eyes is pure relief, the spirit within that meek smile is satisfaction; for Robert Goodwin had finally been released from the long-preserved state that, in deference to his good father, he had kept achingly intact until his wedding night—his virginity!
However, it was not Caroline that plucked him. For while Robert Goodwin’s new bride lay reclining upon her bed—the ribbons at the neck of her nightgown untied and the garment teased down low to reveal the ample mounds of her primped and scented breasts, as she eagerly waited for her new husband to finish his business within the negro village—he was in the room under the house, frenziedly dropping the clothes from off our July’s back.
He had turned July around within the feeble light of a tallow candle like an anticipated birthday gift finally unwrapped. And, as if to confirm that each inch of her was indeed as delightful as his possessed mind’s eye had conjured, he studied her close. Laying her down, his hands stroked all over her. And where his hands roamed, his tongue and lips soon followed. When he entered her his breath came so fast and he yelled so loud that July slapped her hand across his mouth to stifle the sound lest her missus hear this obscene intimacy seeping up through the boards of her floor. Afterwards he hugged July close to him—her back against his front. He had married ‘that woman’, he told July softly into the dark, just so he could be with her like this—just like this. And then he whispered to July over and over that he loved her, oh how he loved her.
By the time Robert Goodwin finally arrived at his new wife’s chamber, he was exhausted. He promised Caroline that their coupling would take place soon and not to bother him now, for he was very tired as the negroes had quite worn him out with their demands . . . and, oh please could she cease mentioning it . . . and certainly she was his love, but would she stop incessantly whining, for it was making his head ache . . . and, of course, of course, he desired her, but had she not heard him? . . . soon, he promised, soon. Then he slept sweet as a suckled and belched babe.
Whose suggestion it was that the backdrop for this portrait—Mr and Mrs Goodwin—be the open landscape of the plantation and not the long room at Amity, is arguable. The artist—who took several months to carefully figure the grounds into a tropical idyll—claimed it was his. However, Robert Goodwin maintained that he saw a similar background used in a painting of some English gentry and so declared the idea his own. But whoever fathered the notion, Robert Goodwin stands before the trunk of what appears to be a rather puny baobab tree. No longer a lowly overseer, he looks every part the master of the beautiful view that the artist has constructed. Come, his chin is held high. And why would it not be?
Eight letters Robert Goodwin had received from his father which had urged him with increasing passion, to think of marrying soon. His father wrote of his age—how he was no longer a boy; of his circumstance, which would be greatly eased with a wife to share his burdens; of temptations that were easily overcome within marriage; and of Lucinda Partridge, a young girl within his father’s village in England who always talked of Robert with affection and had ambition to travel.
Robert Goodwin had longed to oblige his father with this seemingly commonplace request. But he loved a negro girl. He loved July. And to marry a negro . . . to marry a negro! Oh, who could countenance such an indecent proposal? Certainly not his father. To bring kindness to the negro, to minister to the negro, to pity the negro, was his father’s dearest wish for him. But for his son to marry the negro—that would surely kill him.
However, within the next letter that he received, his father had written: ‘Remember, Robert, that a married man might do as he pleases.’ Now, although Robert Goodwin had never dared to even hint to his father of the troubling attraction he felt for the negro house servant, he somehow came to believe that those instructive words were meant as suggestion. A married man might do as he pleases.
If, Robert Goodwin had pondered, he were a married man, then might he not be able to keep