I Want to Be a Slave

Pieces of cloth drifted to the floor like ash from a volcano. Neema Hudgins, in the basement to her family's modest three-story Wilmington, Delaware home, clipped and clipped until patches shown on the worn white dress. She had pressed the dress in muddy water overnight and dried it on the line overnight. Shabby and dingy, she slipped the piece of fabric over her body. She peered at herself in the mirror. What reflected back was an 18-year-old woman who had had enough. She ventured up the stairs. Her ascension in physical form deviated from the low grade that she had leveled herself. The first person to see her that morning was her brother Greer, age 16.

“Neema, what the hell?”

Neema put her index finger to her lips.

Greer just waved her off and prepared for school that morning, gathering materials for a light breakfast.

Neema walked with slow precision up the stairs to her bedroom. She was greeted by her mother Faleema and her father Sturges Hudgins in the hallway. Her mother’s worry lines appeared above her brow as her lip curled.

“Young lady, what in the world has gotten into you?”

“I want to be a slave. I mean I am a slave. I just have to make it official,” Neema said.

“Neema, you better get ready for work,” Hudgins said.

“I reckon to go down to the courthouse to sign documents saying that I am trans-slave. I am letting go of my individual rights,” Neema said.

“Trans-what, now?” Hudgins asked.

“I’m really a slave. I should’ve been born into the hellish world that our forefathers and foremothers had to endure. I want that. I am willing to give up all of my freedoms to become just like them.”

“Baby, do you hear what you are saying? What brought all of this up? You’ve never spoken like this before,” Faleema said.

“It’s something that was growing inside of me and has finally bloomed. All it takes is a few strokes of a stylus and I’ll be carted off into the places in Delaware that held slaves.”

“We’re going to stop you right now... we can look up the Constitution online, read it to you, and get you some soothing tea to drink and prevent you from harming yourself mentally and physically.”

“I say we drive her down to the courthouse,” Hudgins said with a cool tone.

“What?! You want your daughter to go through with this abomination?” Faleema asked her husband.

“Let’s go.”

When the three of them had arrived at the New Castle County Courthouse, they encountered stares. Neema’s apparel signaled something off and amiss. She didn’t mind. A clerk at the courthouse greeted the Hudgins.

“Yes and how may I…” he looked at Neema who shot a glance down at the floor, not to meet the eyes of the white man.

Hudgins looked directly at the clerk and said, “She wants to be a slave.”

“Why, this cannot happen. The laws of the Constitution of the United States of America bar anyone from becoming chattel,” Clerk Micah Callow said.

Faleema turned to her daughter. “Do you see that, Neem? It’s in the Constitution. No one can make themselves into a property of another individual.” The family journeyed back into the car.

“You don’t need to look to the law to change your status as a free woman into a slave,” Hudgins said. “Consider all of the mental slavery that is disseminated through the culture. You’re told what government schools to go to, what government healthcare to get, what taxes that are levied against you. This, contrary to popular belief is not a free country. Semi-free, maybe, but certainly not free. Do you see now, Neema?”

“I’ll just have to find ways to keep myself from seeking out those avenues that would help me from possessing sovereignty over my person. I’m very comfortable with being a slave. Why, you both can punish me and make me labor until I give out from exhaustion. I could be raped by a white master and have my babies taken from me. Can that be?”

“No,” Hudgins and Faleema both said to their daughter.