Becoming the Boss of a Brown Sugar Harem

As I crack the lid on the crate of yellowed documents, I have no idea my dull academic career is about to get upended or that my quiet, perverted little prayers are about to be answered.

Three months ago, I landed in Chocolate City.

A demotion dressed as an opportunity. Semi-stellar record (Master’s in History at twenty-one, PhD at twenty-three), a couple years of research ass-kissing, and I was well on my way to a lifetime of other people’s projects.

Then the American Academic Institute recruited me to run my own.

The AA Institute isn’t as slick as it sounds—a private circle-jerk bankrolled by rich people who want to play historian without funding it—but I took the post.

Especially after learning the program they wanted me to lead was The History of American Slavery.

It’s not my official scholarly party line, but I have a sick fixation on the slave era beyond its academic weight.

My obsession with Black women means I can’t think about the slave master/black harem setup without the itch in my pants overriding my professional objectivity.

As a scholar, I know the fantasy is a lie.

Slave women’s journals document the horrors in plain language, and slaveholder writings make clear that Black women lived on the level of livestock.

I’ve also carried the guilty assumption that, through the generational transmission of that history, Black women today want nothing to do with white men like me.

I’ve never let myself imagine otherwise. Result: chronic blue balls.

D.C. doesn’t improve things.

My partner, Dr. Tamara Addison, is twenty-eight, another prodigious researcher whose articles I’ve read in peer-reviewed journals.

The publications leave out her flawless cinnamon skin, the china-doll ness of her face, and the brown eyes that hold steady when she disagrees with you.

Five-three, with legs that make me forget my sentence halfway through it.

Her warmth might’ve undone me entirely if not for the grad assistant, Patrice Monet—twenty-three, skin the color of dark chocolate, full lips, high cheekbones, almond eyes, and a wild waterfall of black hair above a six-foot body that belongs on a runway and keeps straying into my thoughts at inconvenient hours.

Home isn’t easier.

The AA Institute set me up on the second floor of a three-story walk-up in Adams Morgan.

The landlady, Veronica Blaine, is late thirties—classic ebony beauty, great bones, full lips, and a lethally assembled figure.

Her daughter Kendra, twenty-one, runs a couple shades lighter: green eyes, an angelic oval face, and a dancer’s frame except for the D-cups that contradict it.

The most disruptive neighbor is Veronica’s thirty-year-old sister Julia on the third floor—big smile, big eyes, and a 38D-24-37 body she displays in skin-tight jeans and barely-there tops like it’s her full-time occupation. The effect on my Johnson is consistent.

That’s me on the day Jebediah Harrington’s effects arrive.

Harrington was a slave master, born in 1770, died 1853, whose belongings turned up with a Tennessee historical society—including primary documents: a ledger book and three journals written by slave women.

The AA Institute bought them for me to study.

The society also sent a dossier full of oddities. Harrington’s land holdings were minor, but he amassed fortunes.

He kept a surplus of slaves he treated well: no whips, no chains, no overseer—none attempted escape, many freed during his lifetime, the rest at his death.

I cracked the first journal, wondering what kind of man he was.

Slave journals, while not uniformly grim, are usually distressing—the humiliat