Nightjohn Read online

  “I just come across old Willy. You remember him?”

  For certain I remembered him. Delie she said that she and old Willy once had eyes for one another. Soft old man used to carve willow whistles for the children in the quarters. Called them whoop-te-do whistles. Gray hair, gray beard, soft voice, soft smile.

  “They sold him for fifty dollars,” Lucy said. “That was all. Fifty dollars …”

  And it caught me then, what we were looking at. I had been too much on little Delie and Tyler, couldn’t see past my darlings.

  Lives. These were lives. All the people we knew and didn’t know and Greerson, Waller, all the small evil men had been selling lives. Whole lives. My mammy, pappy, Delie, Billy—didn’t matter. All bought and sold, people bought and sold for money, for work, to work to death. Heard once that when they worked the men down in the cane fields south, far south, they figured on the men being dead by twenty and seven. It was the way they worked it out. After they were twenty and seven they started to break and it was easier to just let them die and get newer ones, younger ones.

  People. People bought and sold and each of them on these little pieces of paper, each of their lives down to a slip of auction paper. “Answers to name of …”

  Swore then, swore in my mind so I suppose it’s the same as swearing in the open and I hope God he don’t get to keeping too close a track on those things. Swore at all the evil that men could do and I cried some with Lucy, cried for the people on the small papers we read in the yellow light from the lamp.

  We stopped for a bit and sat, getting sad, but then I shook my head. Crying wouldn’t help. “We have to eat something now. So we can keep going.”

  She took out one of the hams. We didn’t have a knife but there was broken glass from the windows and I found a piece and sliced two chunks, thick with fat and smelling of hickory smoke. The smell must have been more than I thought because twice men came to the door while we were eating. One white and the other the same black man who had been beating Greerson. The white man he just looked in and moved on, scared looking, a white face flashing in the lamplight and gone. The black man he came in and we gave him some ham and he chewed it quiet, sitting in the corner, didn’t talk to us, never a word and then he left, nodding his thanks for the ham while we went back to the papers.

  More lives. We looked all night, paper on paper, and I stacked the ones we read in a neat pile. I couldn’t bring myself to throw them away meaning what they meant and just at first gray dawn, sun just starting to help the lamp, Lucy she found it.

  “Two children, one boy answers to name of Tyler, girl answers to name of Delie, to be auctioned together or separately—”

  I snatched the paper away from her and read but it didn’t say more. Just that, to be auctioned. My babies, to be sold. Together or separately? Not that, not apart, not all of us apart. Where were they, when were they sold, who bought them, who bought my babies, my life?

  Nothing more on the paper. I turned it over and over but it didn’t give nothing. Couldn’t think, couldn’t do, couldn’t make my brain get working again.

  “We have to keep looking,” Lucy said. “There might be more paper on them.” And she picked up another piece, then another, and I nodded and we kept going, kept looking and finally, eyes burning from smoke and no sleep and reading in the dim light all night Lucy she found it again.

  “Two young Negro children, answer to Delie and Tyler, sold to William Chivington of New Orleans without auction for three hundred dollars.”

  I took the paper, hands shaking. Only thing else was the date. One day after they were taken from me. There was no auction. Greerson he must have been worried about what was coming. Wanted to get his money and run, only he didn’t run far. Just to his yards. Low man, low as a snake’s belly, he laid dead now in the yard where he caused so much misery.

  But we had something now. We had a name, the name of the man who bought my children. We had a name and we had a place.

  “Where,” Lucy asked, “is New Orleans?”

  “It’s where we’re going.” Had hope now, had a name, a place. Had hope. Had something. “It’s where we’re going.”

  Gary Paulsen is the distinguished author of many critically acclaimed books for young people, including three Newbery Honor books, The Winter Room, Hatchet, and Dogsong. His most recent books for Delacorte Press are A Christmas Sonata, The Haymeadow, and The Monument. He is also the author of an original paperback series from Dell, the Culpepper Adventures. He and his wife have homes in New Mexico and on the Pacific.

  DON’T MISS

  the companion to Nightjohn:

  Sarny: A Life Remembered

  by Gary Paulsen

  Many readers of Nightjohn have wanted to know what happened to Sarny, the young slave whom Nightjohn taught to read. Here is Sarny’s story, from the moment she leaves the plantation in the last days of the Civil War, suddenly a free woman in search of her sold-away children. Her quest takes her to New Orleans and the home of the remarkable and mysterious Miss Laura. Like Nightjohn, Miss Laura changes Sarny’s life, and she helps Sarny pass Nightjohn’s gift on to new generations. This riveting saga follows Sarny until her last days in the 1930s and gives readers a panoramic view of America in a time of trial, tragedy, and hoped-for change.

  “A great read, with characters both to hate and to cherish, and a rich sense of what it really was like back then.”

  —Booklist, Starred Review

  “Sarny is a noble character who carries Paulsen’s message of the power of literacy.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Sarny is a wonderful, believable character. Her story makes absorbing reading.”

  —School Library Journal