"Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally." Abraham Lincoln

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XIV.

Of course, Susanna had known that Alex was once a slave. It was a word of which she knew the definition, but she did not understand. Perhaps she would never fully comprehend the meaning. How could she?

But to hear Alex so simply state that his mother had been owned by someone affected Susanna so shockingly. As she stood on the grounds of her family's estate, in a life that had never known cruelty, in a body that had never experienced judgment, it frightened her deeply to know that there were living, breathing human beings out in the world being possessed as though they were objects.

"I'm sorry," said Alex quietly, turning away from Susanna to look out over the pond. "I don't mean to frighten you."

Susanna gasped quietly. "No, you did not frighten me," she assured him. "I ... I am just so sorry for you." She didn't know if that was the correct thing to say, but it was genuine.

She stepped forward to stand beside him, looking up at his face as he marvelled at the view. Susanna did not venture to the pond save for the anniversary of her father's death each year. It was a beautiful place to rest, but also a beautiful place to just be.

"I never imagined I could meet someone like you," Alex uttered quietly. His eyes flicked down to her. "A white woman with a heart the size of an ocean. I do not think you know what a rare woman you are."

Susanna sat down on the banks of the pond, the grass beneath her cool, though not damp. Alex followed suit and sat down beside her, leaving enough distance between them. "I don't want to be rare," Susanna whispered. "I hate that I am to you. I hate that it means you have known cruelty from those who look like me."

"I didn't know any different," replied Alex softly. "I have never known true kindness." He looked into Susanna's eyes, as though he was searching for something, or wanting something, or wanting to say something. Susanna saw hope in their dark depths, but such pain. Such unimaginable pain.

"Will you tell me what happened to you?" Susanna again did not know if that was the right thing to say, but she couldn't help but ask. She wondered if Alex had ever told anyone what had happened to him. It had to be such a remarkable burden to bear on one's own.

"I don't want to frighten you," Alex said again in a reserved voice.

"Please," she urged. How could anything frighten her when he had been the victim?

Alex exhaled shakily as he stretched his legs out in front of him, crossing them at the ankles. "Where to start?"

"At the beginning?"

Alex nodded as he pursed his lips. "My mother's first service to me was to stay alive."

Susanna's breath hitched in her throat, though she was determined not to make a sound.

"Pregnant women, pregnant slaves did not often survive in Saint-Domingue. They either died during pregnancy, or during birth. Some took their own lives believing that they and their children would return to Africa in death." Alex glanced at Susanna as he spoke his last statement, and Susanna did a poor job at masking her shock. She was too slow to control her expression. "I knew this would frighten you. I don't want to scare you, Susanna. This is not a fairy tale. Mine is not a happy story. I would rather your ears stay free from having to hear the cruelty that one's fellow man is capable of."

"No, I'm sorry. Please, go on," encouraged Susanna.

Alex looked upon her sadly. "Please don't apologise. None of what I say is your fault."

Susanna nodded and composed herself.

"My mother stayed alive," Alex said again carefully. "She did what she had to for food. She kept herself as healthy as possible, and when I came along, she protected me above anything. Infants didn't survive long. But Maman kept me alive. She kept us both alive.

"I do not remember not working. All I remember from my childhood is the shouting, the cracking sound the whips made, screams. My mother protected me from it all. She kept me safe, hidden when I needed to be, and out of the way. I was born into chains, and I was owned by a man called ..." Alex paused, as though he couldn't let the name out of his mouth. "He was always "Master" to us all. He was an evil man.

"The work was brutal, but the punishment for falling behind was even more so. We worked twelve hours, fifteen hours, sometimes whole days without rest. People died all the time. I have seen people die before my eyes from exhaustion, their ailing bodies simply giving out. It was cheaper, you see, to import more slaves then improve conditions.

"Master wasn't there all the time. He was what they would call grand blanc," Alex explained. "He spent a lot of time in France, and so his lands were looked after by the petit blancs. Those men were just as evil, if not more so. They tortured for amusement. Pulled men and women at random for a lashing. They would burn and brand people at will. The worst ... the worst I ever witnessed was ..." Alex stopped himself momentarily. "I have learned never to hit a white man," he stated, reiterating the point he had made after his assault in London. "Because in Saint-Domingue such a crime was immediate execution. I watched a man fight back, and the petit blancs buried him alive."

Susanna covered her gasp with her hand, but she could not mask her horror at such a revelation. How could she?

"It was all sanctioned," Alex continued angrily. "They wielded that Code Noir like the Bible. It was a book of rules, for how the French were to treat us. They believed the word of the king to be Gospel, that it gave them the Divine right to do whatever they pleased to us."

Something horrid told Susanna that Alex was concealing the very worst of what those men had done.

"What was worse was that the Catholic Church condoned what they were doing to us," Alex whispered. "They believed the good work the French were doing would civilise the African slaves, that it would turn them to Christianity. I struggled as a boy to believe in a God who could watch from above and do nothing while ...

"My mother prayed every night for God to forgive Master, to forgive the petit blancs. It used to infuriate me. She prayed for me, too. All the time. She prayed that I would live, and she did everything in her power to keep me safe, and to keep the white men from me."

Susanna hated to think of the sorts of things that Alex's mother would have had to do to keep him safe.

"When I was six years old, Master returned from France to control his land. The Revolution was beginning, and he sought to secure his holdings. He chose me on that day for no good reason. To assert his power. To frighten his people into submission. A petit blanc tore off the rags I was wearing, and he brought me before him. My mother screamed for me. I ... if I close my eyes, I can still hear it. She begged for me, offered them anything. But the master still smiled at me and twisted the chat à neuf queues in his hand."

