Devastating But Important

American literature, race, the art of narrative

The Nickel Boys a novel by Colson Whitehead.  Doubleday.  213 pp.  $24.95 *****

I got this book as a gift many months ago, and it has sat on my shelf ever since.  The problem wasn’t anything about Colson Whitehead; I loved The Underground Railroad and actually heard him read from it in Durham.  He’s a person of enormous talent.  But I’d read enough about The Nickel Boys that I wasn’t sure I could take it.  I especially dislike hearing about young people being abused.  Finally, this week, I picked the book up.

I’m more admiring of Colson Whitehead than ever.  This is a beautifully written and structured novel that tells an important story, and nowhere does it seem exaggerated or to be making too much of what happened.  It won the Pulitzer Prize and fully deserved it.  But it’s also absolutely devastating.  It made me ashamed to be white and to be a man.  I don’t see that as an intention of the book.  Whitehead just wanted to tell this story.

Elwood Curtis is a young African American man of almost exactly my vintage, entering high school in 1962, when the Civil Rights movement was in full swing.  He didn’t come from an educated family, in fact his parents had absconded altogether, but he grew up with a strong grandmother and educated himself.  He was especially taken with the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., and had a recording of his speeches.

A few early teachers saw his promise and encouraged him to go to college, in fact to begin taking courses while he was still in high school, an opportunity that presented itself.  He had no transportation and needed to hitchhike; in those days in Tallahassee, there was no chance of getting a ride from a white driver, so he only put out his thumb when he saw a black driver.  The third one who came by picked him up.  Unfortunately, he was driving a stolen car, and when a cop stopped them Elwood was implicated in the crime.

He was sent to a Reform School named Nickel Academy.  Whitehead made the place up, but based it on an actual place, Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida.  It didn’t look dreadful when Elwood arrived.  It seemed from the outside to be a ragged and rough place where guys who had gotten on the wrong track were being righted.  It was segregated, and had two separate campuses for the races, but seemed on the level.

In fact there was no schooling going on at all.  The classes were all for show; no learning was taking place.  And the punishments for the slightest infraction—Elwood tried to break up a fight when he saw a boy being bullied—were arbitrary and brutal beyond belief.  Elwood was beaten with a strap until he passed out.  It took him days to recover.

This idealistic young man soon meets his polar opposite, a guy named Turner who has seen how the system works and has learned to play it.  Turner is as smart as Elwood—at least as street savvy—but has no ideals at all (and would never have tried to break up an incident of bullying).  He’s determined to put in his time while drawing as little notice as possible, and advises Elwood to do the same.  Soon the two of them, because they are among the brighter young men in the school, are doing “community service,” taking the food and other things that were donated and selling them to local businesses and restaurants.  The boys at Nickel are supposed to be eating ham and eggs, but their daily breakfast is oatmeal.  The system is corrupt and brutal from top to bottom.

The tension of these early chapters is almost unbearable.  There’s an air of menace that never lets up.  We’re much relieved, perhaps two-thirds of the way through the book, when the narrative flashes forward and reveals that Elwood does get out, though the school never gets out of him.  The whole of his remaining life, he’s trying to overcome the trauma of the months when he was there.  He does a remarkable job, but never fully overcomes it.

Toward the end of their stay at Nickel, the idealistic Elwood sees a way to blow the whistle on the place—he’s been keeping a record of the “community service” that he’s been performing—but Turner thinks he’s crazy.  He just wants to ride out his time, while Elwood wants to bring about a change, though he will be relying on the fundamental goodness of whoever receives his message.  The idealist vs the cynic: who is right?  I could see both sides.

A review on the cover suggested there was a surprising twist at the end, and weirdly enough—I’m never right about these things—I guessed what it might be.  It makes the story more heartbreaking than it already was.  But it rings absolutely true.

As with The Underground Railroad, you have to be ready for this book when you read it.  It’s not an easy experience.  But Colson Whitehead is one of the important writers of our time.  Read this book when you’re ready, but definitely read it.