Nightjohn Read online

  ALSO AVAILABLE IN LAUREL-LEAF BOOKS:

  THE CAR, Gary Paulsen

  CANYONS, Gary Paulsen

  THE CROSSING, Gary Paulsen

  THE ISLAND, Gary Paulsen

  THE NIGHT THE WHITE DEER DIED, Gary Paulsen

  JOHNNY TREMAIN, Esther Forbes

  THE SLAVE DANCER, Paula Fox

  THE GIVER, Lois Lowry

  LAND OF HOPE, Joan Lowery Nixon

  LAND OF PROMISE, Joan Lowery Nixon

  LAND OF DREAMS, Joan Lowery Nixon

  Published by

  Bantam Doubleday Dell Books for Young Readers

  a division of

  Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

  1540 Broadway

  New York, New York 10036

  Copyright © 1993 by Gary Paulsen

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. For information address Delacorte Press, New York, New York 10036.

  The trademark Laurel-Leaf Library® is registered in the U.S. Patent and

  Trademark Office.

  The trademark Dell® is registered in the U.S. Patent and

  Trademark Office.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-80422-8

  RL: 4.6

  Reprinted by arrangement with Delacorte Press

  v3.1

  This book is dedicated to the memory of

  Sally Hemings, who was owned, raised,

  and subsequently used by Thomas

  Jefferson without benefit of ever drawing

  a single free breath.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Preview of Sarny: A Life Remembered

  About the Author

  Except for variations in time and

  character identification and placement,

  the events written in this story are true

  and actually happened.

  ONE

  This is a story about Nightjohn. I guess in some ways it is a story about me just as much because I am in it and I know what happened and some of it happened to me but it still seems to be most about him.

  Nightjohn.

  There’s some to say I brought him with witchin’, brought Nightjohn because he came to be talking to me alone but it ain’t so. I knew he was coming but it wasn’t witchin’, just listening.

  It happened. How it came to be was that Nightjohn he came and it wasn’t me, wasn’t nobody one or the other brought him except maybe it was that God did it, made Nightjohn to come.

  God and maybe old Clel Waller. He wants that we should call him “master,” and they’s some do when he can hear but we call him dog droppings and pig slop and worse things yet when he ain’t listening nor close. He ain’t no master of nobody except that he’s got dogs and a whip and a gun and so can cause hurt to be on some, bad hurt, but he ain’t no master for all of that. We just call him that when we have to. Keeps him from whipping on us.

  I’m Sarny and they be thinking I’m dumb and maybe up to witchin’ and got a stuck tongue because when I birthed they say I come out wrong, come out all backwards and twixt-and-twinst. But it ain’t so that I’m dumb. I’m just quiet and they be thinking because I don’t make noise and go to twattering all the time that I be dumb. But I ain’t. I just be so quiet and listen all the time that I learn things.

  I’m Sarny and the other part of my name be the same as old Waller who wants to be master but is nothing. Nothing. I don’t count the back part of my name no more than I count old Waller himself. No more than I count spit.

  My mammy she told me that my birthing mammy was sold when I was four years old because she was a good breeder and Waller he needed the money. My mammy said that my birthing mammy brought enough for four field hands and that she cried when the man bought her. My mammy say that my birthing mammy stood in the back of a wagon and watched back and waved and my mammy held me up so I could see the waving and hear her crying. But I don’t remember that.

  All I know for a mammy is the one that raised me, old Delie, and she be the one who raises all the young. Breeders don’t get to keep their own babies because they be spending all their time raising babies and not working. So when they’re born babies go to the wet nurse and she feeds them and then old Delie gets them and they don’t live with their birthing mammies again even if they aren’t sold off.

  It isn’t for certain how old I am except for the Micks. Mammy keeps a stick for each one of us and in the summer she cuts a notch on the stick for each of the girls so as to know when it will come time for the troubles and then the breeding. Waller puts great store in the sticks and watches them like a old hawk watching the chicken pens.

  By the stick I am going into the same year as all the fingers on both hands, fold them down, then hold up the thumbs. Delie says it be twelve but I don’t know numbers to count so that doesn’t mean so much to me. I don’t yet have the trouble so I am still left to be as a child. We work around the quarters and clean the yard and gather eggs and help mammy with the young ones. It’s work, but it ain’t dawn to dark hard work like the field work and it leaves me a bit of time to listen and see things. Mammy she tells me some things to learn and I hear some others from the field hands who come back at dark and now and again I have to work in the flower beds below the big window on the white house.

  The house women are fond of leaving the window open and talking all their business right there. So when I’m in the flower bed below the window I hear more things to learn. When the day is coming on dark and we are all finished eating out of the trough in the front of the quarters I get onto the pallet in the back of the long log house with Delie and the babies and I lays there and thinks.

