Piet "Loitering with Intent" A Short Story
This is a story of slave fiction meant for adult readers over the age of eighteen years.
Written by Jean-Christophe (Chris): October 2011 An archive of all my stories can be found at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Jean-Christophe_Stories
"The characters and ideas contained in this story are the writer's and shouldn't be used without permission"
"Piet! Get your lazy, white ass up here. NOW!"
Master Isivile's voice echoes loudly down the stairwell from the upper story and leaves me in no doubt that I am in trouble. Fearfully, I stop polishing the mirrors that adorn the walls of the entrance hall - the task assigned me to me by the housekeeper, Mistress Mandisa - and I bound up the stairs to my young Master's bedroom. Quaking with fear, I enter and fall to my knees and press my forehead to the carpeted floor in homage.
My young Master, the younger son of my owners, Master Thandiwe and Mistress Nonyameka, glowers down upon my naked form and ominously, I see the cane he is holding in his hand. I know then that I am in trouble and that I am to be caned. But of what am I guilty?
I am a very recent addition to the household of my owners. Indeed, I was only recently enslaved for the serious crime of 'loitering with intent' in a Black residential zone.
I wasn't guilty of the charge but my protestations of innocence didn't sway the Black Magistrate who'd heard my case. I was an eighteen year old white man and that was sufficient reason to find me guilty and to see me enslaved for life. And I was eminently suited to serve out the remainder of my days in servitude to my Black Superiors.
Since the advent of Black Rule in our society, little sympathy is shown to any white person brought before the special, "whites only" courts. Inevitably, they are found guilty and sentenced to indentured labour which is the new euphemism for slavery.
Once the whites had ruled supreme in the parliament and the courts of the land and we'd held the vast majority of the country's wealth in our greedy hands. We had held our Black subjects in the twin thralls of poverty and ignorance and we'd consigned them to a hellish existence living in the mean hovels amid the festering slums of the overcrowded townships which were always beyond the sight of our white enclaves. We allowed them into our areas of white privilege and our homes only as house-maids and house-boys. They tended our gardens and chauffeured our cars, but we neither recognised them as fellow humans nor did we care about their lives.
In the face of our callous indifference, who now can blame the newly enfranchised Blacks for their harsh retribution and treatment of their white subjects? With the collapse of white minority government and the imposition of Black majority rule everything was reversed; the Black man became the master and we were well on the way to becoming his slaves.
For some inexplicable reason, I had been overwhelmed with a sense of nostalgia and I had returned to my old home and neighbourhood. It was foolish of me - whites are discouraged from entering Black designated areas - but my need to catch a glimpse of my former life consumed me and I had thrown caution to the wind. The area hasn't changed. It still retains its charm and air of affluence.
There is however one major change. No whites live here now except as slaves. The whites have been supplanted by newly enriched, Black families and it is they who now live behind the high security fences designed to keep the 'whiteys' out.
I reach the electrified perimeter fence of my former home and I peer wistfully though the stout iron bars into the lush gardens of which my mother had been inordinately proud. Once she had three 'African boys' to tend to them as well as three house servants. I wonder what has become of them for they are nowhere to be seen and it would appear they have been replaced by two young, white slaves.
I watch as the two slaves take a break from their labours and engage in a good natured wrestling match. My attention is centred on them; they are as naked as the day their mothers gave birth to them and the only articles to adorn their nudity are the wide stainless steel collars permanently fasted around their necks.
I watch their boisterous rough and tumble over the verdant green lawns and I see the sun glinting on their lithe, young bodies. Their blue eyes and blond hair - now closely cropped in the fashion of the slave - hint at their Northern European ancestry. Both slaves are young - perhaps no older than twenty - and I estimate they are comparatively new to slavery. Why do I think this? Both slaves have a swimmer's body, lean, taut and tightly muscled and are deeply tanned from time spent on the now segregated beaches of our city. But their naked asses are a lighter shade of brown to their upper torsos and legs and this tells me they are still colouring up.
Noisily, they wrestle one another to the grass and in their exuberance they don't see a Black man striding purposely across the lawn in their direction. I recognise this man as my mother's former head gardener, Moses. I'm sure that isn't really his name but, in their indifference, it was the one my parents had used in all their dealings with him.
