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Was Slavery Good Or Bad

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Slavery: Good or Bad?

Was slavery a good thing? In the story Nightjohn, we see slavery in the perspective of the slaves. Nightjohn was a slave who escaped slavery, but came back to teach other slaves to read and write. The themes I focused on the most were prejudice, getting along with others, and freedom. I feel they were the most important out of the many themes in the story.
I do not think it’s right for some people to be treated differently just because they’re different from others. Things like skin color and sexuality shouldn’t matter at all. People are people, and that’s not gonna change, so why make someone else’s life miserable just because they’re different in some type of way? Racism, I think, is one of the worst things ever. …show more content…

So, for that reason, I don’t believe in the discipline methods that people like Clel Waller used on their slaves. I don’t think they’d want to be worked to death, whipped, and beaten- all for no pay. I feel like, instead of hurting the slaves when something wasn’t right, they should’ve rewarded them for the things that were right. Working for something they want or need would’ve made them work harder. Not that slavery was good in any way, but it would’ve been much better this way.

In the story, Nightjohn was a slave who escaped and went to the North. He was a free man, but he came back to teach the slaves something of great value: how to read and write. If the slaves knew how to read and write, they’d become a stronger force against the whites. The slave owners hated them being even a little bit educated for this reason. If they kept them uneducated, then they couldn’t make it on their own, even if they did escape.

Life was terrible and unfair for the slaves. They were treated horribly just because they looked different. They were forced to work in harsh conditions, and they got nothing out of it, and they weren’t even allowed to learn anything. For these reasons, I believe that slavery was a terrible thing. Even though African Americans look different, doesn’t make them any less of a human, so why would we treat them as if that were the

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In the book Nightjohn, by Gary Paulsen, an insight about life is presented through the meaningful texts. Nightjohn and Sarny both persevere through hard times. The narrator, Sarny, is an 11 year old—at the beginning of the story— girl who lives on Old Waller´s plantation in the South. Through the eyes of a child, the reader gets to understand how daily life was on a plantation for a slave. Nightjohn, an older male slave, comes in bad—which means that Old Waller brought him in with shackles around his neck, and no clothes on—and later on in the story teaches Sarny how to read and write.

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