Nightjohn: Knowledge is Power

by Jason McGensy

“All you got is what you remember.”  

A little black history mumf history: Black History Month (as some folks call it) originated as Negro History Week in February of 1926 at the organizing of Carter G. Woodson, to coincide with the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. Woodson believed that one way to combat race prejudice was to tear down the notion that black people had never contributed anything to humanity, a notion perpetuated by whitewashed history textbooks which denied black people any historical place outside of slavery. 50 years later, in 1976, as part of America’s Bicentennial jubilee, Black History Month was formally adopted as a national month of remembrance and celebration. In his book, “The Mis-education of the Negro“, Woodson wrote,

“Can you expect teachers to revolutionize the social order for the good of the community? Indeed we must expect this very thing…Men of scholarship and consequently of prophetic insight must show us the right way and lead us into the light which shines brighter and brighter.” 

And it this idea of the scholastic, prophetic insight of a teacher that leads us into our discussion today of Charles Burnett’s Nightjohn.

Nightjohn is the story of a little slave girl, Sarny, who is empowered by knowledge in the form of reading, taught to her by an learned fellow slave named John, by night.

The night Sarny is born, Massa Clel Waller (played by Beau Bridges, making his second appearance in the Mumf) comes in and says he’d rather it’d been a boy because a boy could grow up to fetch $1,000, while he can’t even give a girl away. So he gives away her mother instead. For birthing a girl.

Bye baby.

Bye Momma.

Sarny is placed under the watchful care of Dealey, the main servant of Misses up in the big house, even though Dealey would “…rather be in the field. I like the company better.”

Pick that cotton, chillun.

At Sarny’s first major dinner working at the big house, the new doctor in town is the guest and he tells of his time at Harvard and his love of books. Waller tells him, “You would get along with my wife. She thinks life’s a book: a romance.” She responds, “You think life’s a book too, Clel. A ledger.”
Sarny takes this conversation in, unaware just how much books, indeed these exact books, will come to mean to her.

One day, a new slave named John is sold to Massa Waller for $50, just to get rid of him, because he’s a trouble maker, evidenced by his welted back.

He ain’t get those for minding his mouth.

He offers the others a trade for tobacco. Sarny says he came in naked with nothing so he couldn’t have anything to trade. He says what he’s offering they can’t take away: letters! He begins teaching her letters and reading each night.

This is B. It reminds me of my wife.

John tells Sarny and Dealey that he ran to freedom but came back south to teach others. Old Man (Bill Cobbs!) catches wind of them talking about reading and tells them he learned all that reading a long time ago and all it got him was a finger chopped off; better to stay ignorant and safe. John fires back, “Words are freedom, Old Man, because that’s all slavery’s made of: words…what you teaching that girl is more dangerous than what I’m teaching her.” But John decides to back off on the teaching for a time because Waller is keeping a very close eye on him.

I learned my letters, they cut off my finger.

Sarny, undeterred, continues teaching herself with Massa Waller’s toddler son’s blocks while she babysits him. She’s given a newspaper to give to the young Waller boy as toilet paper as she is potty training him. There’s a cruel irony that the newspaper is so meaningful to her, WORDS!, but to the boy it’s nothing more than something with which to wipe his backside.

You don’t know how good you got it.

Sarny learns she can read instead of just looking at letters while she’s in church, and tears stream down her face (“I be readin'”). The minister, mistaking her tears of joy over education for love of de lawd, comes down to ask her if she’s been saved. She thinks, realizes her newfound literacy is a kind of salvation (though not the kind the preacher is talking about) and says yes. He shouts and says “We’re gonna have us a baptizin’!” and they head down to the river.

It’s a baptizin!

Sarny takes the newspaper into the slave quarters and reads to them about Nat Turner’s rebellion. The others are incredulous, “An army of slaves???” You begin to understand why Waller would not want a slave who could read in their midst.

Later, she steals a bible from the big house. When it’s discovered, the others try to cover for her. Dealey gets whipped and John gets his finger cut off. When Massa Waller asks if he’s learned his lesson, he says yessah, I learned my lesson and now I’m gonna teach it. He starts writing letters in the dirt and calling them out for all the slaves to see. Waller laughs and asks derisively, “Who you think can learn?” Then realizing, maybe for the first time, that maybe he’d been underestimating the cognitive prowess of his slaves all this time, he asks again, this time threateningly, “WHO YOU THINK CAN LEARN?” He looks around wildly, his world has been rocked. After all, if one can learn, what’s to stop the others? John is sold to the nearest plantation because Waller can’t take any chances of him teaching any more.

Who you been teachin’, boy?

Before John left, he was writing out two passes for a young newlywed couple, Egypt and Outlaw, to escape. He only finished one before he was sold away, so Sarny writes the second one and the young lovers run and get free. Waller and his overseers go out looking for them once they discover they are missing but it’s too late, all they find are the passes. Waller comes busting into the church service holding the two passes. He says he knows one was written by John, but demands to know who wrote the other pass. He threatens to shoot each one of the slaves until the educated negro who wrote that pass comes forward. Sarny calls his bluff. She’s seen the ledger and knows Waller has no money other than the value of his slaves. She tells the others “He’s not gonna shoot you. Massa Waller’s a rich man, but you his wealth.”

You ain’t gon’ shoot me, Massa Waller.

Waller threatens to shoot her directly but she doesn’t flinch, she knows what she lacks in monetary value, she makes up for in secret information. She’s been ferrying private letters back and forth between Waller’s wife and the new doctor in town. She tells Misses if you don’t speak up for me, I’ll speak up for you, but the doctor intercedes, takes the blame and Mrs. Waller demands her husband sell Sarny immediately. The slave owners didn’t even understand the inherent foolishness of their idea here. By moving the slaves that could read and write to new plantations when they were discovered as literate, all they were doing was spreading the knowledge.

Saying goodbye to Sarny.

Through young Sarny we see how even the most basic education gives one leverage in society and why the slave-owners were so desperate to keep the slaves from learning. Learning and reading are not just ends unto themselves, they open up the mind to different ways of thinking and understanding and THAT is what the slavers were really afraid of. If blacks could in fact read and write and reason, it would give the lie to their whole worldview that negroes were inferior and thus justifiably enslaved.

I be readin’.

P.S. In contrast to most portrayals of slavery, Nightjohn shows slavery not as an unrelenting horror show. There are actual relationships, the slaves also laugh and joke and fall in love; it’s not all the work and the whip.

You ever hear the one about Massa and Misses?