by Robert Trailins
1969 Lancer Books
1825, South Carolina. Slave breeder Jeremy Black and his craven, under-endowned brother-in-law Haroun Weens, buy the African prince Brutus during their usual shipment of under-aged sex slaves. Jeremy literally bets the farm against Haroun that Brutus won't have sex with his mother and wife. This goes well for no one, and the short book ends horrifically with dismemberment and hog feeding.
It feels like Tralins had a list of pervs and fetishes next to his typewriter and checked them off as he went: interracial sex, prostitution, sexual slavery, adultery, voyeurism, exhibitionism, lesbianism, rape, child rape, bondage, and incest, oh, the incest. So much incest. The short reason for this is because Mandingo had it, the same reason this book has pit fighting and a plantation owner who can't sleep with his own wife because she's White. Although, I'm beginning to suspect that the Plantation Gothic genre may just be a delivery system for incest porn.
There are different ways that exploitation presents atrocities. There's a "just the facts" approach, just laying it out as historical evidence. The prologue of Black Brute, in which it claims it's based on actual diaries, starts with this approach, but it doesn't last. Some books present things with mock indignation, or play up the horrific aspects along with the titillating ones.
Here, Tralins, and his characters, are just having fun with it. Up until the end, that is. The teenage girls straight off the slave ship are absolutely down for it, unless Tralins wants them to scream a little bit first, but they come around. This feels so, so much worse.
I was expecting Brutus, six foot eight and speaking eight languages, to be the hero, or at least a noble savage type. Nope, he likes raping children as much as the slavers, giggles at shiny things, and is submissive throughout the story.
The actual sex scenes are written in a strange way for exploitation. This isn't like a bodice ripper or erotica, where we get at least a half page of what the sex-havers are experiencing with various degrees of euphemisms. Black Brute is crude and anatomical and barely describes the actual act: "He's got a wiener, she has boobies, and they did the sex". The references to off-page sex are about as explicit as the actual sex scenes.
Speaking of language, this has some of the worst dialect I've ever read, almost impenetrable, with made up nonsense like "h'it" and "h'aint". At least Tralins has the White people talking crappier English than the Black characters, which is a nice change of pace.
This is the beginning of a trilogy, which is collected in Black Roots.
No comments:
Post a Comment