ISBN: 0-385-30838-8.
Nightjohn was a slave who was brought to the Waller plantation at the end of a rope � naked, dirty, and covered with biting flies. The patchwork of scars he bore told his story: he was a runner. Twelve-year-old Sarny quickly formed an alliance with the newcomer. She would provide him with tobacco in return for letters: �I�ll trade A, B, and C for a lip of chew.� (p. 34) When Mammy discovers Sarny writing letters in the dirt with a stick, she is alarmed because reading is strictly forbidden for slaves. Sarny is warned of the consequences: �You learn to read and they�ll whip you till your skin hangs like torn rags. Or cut your thumb off. Stay away from writing and reading.� (p. 36)
Sarny is eventually found out by Waller, and the inevitable happens. Mammy is cruelly beaten when she refuses to reveal the name of Sarny�s teacher. After Nightjohn intervenes and confesses to teaching Sarny, Waller brutally hacks a toe off of each foot with a hammer and chisel. Before his feet heal, Nightjohn disappears, but a few months later he stealthily returns in the night. He leads Sarny to his secret �pit school,� disguised by brush, where he is teaching slaves from all the surrounding plantations to read.
The story is narrated by Sarny, a twelve-year-old slave girl, with the effective use of dialect. Through her eyes, readers see what life was like in the slave quarters. The misery and inhumanity of slavery is shown in the starkest terms, as Sarny tells the plain truth as she knows it. We see people treated like animals: forced to eat from troughs, �bred� against their will, stripped naked and beaten, and deprived of family life and relationships.
The pain and indignity of slavery is poignantly and painfully captured in Sarny�s matter-of-fact narration. �Breeders don�t get to keep their own babies because they be spending all their time raising babies and not working.� (p. 16) Even children were forced to do miserable work. Sarny describes how she chewed tobacco and spit the juice on plants to kill pests. �It made me sick enough to near heave my guts.� (p. 20)
Paulsen�s powerful use of imagery puts the reader in the story, evoking strong emotions. He captures Sarny�s panic and bewilderment as she�s kicked and beaten by Waller, with her face in the dirt �near his feet. Big boots. Black boots but wrong kind of black. Bad black, not good black like John. Mammy. Me. My mind rolled around like a sick dog.� (p. 63)
The cruelty of the plantation owner, Waller, is starkly described in his treatment of Mammy. �He hit her with his fist. Then he unhooked her from the chains and ripped her clothes from off her body and dragged her naked to the harness. �Put it on � I feel like a ride in the buggy.�. . She strained and heaved and the wagon it moved and Waller kept saying: �Faster, damn it, faster.� And the whip come again and again.� (p. 71)
The characters are described as they are perceived by a child. The white people are flat characters, supremely contemptible and evil, toward whom Sarny feels a cold hatred. Waller is described as a �white maggot� (p. 68) and �pig slop� (p. 14), and the ladies of the house are inelegantly referred to as �dog droppings or horse crap.� (p. 21)
The slave population are characterized both as a group and individually. Secretiveness is necessary for survival, and all are canny and wary of the people in the big house. "[Waller] wants that we should call him �master�. . .We just call him that when we have to. Keeps him from whipping on us.� (p. 14)
Sarny is the most well-rounded character in the book, because she reveals herself through her narration. The other principal characters, Delie and John, are archetypes of the roles they play in Sarny�s life: the wise, protective mammy and the defiant, tireless liberator.
The innate yearning for freedom and dignity is the primary theme that courses through the story. Although people in the quarters were punished if they were caught praying, Mammy �prayed all the time in her head.� She would �put her head inside the kettle so�s the sound wouldn�t carry and she�d pray in a whisper. . . �Lord Jesus, you come be making us free. Free someday.�� (p. 23)
This award-winning book tells a story that is not easy to read. Many young children will be emotionally unprepared, and discretion should be used by parents and teachers in presenting it. Its truthfulness is compelling, however, and Paulsen does not shrink from telling it in graphically honest terms.
Kirkus Reviews (January, 1993) describes it as �a searing picture of slavery� and Publisher�s Weekly (December 14, 1992) says it �evokes shame for this country�s forefathers.� Readers are not left, however, without a glimpse of the hope that knowledge continually kindled in the slave quarters: �Late he come walking and it be Nightjohn and he bringing us the way to know.� (p. 92)
Related Websites:
Gary Paulsen Website:
http://www.randomhouse.com/features/garypaulsen/
Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/snhtml/snhome.html
Back of the Big House: The Cultural Landscape of the Plantation:
http://www.gwu.edu/~folklife/bighouse/index.html