Page 1Page 2 Now Jim was a dreamer, but he was a thinker, too. And he thought one day that if he let his owner meet the cooter, he might get his freedom that way. After all, a talkin cooter was a wonderful thing to hear. So Jim went on back to the plantation. He found the slaveowner, and he says, “Mas, I wanter tell you about this cooter down there at the pond.”

—“The Talking Cooter,”
Virginia Hamilton

Read the passages. Then, write two to three sentences comparing Jim’s viewpoint on escaping from slavery with the nonfiction narrator’s viewpoint on escaping from slavery.