Sarny accidentally drops the plate of food, and is punished when Clel forces Callie to slap the girl. That night Delie tells Sarny to behave, otherwise she will have to do the hard labor out in the fields. Sarny is upset, vowing revenge on the Wallers. The next day, Callie tells Sarny to take a letter to the doctor's place. On the way, she sees a slave trader, Tom, herding black slaves toward the Waller household. At the doctor's house, the doctor asks Sarny to take a love letter to Callie, keeping it a secret from Clel. He then gives Sarny a penny for her troubles. Back at the plantation, Tom is willing to sell a slave to Clel for 500 dollars. Clel then questions Tom about why he is willing to sell a slave worth $3000 for only $500. Clel then asks the slave to take off his shirt, revealing many scars from being whipped. Clel says that instead, he will buy the man, John, off of Tom for only 50 dollars without clothes. That night, John and Sarny strike a deal, willing to trade tobacco for lessons on reading. John tells Sarny about the risks, but Sarny accepts as she wants to be free. Sarny learns the letter ‘A’. She then starts to read the letter ‘A’ in the letters between the doctor and Callie that she delivers. The next morning, Outlaw is being punished because he snuck out the previous night to see Egypt. As Mr. Waller is about to whip Outlaw, Jeffrey, Clel's son, asks him to stop because they are friends. Clel say to Jeffrey that the slaves were made to pick his cotton instead of being his friend, and Outlaw is whipped. In Sarny's narration of the story, she states that Clel watched everyone instead of the one person he needed to watch, the mistress, his wife. That night when the Wallers are having a party, Delie walks in on John teaching Sarny the alphabet and is outraged. She questions John about the scars on his back, and he says that they were because he had tried to run away twice. The third time, however, he successfully got away to the North but ended up coming back in order to teach slaves how to read. Delie prohibits John from teaching Sarny to read for her safety. Sarny stalks away, stating that she will teach