Ray Nessly's Reviews > Nightjohn

Behind on reviews. Read sometime in July 2022, in a few short sittings.
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Nightjohn is a YA title, and it shows. But it’s a riveting, tragic story, and surprisingly violent. I came away shaken, saddened by this reminder of the nation’s shame: slavery. And the story was so involving that I’m very much interested in the sequel. In this novella, John, an adult slave, teaches twelve-year old Sarny the rudiments of reading. Learning to read is completely forbidden for slaves, of course. On penalty of mutilation. (The sequel, Sarny: a Life Remembered, is her journey after the civil war, trying to find her sold-away children.)

"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."

Adults will find Nightjohn to be a quick read. Eighty pages, only about 13,000 words by my rough calculations. (Rant: Hey publishers, why don’t you routinely provide the word count? It's easy. You’ve got the document, right? All it takes is a key stoke on Word. Now, add a short line to the book description on Amazon or whatever. “Word count: xxx.” You’re welcome.)

Anyway … some folks recommend Nightjohn for elementary school readers. It depends of course on the maturity of your little ones, but I can’t imagine grade-schoolers being able to handle this material. The story is narrated in first person by Sarny, an illiterate slave girl. I would imagine the syntax and patois would be difficult for someone very young to understand. Admiringly, the author doesn’t just drop g’s and call it a day; instead, he makes every effort to accurately recreate this manner of speech. And the structures of the sentences themselves are occasionally “odd.” This makes the words realistic, but it also makes them probably not a breeze for every reader to follow.

Also, there is quite a bit of violence. When I was young, the depiction of violence in books and TV was infrequent and unrealistic. For example, in a show, when someone was shot, they’d wince and keel over, usually no blood. In this book, whippings are frequent and graphic. Backs become bloody jelly; scars like coils of rope develop. Toes are amputated. Stomachs kicked. Attempted runaways are ripped to shreds by dogs; limbs, chest, buttocks, stripped of flesh. Young slave girls dread their first menstruation, knowing they’ll be forced to “breed.”

Children are sold off, separated from their parents forever. Sure, you already knew that. But let that sink in ...

More psychological violence: I knew that slaves weren’t allowed to worship in church. In this story, slaves aren’t even allowed to pray, in silence, privately. The “rationale” for that I can’t even begin to understand --apparently it wasn’t as universal as forbidding congregation, but on some plantations, as in the one in this story, even private prayer was verboten. In one scene, a slave puts her face into an empty food bowl, ensuring that her whispered prayers go undetected.

Don’t misunderstand. I think it’s important to teach kids how brutal and shameful slavery was. At what age, though, does one introduce this knowledge? The narrator is twelve. Maybe that's a guide point. Again, it's up to parents, and teachers, to decide.
But for those old enough to handle it, Nightjohn is a very good read. For kids of all ages.