Cat o' nine tails. Susanna stomach flipped as she translated it in her head. Alex had been a child, a six-year-old boy! How could this have happened?

"I didn't cry. He told me it would stop if I cried. But I wouldn't. The only reason he stopped was because he would be fined per the Code if he killed me without cause." Alex breathed heavily. "He then took my mother anyway and I didn't see her for three days. I thought she was dead. I wanted to die, too. I nearly did. I was feverish as my wounds were diseased. But she returned and she tended me as she always had. And we survived.

"The Revolution came to the island, and the next decade was a haze of fighting ... killing. Master was murdered in '91, as were many of the petit blancs. The slaves turned on their masters, and those who weren't killed escaped. But we were not free. It was believed that the island would not prosper without the plantations, and who better to farm them than the slaves? Instead of masters, it was the military, and we were forced to labour in much the same way.

"But we survived. And when the French were finally defeated in '04, and Saint-Domingue became Haiti, we were freed. Freed, but still forced to labour. So, I took my mother up into the mountains where I knew of a maroon community. And then I fled Haiti."

The rest Susanna could piece together. At some point, Alex had met Mr Bishop, and at another, he had journeyed to England. And a thousand other choices had led him to be sitting by the pond on the Ashwood estate on this day in September. But she never could have predicted such a tale, and she never could have grasped such character and soul.

Alex adored his mother, it was clear, and Susanna hoped that she was safe, wherever she was. What an extraordinarily brave and selfless woman.

But her heart absolutely broke for Alex. It bled. What unfathomable cruelty he had endured, and yet he had survived to tell the tale. To be a child of six and to have suffered such a lashing ... he had to carry those scars to this day. Scars that were visible, and scars that were not. Susanna hated to imagine the scars that she could not see.

Susanna went to apologise. It seemed instinctual, but he had asked her not to.

"I have never told anyone my story before," Alex finally murmured. "Not even Len. It's a story shared by far too many, and far too many are not alive anymore to share what happened, how they should have survived."

"Thank you for trusting me." Susanna reached out for Alex, and she placed her hand atop his large forearm.

She felt the muscles tense underneath her touch, and he turned towards her with an inquisitive stare, as though he was searching her face for fear. But Susanna wasn't afraid. He hadn't frightened her but marvelled her with his strength and spirit.

Alex's entire face softened as he continued to look at her, to look in to her. His brows slowly lowered as his mouth parted in realisation. "Good Lord, I do trust you," he realised softly. "I trust you."

"I'm glad," replied Susanna tenderly.

"Why are you so good?" Alex asked, almost sounding as though he was in disbelief.

Susanna didn't know how to answer such a question. She had already explained to him how she didn't believe that she was better than anyone else, the same as she didn't believe anyone else was better than her.

She had longed for worldliness, and she had just received her first dose. And she wanted so badly to apologise. Susanna would grieve later, she knew it. She would cry for the boy who was lashed, for the mother who endured all manner of horrors to keep her son alive.

"I wish this had never happened to you. To any of you," Susanna whispered. "You back ... how that must pain you."

"It doesn't pain me anymore," Alex replied quietly. "I feel it every night when I sleep. The tissue is harder, and the pressure does bother me sometimes, but I choose not to feel the pain."

Susanna's eyes unwittingly flicked to the collar of Alex's shirt out of uncontrollable curiosity. Alex noticed.

"I don't want to frighten you," he murmured again.

Which gave Susanna something desperately to prove. "You won't."

Alex looked upon her warily as he climbed up to his feet. He took a few steps away from her and she watched as he reached behind his head to grasp the collar of his shirt. Susanna quickly stood as well and watched on.

Alex tugged on his shirt and pulled it up and over his head, soon exposing her to the dark skin of his back. His back was broad and strong, and the surrounds of it were perfectly smooth. But across the middle of his back was a mess of raised black scars that looked like a mess of dark web. His back was a work of anger and hatred, a prime example of cruelty, and it was a harrowing thing to see.

But Susanna quickly understood that it was a far more harrowing thing to experience, and at one point in time, these wounds had been open sores, bleeding, diseased, and ... and they had been on the back of a boy.

She closed the distance between them without thinking much about it, reaching out to him and laying her hand against his skin for the second time, only this time the palm of her hand rested on the raised, hard lumps of skin that protruded from Alex's back. The moment her hand came into contact with Alex's skin, she felt a shudder down his spine.

She could see his pain, and she could feel his pain, and all Susanna wanted to be able to do was to take it away. Alex suddenly turned around and captured her extended hand in his. She gasped as she looked up at his face, the face she had thought, and still thought, was beautiful. Only now she knew the man. And something stirred within her stomach that she had never felt before.

Before she knew what was happening, Alex had closed the distance between them, capturing Susanna's lips in a passionate embrace.

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Hope you enjoyed it! 

The research that went into this chapter was honestly devastating. The people of Saint-Domingue (and later Haiti) were some of the most, if not the most, brutally treated slaves in the world during this time, and I honestly couldn't write some of what was sanctioned by the French colonisers. The sugar and coffee trade was so productive out of Haiti purely because these people were worked to death and then quickly replaced.

What is even more devastating is that slavery is still a problem in Haiti today. Over 200,000 people are still enslaved today and there is more human trafficking in Haiti than any other Central or South American country. Child slavery and sex slavery are a huge problem. If you want to learn more about it, or you feel inclined or are able to help, please visit https://restavekfreedom.org/issue/

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