"two boys with mossy teeth, one sucking on my breast the other holding me down, their book-reading teacher watching and writing it up." Schoolteacher in a nutshell. Schoolteacher arrives with his nephews to manage Sweet Home after the death of Mr. Garner . He seems to be an educated person but is very cruel from the start. He uses tactics of conventional slavery on the slaves of the plantation to replace what he saw as Garner’s too-soft approach. His oppressive regime of rigid rules and strict punishment reminded me how horrible slavery truly was. Being the only purely evil character in the novel, Schoolteacher is frightening for his detached and methodical cruelty. Not only does he beat and abuse his slaves, but he also takes notes on their actions and studies them like animals. He seems, literally, to see them as animals. His pursuit of certain "knowledge" is especially disturbing, because it demonstrates a horrifying justification for racism, leading