferson!" as he came, and the promise of "The South will rise again" in response to Carrie asking if he was done. Strom loved watching her unabashed tears of joy as she pulled her skirts down and headed back to the kitchen."

When Carrie announced that she was pregnant with his love child, Strom did what any upstanding white man with an eye for a future in politics would do. He had the child sent out of state and paid her for decades to keep her silent as he did what any upstanding white man would do in the South, in the first half of the 20th century, and worked to keep the nigras in their place. And now we can all wonder what might have happened to young Strom if baby Essie Mae had spoken out in the last eight decades. We can wonder if young Strom would have held onto his place in Congress, propelled by hate, decayed by age, mad with denial, like the South.