Nightjohn (Charles Burnett, 1996) (Patreon)

Nightjohn is based on a 1993 book by Gary Paulsen, a popular author of children's fiction. The film adaptation was co-produced by Hallmark and the Disney Channel, and as one watches Burnett's film, one can immediately see that there is a didactic purpose at the heart of the project. While it is instructive to compare Nightjohn with other cultural-landmark productions, such as Roots or 12 Years a Slave, it's also important to understand where Nightjohn came from, and how it exists within a unique set of parameter that demands Burnett to place his emphasis elsewhere.

Nightjohn certainly depicts the brutality of American slavery. Burnett shows people being whipped or having fingers chopped off with an axe, and any viewer who knows anything about Southern chattel slavery can see the strong implications of a non-consensual sexual relationship between the master, Mr. Waller (Beau Bridges) and house slave Delie (Lorraine Toussant). But there were obviously limitations to the violence and gore that Burnett could show in a Disney production, and he actually turns this restriction to his creative advantage.

Nightjohn spends an unusual amount of time attending to the psychological torture that was involved in slavery. Part of this, of course, was the punishment for literacy, the enforced ignorance that imprisoned Black people's minds as well as their bodies. But more than this, Nightjohn articulates the complex social relations and gaslighting that slavery entails. One minute, Waller is working the fields with his sons alongside his slaves, sharing water and abjuring violence. But then he will strike back with the whip at a moment's notice. Similarly, his eldest son Jeffrey (John P. Ford III) wants to be a "kind," liberal master, treating many of the slaves as friends. But again, when his own interests are threatened, he is as bloodthirsty as his father. 

Burnett also emphasizes the Foucaultian dimension of slavery, how fear and conditioning causes enslaved people to internalize the warped values of their masters. This isn't just about the Black overseer, a common fixture in Southern enslavement. It's a recognition that learning to read, while perhaps offering a form of freedom in the long run, is too dangerous to be allowed because of the immediate violence it brings. So Nightjohn (Carl Lumbly) is initially seen as a troublemaker, not just by the Wallers but the other slaves as well. At first it's only a young girl, Sarny (Allison Jones), who is naive and inquisitive enough to accept the risk.

Aside from its interest in internalized violence, Nightjohn is unusual because of its gentle friction between text and affect, realism and myth. Burnett seems to recognize that the film's finale in the church, which has a distinct To Kill a Mockingbird tone, is far too triumphalist, creating a situation in which literacy actually saves Sarny's life in an immediate situation. In other words, we are given a dramatic example of the value of reading that is narratively implausible but emotionally satisfying. Sarny's capacity to read allows her to attain a structural comprehension of slavery as an institution ("you are his wealth"), and while this softens the actual savagery of slavery (Waller would have killed Sarny and many others without a second thought), it provides a picture of a future without slavery, one that is only possible through Black literacy. 

So if Nightjohn's unfailing dignity, and Sarny's capacity to manipulate a deadly situation to her advantage, ring a bit false, it's not only because Disney and Hallmark demanded it. It's also because Burnett departs from historical realism in order to produce a picture of an unimaginable future, one that allows Black people not only freedom but subjecthood. Nightjohn makes these intangible ideas into embodied myths, because they are just as true, in their own way, as slavery's dehumanization. And in the long run, they are actually even more true.