Gary Paulsen Sarny

Running was the same as reading. It started slow. They'd run and get caught, get whipped, get killed sometimes.
But they kept running, because they knew that if they could get north, get away, they could be free..

This book is a sequel to Nightjohn, the book which tells the story of a young slave girl who learns to read and who experiences the power of reading.
In Sarny, we meet her again as a young woman who flees the plantation in the last days of the Civil War. She searches her sold-away children, meets them again and starts a new life.
Sarny's story gives a panoramic view of America in a time of trial, tragedy, and hoped-for change, until her last days in the 1930s.