The field of “Night Studies” has produced much scholarship on the medieval Arabic text “Alf Layla Wa Layla” (Arabian Nights) on gender, oral traditions, violence, and the politics of translation. However, the figure of the sexually deviant enslaved black subject remains understudied. By conducting a close reading of this medieval text, I examine the centrality of blackness and anti-blackness in 14th century text by tracing the ontological formation of the enslaved black subject in the text which, I argue, is constituted through slavery and racial animality. This paper center Mas’ood, a black slave who is only called into the story to sexually serve Shahrayar’s wife; every time he is called upon, Mas‘ood descends from a tree to the ground. Drawing on theories of racial animality which dictate that “blackness is a species construct (meaning “in proximity to the animal”), and animalness is a racial construct (meaning “in proximity to blackness”), and the two are dynamically interconstituted all the way down,” I argue that the black subject in this folklore is constituted as an animal, not human. While this popular medieval work of folklore has been “transformed and translated” from Persian to Arabic, English and French, the figure of the sexually deviant black slave remains. Central to the text is the gendered violence that women are subjected to at the hands of Shahrayar which is the result of his wife’s infidelity and sexual escapades with her black slave Mas’ood. Thus, one must ask, what role does the sexually deviant slave play in the psyche of the medieval Arab? How can we understand women’s subjugation in the text against the backdrop of “deviant” black hypersexuality? This paper attempts to answer those questions.