Рот Уайт - 400 Days of Oppression

“But the constant deficit of fresh air was by far the most torturous of all the horrors aboard these ships. To bring in fresh oxygen, most slave ships had five or six air-ports on each side about five inches in length and four in width. Some had what they called wind-sails. But whenever the sea was rough and the rain heavy, the crew would shut these and every other opening in the ship and the slaves’ living space soon became intolerably hot and, what little oxygen there was, almost unbreathable.

“Slaves often fainted from the oppressive heat and the deprivation of oxygen and were carried above deck where many of them died and were tossed overboard. A healthy slave was sometimes dragged up onto the deck shackled to a corpse; sometimes of the three attached to the same chain, one was dying and another dead. Suffocating slaves struggled to extricate themselves, destroying one another in their fury and desperation for oxygen and room. Men strangled those next to them, and women clawed each other to ribbons.”

By the time he was done reading I knew I had to do it. Still, I had no idea how he hoped to recreate such atrocities or how I was going to handle it, but if I loved him I knew I had to try. That’s when he told me about his idea for the box.

“The Box” was a pine coffin that Kenyatta purchased from the local mortuary. It was four feet wide, three feet deep, and six feet long. Kenyatta bought several lengths of chain and a few thick metal loops that he screwed into the wooden floor trusses in the basement ceiling. He then connected the chains to it and, after screwing several other eyelets into the coffin, suspended the entire thing three feet off the floor. He kept the chains long and loose so that the slightest vibration caused the entire thing to sway. Then he hooked up a motor to it that pulled the pulley’s up and down, rocking the box steadily like the motion of calm waves gently rocking a boat.

“This will make it feel like you’re at sea. I can’t exactly hire a bunch of naked Africans to pack you in here with, so this coffin will simulate that same claustrophobic feeling they must have had being packed in tight with hundreds of other slaves. I’m gonna put heaters all around the room and a humidifier to make it as hot down here as it was between decks with no windows or ventilation. It’s gonna be miserable as hell. But just remember that no matter how horrible and uncomfortable it gets in there, no matter how fucked up and cruel I might seem for putting you through this, remember that it’s nothing compared to what my ancestors endured. They had no safe word.”

“Okay. I’ll do it.”

“You’re gonna have to quit your job. Take a leave of absence or something. Just tell them it’s for personal reasons. They won’t ask questions. Then come right back here and we’ll start this shit. I love you, baby. I really do. But I’m warning you that once this begins I’m fully committed. I’ll become your oppressor and I won’t show you any pity. No mercy. Not for four hundred days. And this box is just the beginning. My ancestor’s journey through the Middle Passage was just the first part of a fucked up odyssey that lead right up to today. I’m talking about four hundred days experiencing all the hardships my people have endured for the last four hundred years. You sure you can do this?”

“I’m sure.”

“I’m not gonna take it easy on you. You have your safe word if you decide you can’t take it anymore, but if you do go through with it. If you last all four hundred days...”

He pulled out a small ring box and lifted the lid slowly, staring at my face, waiting to see my reaction. It was an engagement ring. A princess-cut diamond, at least two carats, with a platinum band and two smaller diamonds inset on either side. It was beautiful.

“You make it through this shit and I’ll know that you really understand what it’s like, what my people have gone through, what I go through every day. I’ll know you’re more than just some freaky redneck bitch with a low self-esteem who got tired of the white trash she’s been dealing with all of her life. That you didn’t just get bored and decide to try something a little kinky and go slumming with the jiggaboos. I’ll know you really do love me and understand me. Then we can be together as man and wife. Then every time some sista looks at you wrong and starts in with that bullshit of you not ever being able to really understand a black man or black people, you’ll know different because you can say that you’ve been through everything we have.”

Somehow it all made sense when he put it like that. He had that way of stating things so they sounded perfectly reasonable no matter how fucked they really were, rationalizing his bullshit so well he could persuade you into doing just about anything. The way he put it, made it sound like climbing into that box was the most noble thing I could do. Like it would be insensitive if I didn’t. I almost felt like if I wasn’t willing to subject myself to all of this then that would somehow make me a racist or at the very least a coward. Besides, we’d already taken our S&M play to extremes I never would have imagined before I met him. He had taught me to enjoy things that would have repulsed me just months ago. How much worse could this be? I felt like I could endure anything. And then there was the ring. I’d dreamed about marrying Kenyatta many, many times, even before we’d started dating, but it was always just a childish fantasy that I’d put out of my mind almost as fast as it entered. I’m not the kind of girl that men marry, especially not men like Kenyatta who can have any woman they want. Just mentioning the possibility that he and I could someday be together forever, just the fact that he would even consider it made it impossible for me to say no.

“I’ll do it.”

That was two weeks ago to the day.

Perspiration ran in a constant deluge from my brow down my face. I blinked tiny droplets of sweat out of my eyes. Salty rivulets made their way to the corners of my mouth and I licked them from my lips, trying to quench my thirst. It would be hours before I could drink again. Kenyatta worked eight hours every day and sometimes nine or ten. Then he would go to the gym for another two hours. That meant I was sometimes locked in my box for twelve hours at a time. Most days he came home on his lunch break to feed me or else he dropped by on his way to the gym. But some days he left me in there without food or water or a bathroom until he came home for the night.

The heat was the worst thing at first. I was constantly sweating. My skin stuck to the damp wood and between that and the chains, every movement abraded more skin. The heat and humidity made it so hard to breathe I inevitably began to panic and claw at my box, trying to free myself, which made it sway violently and began a new problem. Seasickness. I tried to lie still, but the way he had the box hung from the center rather than the ends, the slightest shift in position sent the box tilting and reeling. Between the heat and the claustrophobia, it was too much. I could feel the gorge rising in my stomach, the bile scalding the back of my throat. Many days, as I lay interred in my coffin breathing my own funk and swaying back and forth, I was overcome with nausea and regurgitated, leaving me no choice but to lie in my own vomit for hours until Kenyatta returned. The liquefied chunks of squash and horse beans would slowly curdle in the heat, filling the boiling air with its repugnant stench until I vomited again and again, the nausea magnified by the smell of my own waste. I didn’t want to go through that again. I tried to suck the scalding bile rising in my throat back down into my stomach and lie steady to quiet the swaying of the box. It worked for a while at least.