Nightjohn by Gary Paulsen Read Free Book Online Page B

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 beauctioned. 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