In fact, we used anglicised names for all our servants; it was so much easier than trying to get our tongues around those unpronounceable native names. And so we'd arrogantly robbed them of the individuality of their proud, parent-given names and replaced them with the more demeaning and subservient ones of "Molly" or "Jimmy".
Once Moses would have stood with his head bowed and shoulders slumped; he now carries himself proudly erect. I wonder what position he now holds in my former home.
Then I notice he carries a litupa whip which marks him as a person of authority. The litupa is better known to me as the sjambok whip which was once the symbol of white oppression over the Black man. Now renamed the litupa it is the Black man's tool of control over his white slaves.
As a boy I had seen the sjambok used against Blacks by the white police to break up their illegal gatherings. I knew the sjambok was effective in dispersing any Black demonstrators. One had only to watch the TV news as the Black demonstrators took to their heels and fled once the white constabulary withdrew the whip from their belts to know this was so.
My father had one but he'd never used it on any human - Black or white. Rather it was a family heirloom passed down through his family and was the original one used by a distant grandfather- I forget precisely how many 'greats' go before the grandfather - on an overland trek sometime in the far distant past of the nineteenth century. Its use then was to drive oxen and not men and it was much longer than today's litupa.
Today's litupa is much shorter than the sjambok used by my ancestor. Overall, it is about three feet in length and is made from a strip of hide taken from an adult hippopotamus or rhinoceros. Somehow this strip of hide is then rolled into a tight cylindrical shape tapering from one inch in diameter at the handle end to about three-eighths of an inch at its tip. It is very light and flexible and I am about to witness its effectiveness when applied to the exposed body of a slave.
Both the slaves are so engrossed in their horseplay that they neither see nor hear Moses as he approaches. Their first inkling of his presence is when they hear the loud crack of his whip and the 'thwack' as it falls upon their unprotected backs and asses. Their yelps of surprise and cries of outrage are testament to the pain they feel.
Moses continues to whip them as they break free from one another and try to roll away from his anger. He berates them and orders them to their feet.
"Get back to work! Move your lazy white asses! NOW!"
The now thoroughly subdued slaves move quickly to obey. With their backs turned toward me, I can see the crisscrossed pattern of these latest angry, red welts superimposed over the older and less obvious bluish stripes of earlier chastisements.
Moses turns and seeing me standing at the fence, he walks towards me.
He doesn't recognise me or if he does he chooses not to show it.
"What do doin' here white boy? This ain't no place for white trash like you. Move on before I whip your thievin' white ass."
I beat a hasty retreat. But I have stayed too long.
As I walk away, I am stopped by a group of Black, teenaged schoolboys wearing the new uniform of my old school of privilege. They surround me and question me.
"What you doing here, white boy?"
Some grab hold of me and hold me prisoner as another boy uses his cell phone to call for the neighbourhood security patrol. Within minutes they arrive and they take me into custody. I have been charged with the crime of 'loitering with intent'. I protest my innocence but no one pays me any heed. I am a young, strapping, white boy eminently suitable for enslavement. I can expect no mercy.
Justice for a white in our new Black Rule society moves swiftly! Within hours, I appeared in one of the out-of-session Magistrate Courts which operate around the clock to deal with the increasing phenomenon of "white lawlessness". There, I received no mercy. I was found guilty of 'loitering with intent" and sentenced to lifetime slavery.
Suddenly, I had lost my freedom and become a slave!
Now, I crouch in fearful anticipation at the feet of an angry Master Isivile. I have angered him but I don't know how. No explanation is given to me; indeed none is due to me. I am a slave and I have offended my Master. That is all that matters. And I am to be punished.
I am terrified and as the cruel cane strokes rain down my naked ass and shoulders I feel the full measure of my Master's fury. My pain filled cries echo sorrowfully throughout the silent house; my body shakes from my anguished sobbing and my tears darken the carpet beneath me.
The stainless steel collar which now defines me as owned property weighs heavily around my neck and I feel the fullness of my slavery.
Like all my fellow whites, I shed tears for all we have lost!
End.