  I thinks of all the things I have learned that day and then I tries to add them to the things I learned the day before and then the day before that. I’ve been doing that as long as I can remember, since I was almost just walking, and I remember all the parts of my life. If there is time of an evening and I haven’t been worked to the bone I can just lay there in the dark and think on all my time and remember it. Except for my birthing mammy—I can’t think on her at all except to wonder and wonder about her. Did she have dark skin or light? How was her voice, how did it sound? But you can’t remember what isn’t there and no amount of thinking on it will make it come into my brain.

  It was in the flower bed that I first heard about Nightjohn. Not by name, but by happening.

  TWO

  One morning I was below the window working in the roses. Some leaves had fallen because of the little green bugs that eat the roses and I had to chew tobacco leaves and spit on the plants to kill the bugs. I didn’t much like to chew on tobacco leaves, though some of the men favored it, and it made me sick enough to near heave my guts. I had to stop and while I was stopped, just under the window down in the thick leaves and the soft dirt, I hears it.

  “I swear—if Clel doesn’t stop buying hands we won’t have any money left for dresses.” It was the missus talking to her sister. Her sister be an older woman never found a man, dried up and mean and she hates us. The missus is named Margaret and her sister named Alaine or something close to that. Course we never call them by their names. Never talk to them at all. And when we talk about them in the quarters and ain’t nobody listening but quarters’ people we call
them same as the master. Call them dog droppings or horse crap.

  “He went out and bought another hand,” the missus said. “Over a thousand dollars. Honestly, he must think we’re made of money.”

  I didn’t know counting but I knew a little of money. Once I found a penny in the dirt by the quarters and I went to mammy and held it out.

  “Hide that,” she told me. “That’s money. Somebody see that and they’ll come along and take it from you.”

  So I figured money was something to have and keep and I kept the penny, hid in the dirt at the end of the quarters and I still have it. Sometimes I take it out when there ain’t anybody around and rub it on my shirtdress until it shines and shines.

  And I knew that there was bigger money than a penny but I didn’t know how that all worked, that bigger money, because it wasn’t something I learned. So when the missus she said about a new hand costing a thousand dollars all I knew was that it was more than a penny. More than many pennies. Maybe more than all the pennies in the world because they be rich, the people in the white house.

  Richer than God, mammy said once, but she was just mad and didn’t mean it. She’d been praying and got caught at it. People in the quarters weren’t supposed to pray nor know nothing about God. Mammy she prayed all the time, in her head. Usually she only prayed out loud late at night when there wasn’t anybody to hear her. Sometimes she brought in the big cast iron kettle used for making morning food to pour in the trough for us to eat.

  Mammy would put the kettle in the corner of the quarters, way back in the dark corner, and put her head inside the kettle so’s the sound wouldn’t carry and she’d pray in a whisper. She swore they could hear like cats up to the big house and the only way to keep safe was to pray in the kettle.

  I one time put my head in the kettle with her.

  “Lord Jesus,” she said, talking to the bottom of the kettle. “Lord Jesus, you come be making us free. Free someday. In your name, amen.”

  I was small then and didn’t know about being free, or even how to think about being free, or even what being free meant. So I asked her what free meant.

  “Nothing to talk about now,” she said. “You’ll know when you get older but now you just be quiet and never, never say you heard me praying about being free.”

  Which I never did, even after I learned what freedom is and started praying for it my ownself. Even then.

  The people in the white house aren’t richer than God, I know that.

  But they be rich, and they be spending a lot of money and they brought in the new hand for a thousand dollars.

  And that be Nightjohn.

  THREE

  Old Waller brought him in bad.

  Sometimes they come in not so bad. Spec’lators bring them to sell sometimes all in a wagon, sell them from the wagon and Waller he buys them one or two or whatever, right from the wagon.

  Sometimes Waller he goes for to buy them at some other place and brings them home in the wagon, sitting in the back. Old Waller on the seat with a pistol in his belt, sitting like he thinks he’s big. Other places, near here, other places have what they call overseers to use the whip and to use the gun and go to get them. But not here. Waller he loves to carry the whip and carry the gun and so he rides in the wagon his ownself and makes on to be big. Sitting there like he don’t know we hate him.

  But he can bring them in good or he can bring them in bad and with Nightjohn he brought him in bad.

  Not in the wagon. He was walking, all alone in front of the horse. Waller riding the big brown horse in back. Had a rope down and over to a shackle on Nightjohn’s neck. Rope tied to the saddle. So when the horse stopped, Nightjohn he stopped, jerked on his neck.

  Waller he brought Nightjohn into the main yard near the quarters out in the open, yelling and swearing at him. Yanking on the rope. Nightjohn he didn’t have any clothes on, stood naked in the sun. I was by the quarters, carrying water to wash the eating trough before it was time for the evening feeding and I saw them.

  Standing in the sun with the rope going from his neck up to the saddle, tired and sweating because Waller ran him. Dust all over him. Flies around his shoulders.

  His back was all over scars from old whippings. The skin across his shoulders and down was raised in ripples, thick as my hand, up and down his back and onto his rear end and down his legs some.

