Sarny becomes his first student at the Waller plantation, but when she is caught excitedly practicing her first word, "bag," in the dirt, her mammy is savagely beaten until John stops the lashing by confessing his responsibility. John had been a successful runaway who returned to the South to teach slaves to read and write by night, only to be captured and sold again to Clel Waller. When Master Waller brings in a new field hand with a back ridged with healed lashes, twelve-year-old Sarny has no idea that this man, nicknamed Nightjohn, will change her life. Gary Paulsen's "historically accurate" account of 1850's slave America puts the reader back into a brutal, almost unrecognizable world. You learn to read and they'll whip you till your skin hangs like torn rags. They catch you doing that and they'll think you're learning to read. I was just copying something I saw on a feed sack." "Don't you take to that, take to writing," she said. I wrote it down in the dirt with a stick and mammy gave me a smack on the back of the head that like to drove me into the ground.
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