You get some words for yourself and you bee free!”(qtd. White folks got all the words, and they mean to keep them. Laws, deeds, passes: all they are is words. Cause that’s all that slavery’s made of :words. So, Nightjohn sees liberation in words, and we can extent, in education. It is a mean treatment because even birds from a cage can speak on their language. They had to communicate their feelings in other ways, and not to be seen of their master.

This thing comes from the fact that slavers were forbidden to read and to write. Money is not important at all for a man that stays withdrawn like a bird.Nightjohn finds a different way of liberation: words. They wanted rights which could allow them to learn, to travel, to feel themselves free people. Slave people understood differently the slavery. This is the interesting part of the novel and maybe the most important issue of slavery: that through their acts, slave people proved that they are also human beings like whites, and they wanted freedom from all points of view.So, Nightjohn was not thinking only to himself, he realized that his acts could release the slaves.But Nightjohn did not see freedom in a war, or he did not want for him and his people the white’s money. Nightjohn was a slave who managed to escape in the North, but he returned in the South, having the same purpose. He shown the implications of that period, and the reactions of the people in front of such hard time. The novel was appreciated because it emphasized the slavery in a very original way. Gary Paulsen wrote a short novel based on slavery: “Nightjohn”. It was controversial because that period was a very sad one, that limited the human being and that unchained him with some obstacles that a person should not have.

Slavery was a very discussed theme in the American society, but it was also an used topic in literature.

Nightjohn novel