"Me and That First Word:" Nightjohn by Gary Paulsen

100 lbs.

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.

"Don't you take to that, take to writing," she said.

"I wasn't doing it. I was just copying something I saw on a feed sack."

"Don't. They catch you doing that and they'll think you're learning to read. You learn to read and they'll whip you till your skin hangs like torn rags. Or cut your thumbs off. Stay away from writing and reading."

So I did.

Gary Paulsen's "historically accurate" account of 1850's slave America puts the reader back into a brutal, almost unrecognizable world. 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. 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. 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. Despite the revengeful amputation of his toes, John again escapes from Clel Waller, only to return and continue by night his impromptu "pit schools" for pupils from nearby plantations.

Late he come walking and nobody else knows, nobody from the big house or the other big houses know but we do.

We know.

Late he come walking, and it be Nightjohn, and he bringing us the way to know.

Sarny's story is continued in Paulsen's sequel Sarny, in which 94-year-old Sarny looks back over the years in which she marries, bears two children, and loses them to a slavetrader who, in the chaos of the last days of the Civil War, sells them to an owner in New Orleans. Sarny follows to claim her children and goes on to become a teacher in her own right in the days of Reconstruction and Jim Crow South.

Acclaimed, award-winning author Gary Paulsen has written soulfully about the power of the written word in his own life and in the lives of his millions of readers. Nightjohn, written in his typically spare but emotionally charged language, should be must reading for mature young readers who need to know where our nation has been and how far we have come since those days.

"Carrying the Spirit": Copper Sun by Sharon Draper

Taking her title from Countee Cullen's poem "Heritage," Sharon Draper's 2007 Coretta Scott King Author's Award-winning novel, Copper Sun, offers for this generation of young adult readers what Alex Haley's Roots meant to the previous one. Draper, granddaughter of a slave born in 1860, has combined immense historical research with a sweeping, intensely human story of one girl's journey from captive through the middle passage to slave on a Carolina rice plantation and eventual freedom in Spanish Florida.

Betrothed to a handsome boy named Besa, fifteen-year-old Amari is abruptly snatched from her village by slave traders who slaughter the people of her village and seize the young and healthy to trade to the English at Cape Coast. Surviving the Atlantic crossing among the young women who are nightly assaulted by the ship's seamen, Amari is bought by Percival Derby as a concubine, a birthday gift for his cruel sixteen-year-old son Clay. As a new "African," Amari is given over to the tutelage of young Polly, an indentured white servant girl, and Teenie, the cook for the Big House. Amari suffers deep grief for the loss of her family and her freedom, but Polly teaches her to speak English as ordered, and Teenie helps her learn how to survive in the curiously intermingled world of white and black on the plantation.

When, in the absence of Master Derby, his young second wife give birth to a bi-racial baby, Polly, Teenie, and Amari try to help the lonely young woman, but when the master discovers their complicity in the plot to hide the newborn, he murders the child and the black servant involved and then threatens to sell Amari, Polly, and Teenie's small son in New Orleans. The three are helped to escape by an old slave named Cato, and following his advice, flee south, hoping to reach the sanctuary of Fort Mose in Spanish Florida.

Although the three suffer hunger and fear as they move by night across Georgia, they are helped by white and black strangers along the way. When they finally reach south Georgia, an Irish woman gives them a horse and wagon, and the three elude the English border guards and find refuge among the racially mixed community at Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose near St. Augustine.

Then, in the fresh joy of freedom, Amari realizes that she is pregnant with Clay Derby's child. At first she feels she cannot allow herself to bear this child, but as she looks beyond her initial emotions, she has a change of heart:

This child carries the spirit of my mother Amari realized suddenly, as well as the essence of her father, little Kwasi, the murdered people of her village, and the spirits of all her ancestors.... I will tell this child of her ancestors and her grandparents and tell her the stories my father told me.

Draper's story is, on one level, a universal one that must be told and retold for each generation of Americans, white, Black, Hispanic, or Asian. It is the American story for all of us whose ancestors made the passage, often one of hardship, mistreatment, and sacrifice, to earn our freedom.