  I wondered why he was bought with all the marks. When they be marked that way people don’t buy them because it means they hard to work, hard to get to work.

  But he did. Waller he brought Nightjohn home and ran him naked till he sweated and the biting flies took at him and I was there and saw him come in.

  I’m brown. Same as dark sassafras tea. But I had seen black people, true black. And Nightjohn was that way. Beautiful. So black he was like the marble stone by the front of the white house; so black it seemed I could see inside, down into him. See almost through him somehow.

  In a little, Waller he untied the rope. Then he cracked the whip once or twice like he be a big man and drives Nightjohn past the quarters and out to the field to work. Didn’t matter that he’d been run or might be thirsty. He didn’t stop at the pump but ran him right on through and out to the fields, naked as he was born, to get to hoeing.

  He come in bad and it wasn’t until late that night, after dark in the quarters, that I learned his name.

  Mammy she made canvas pants for the new men when they came. Sewed them from the roll of tarp-cloth we used for all our clothes. She gave a pair to Nightjohn when they came in from the field but he didn’t have time to say nothing because it was time for the evening food.

  Two times a day at the wooden trough—that’s how we eat. Mornings they pour buttermilk down the trough and we dip cornbread in it and sometimes pieces of pork fat. We take turns on a calabash gourd for a dipper to get all the milk out except the little ones don’t always get much of a turn and have to lick the bottom of the trough when it’s done. For midday meal the field hands—men and women both, ’less a woman is a breeder in her last month, then she can work the yard—each carry a piece of cornbread and pork fat or meat with them. When the sun is high overhead they stop long enough to stand and eat the bread and fat. They don’t get to sit or rest. Even do they have to do their business they dig a hole with their hoe and do it standing and cover it with dirt and get back to work.

  Don’t they do this, don’t they do it right, don’t they keep standing and work even to eat and do their business, don’t they do it all just exactly right the whip comes down on them. Old Waller he don’t have overseers but they’s two men he calls drivers. They have whips and clubs and use them.

  Then at night, when it’s just dark they come in from the fields. During the day mammy and the breeders that can still walk and the small ones that can’t keep up to work in the fields yet make food.

  We cook in the big pot mammy used for praying. We cook pork fat and vegetables from the garden and make skillet cornbread. When the field people come in at night we pour from the pot in the trough and everybody passes the gourd and eats with their hands and dips cornbread into the juice till it’s gone. Then the young ones get to lick the trough and we go into the quarters for the night.

  There ain’t no light allowed in the quarters. Time was, mammy said, when she had a small bowl and made a lamp with a piece of cotton and melted pork fat but up to the white house they saw the light and made her put it out. Kept the workers awake, they said.

  Course we be awake anyway, if we want to. Just be awake in the dark. Light comes through the open door and there are four small windows down the back wall. If there’s a moon there be good light, light enough to see faces and talk and even if there isn’t a moon enough comes from the stars and the lights from the white house to let us see a little.

  Those to work in the field are always tired. Always caved in with work. And there ain’t never enough to eat, so they be hungry, too. They usually go to sleep as soon as they hit the corn-shuck pallets on the floor.<
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  But the first night when the new man was there you could tell it was going to be different. He didn’t even get on the floor but went right over to the corner where mammy put the pot to pray sometimes and sat there. The new canvas pants were so stiff I could hear them crackle and bend when he sat back against the wall. I was on the side of mammy’s shuck mattress along with about half a dozen young ones who were all kicking and scratching so sleep wasn’t coming and I hear:

  “Who’s got tobacco? I need some tobacco.”

  It was a whisper, but loud, cutting from the corner where the new man sat. I had me some tobacco. It was just shredded bottom leaf that I’d been chewing to spit on the roses but I’d kept some back in a wrapped piece of sacking inside my shirtdress, tied round my waist on a piece of string. I didn’t say a word. You come on things, things to keep, and you keep them to trade for other things. Things you need. Like pork fat. Or pennies.

  He chuckled, low and rippling. Sounded like a low wind through willows, that small laugh, or maybe water moving over round rocks. Deep and soft.

  “I’ll trade,” he whispered. “I’ll trade something for a lip of tobacco.”

  I thought, What you got to trade? You come in naked as the day you was born, come in bad with whip marks all up and down your back, not even a set of clothes or canvas pants and you’re ready to go to trading? I didn’t say it, but I thought it. And he like to read my thoughts.

  “What I got to trade, what I got to trade for a lip of tobacco is letters. I knows letters. I’ll trade A, B, and C for a lip of chew.” He laughed again.

  And there I was, with the tobacco in my dress and he said that and I didn’t know what letters was, nor what they meant, but I thought it might be something I wanted to know. To learn.

  So mammy she was sleeping, her breath moving in and out, and I wiggled out of the pile of young ones and moved to the dark corner and set my ownself next to him. “What’s a letter?”