Monday Night Movie: "Nightjohn"

1996. 92 minutes. Rated PG-13. Sarny, a 12-year-old slave girl in the ante-bellum South, faces a relatively hopeless life on a plantation. Then Nightjohn arrives. A former runaway slave who bears telltale scars on his back, he takes Sarny under his wing and, in exchange for a pinch of tobacco, secretly begins to teach her to read and write, a crime punishable by death.