The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead
Title: The Nickel Boys
Author: Colson Whitehead
Published: 2019
Type: Fiction
Pages: 210
The boys could have been many things had they not been ruined by that place. Doctors who cured diseases or perform brain surgery, inventing shit that saves lives. Run for president. All those lost geniuses - sure not all of them were geniuses... but they had been denied even the simple pleasure of being ordinary. Hobbled and handicapped before the race even began, never figuring out how to be normal.
In Brief:
Whitehead’s most recent novel/Pulitzer Prize winner is absolutely stunning. His simmering prose is unlike anything else I’ve read, with a haunting, relentlessly devastating, and revelatory story to go with it.
Rating: 4.8
Synopsis:
The Nickel Boys is inspired by the horrifying true story of the Dozier School for Boys, a reform school in Florida’s panhandle where some 81 boys were murdered, and hundreds more were brutally beaten, raped, and abused for over a hundred years. Though survivors had been talking about the mistreatment they suffered for years, no attention was given to the matter until 2012, when anthropologists began to discover unmarked graves on the campus. As Whitehead writes about the Nickel Academy, his version of Dozier, “Plenty of boys had talked of the secret graveyard before, but as it had ever been at Nickel, no one believed them until someone else said it."
Whitehead’s story begins with Elwood, an intelligent and hardworking black teenager living in Tallahassee during the Jim Crow era. Abandoned by his parents and raised by a religious grandmother, Elwood isn’t allowed to listen to music so he spends his time listening to the album Martin Luther King at Zion Hill and dreaming about joining the civil rights movement. A teacher recognizes Elwood’s potential and helps him sign up to take classes at a local college as a high school senior. On his first day, Elwood hitches a ride with a black man who turns out to have stolen the car. Despite his own innocence, he’s sent to the Nickel Academy and is told to be lucky.
Nickel is segregated, the white boys treated only marginally less viciously than the black. Both are taken to a shed called “The White House” for punishments, where they’re tortured with whips and other instruments, while an industrial fan covers the noise and sprays their blood against the walls. Though Elwood tells himself he’ll work hard and earn himself early release, he learns that no such meritocracy exists at Nickel – all boys are subject to the whims of the administrators. He earns his first visit to the White House shortly after arrival, when he steps in to break up a fight between other boys, and is hospitalized for days. He makes a friend named Turner, who’s much more cynical but still kind, taking Elwood under his wing in spite of their clashing beliefs. Together, the two struggle to survive day-to-day horrors and grapple with the scars that will define the rest of their lives.
Where I’m At:
This section is getting pretty redundant, much more so that I expected it to be when I first set out to write this blog. San Francisco’s shelter in place order is still in effect, with no real end on the horizon from what I can tell. I work, I run, I read. I miss my friends, play with my cat, tidy my room. Time has sort of bled together, days mostly feel the same.
But there was no way for me to feel sorry for myself while reading this book.
Getting Into it:
There’s a good case for identifying Colson Whitehead as the best, most impressive writer of our time. Between The Nickel Boys and The Underground Railroad, he’s won the Pulitzer Prize for back-to-back-novels, the first person to have done so and the first black man to win twice. Of course, awards don’t mean everything – last year, I read all the Pulitzer Prize-winning novels of the 21st century and there were some definite duds – but it’s well-merited for Whitehead.
His writing has a way of forcing me to read slower than I normally do, deliberately drink in every word, live in his prose. I’m sucked in from the very first line in the prologue: “Even in death, the boys were trouble.” and every line thereafter. It’s emotional, it’s graceful, it’s poetic. It reminds me in a way of listening to a well-crafted sermon: the quiet yet powerful authority, the urgency, the way everything points back to A Truth.
The word choice is succinct and poignant, with a particular talent for describing characters. Whitehead has this amazing ability to give the reader an immediate, intimate understanding and image with just a few lines, or even a few words. Some examples:
“There was nothing in the boy of Percy’s feral charm or of Evelyn’s unnerving gloom.”
“[Turner] was always simultaneously at home in whatever scene he found himself and also seemed like he shouldn’t have been there; inside and above at the same time, a part and apart. Like a tree trunk that falls across a creek – it doesn’t belong and then it’s never not been there, generating its own ripples in the larger current.”
“She kept a sugarcane machete under her pillow for intruders, and it was difficult for Elwood to think that the old woman was afraid of anything. But fear was her fuel.”
“Sturdy was the word he returned to, even though [Elwood] looked soft, conducted himself like a goody-goody, and had an irritating tendency to preach. Wore eyeglasses you wanted to grind underfoot like a butterfly. He talked like a white college boy, read books when he didn’t have to, and mined them for uranium to power his own personal A-bomb. Still – sturdy.”
Sorry that was a lot. I can’t help myself.
It also must be acknowledged that Elwood is an engaging, memorable character, more so than the highly internalized Cora (The Underground Railroad’s protagonist). Highly intelligent and with a keen sense of right and wrong, he’s aware of the racism and hardships in America, yet he’s still naive and hopeful, thinking he can overcome through hard work and following the rules – at first. When he gets to Nickel, he’s constantly grappling with his ideals, replaying the words of Martin Luther King and comparing them to his hellish reality. Eventually, when reflecting on the call to love your oppressors and considering the men who beat him near death, he can’t help but think: “What a thing to ask. What an impossible thing.” It’s sobering, heartbreaking to read.
Beyond Whitehead’s writing, the book itself is just powerful. He reveals a terrifying aspect of our history as Americans, forces the reader to come face-to-face with it rather than just paying the normal lip service – yes slavery was bad, Jim Crow was bad, but it’s over, we had a Black President, can we move on now? In the last part of the book, he begins alternating chapters between future-Elwood’s life in New York and the past at Nickel, reminding the reader that this isn’t just our history, it’s now. The legacy is present, inescapable, haunting.
Though short, The Nickel Boys not an easy book to breeze through. Like The Underground Railroad, it is absolutely relentless. There’s no escape for its characters, no rest nor abatement of horrors. Sometimes the details of the violence are glossed over in the way traumatic memories often are, but the effects no less gruesome. The only negative thing I can really say about it is that I missed the magical realism aspect like The Underground Railroad, but that’s just taste – this book didn’t need it.
I sincerely hope that one day Whitehead’s books are taught in classrooms across the US. They’re invaluable not just for their literary merit, but for understanding our history and identity as a country. I encourage everyone else to do themselves a favor and read it in the meantime.
